The “Impact Points”-method: A distance-to-target weighted approach to measure the absolute environmental impact of Volkswagen's global manufacturing system

Abstract

The current exceeding of six out of nine planetary boundaries (as of August 2022) raises the question how global industrial production and consumption systems can be transformed towards effectiveness and environmental industrial sustainability. The quantitative evaluation of environmental impacts in manufacturing systems represents a key activity in supporting environmental management systems of industrial organizations with impact-oriented information to enable transformative processes towards “zero impact”. Since 2014 and together with various research partners, Volkswagen Group Production has developed the “Impact Points”-method, which is based on the Ecological Scarcity Method (ESM). It applies a “distance-to-target”-weighted thinking and enables a systemic and regionalized evaluation of environmental impacts associated with the global manufacturing system of Volkswagen. This paper presents the developed system boundary, provides the data inventory and highlights the calculation principles for the derived ecofactors to quantify absolute impacts of Volkswagen's global manufacturing system. A total of 389 ecofactors have been calculated for 89 Volkswagen Production sites in 21 countries to quantify the environmental impacts due to primary energy use, CO2 equivalents, air pollution, local water risk, waste water and waste generation. The method is exemplarily applied on representative production sites to highlight its advantages as well as novelties compared to the ESM and the aggregatability of results on five aggregation levels from process level to the global manufacturing system. Volkswagen applies the presented approach within its “Zero Impact Factory”-strategy to measure the transformative progress towards ecological effectiveness of its global manufacturing system.