Green invention making us all winners

In October 2008, Kerstin Hanson, business innovation manager at the Volvo IT Innovation Centre, was standing in the wind with some colleagues on the edge of the quay outside Volvo IT’s offices in Göteborg. They were talking
about developments in the field of mobility and were discussing Nokia’s latest application for purchasing emission rights by mobile phone.

“We said that, as we were focusing on green IT and environmental concern as a core value, we ought to come up with something along the same lines,” Kerstin Hanson recalls, one year later.
Inspired by the popular pedometers that have invaded every workplace in Sweden in recent years, she came up with a simple yet ingenious combination: an application for mobile phones that calculates the user’s carbon emissions while travelling.

“It was initially planned as an internal project to improve our own environmental profile. Selling the carbon-dioxide meter as a soft product outside the Volvo Group was a very distant Utopia,” she says.

This utopia is now in the process of becoming reality, however. Under the name of Commute Greener, this application is being launched both within the Volvo Group and to external customers. For SEK 10, everyone from companies, cities and regions to individual people will be able to use Commute Greener on their mobile phones.

When Kerstin Hanson describes Commute Greener, the small product appears to be too good to be true. She talks jokingly of a win-win-win-win situation.

“Anyone who sometimes leaves his or her car at home saves money, takes more exercise and becomes healthier."

At the beginning of 2009, the carbon-dioxide pedometer was tested by a group from Volvo IT and Volvo Buses, who commuted to work. The test subjects reduced their carbon emissions by an average of 30 per cent.

“I have seen that there is a huge environmental commitment throughout the Volvo Group. Not just from the companies and units but also personally on the part of employees all over the world who have contacted me and said that they want to help improve the environment”, says Kerstin Hansson.

She thinks it is obvious that a producer of heavy-duty vehicles should be behind a product like Commute Greener.

“The Volvo Group is part of the problem of carbon emissions, but we are also part of the solution. We have the expertise and know-how to create modern transport solutions for the whole of society,” she says.