News & updates

When the head of environmental affairs at Volvo Buses, Edward Jobson, started blogging about his work, he never imagined the impact his blog was going to have. He is now in direct contact with everyone from politicians to customers.

The Volvo Group will be the world’s first vehicle manufacturer to join the World Wide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) Climate Savers Program. As a WWF partner, the Volvo Group’s truck companies undertake to reduce the CO2-emissions from vehicles manufactured between 2009 and 2014 by 13 million tons. Independent technical experts will oversee the results.

“We must prepare for another future”. A few days ago, the major UN meeting in Nagoya, Japan, convening over 18 000 delegates and 130 environment ministers, reached agreement on a plan to protect biological diversity.

Volvo has received its first order for buses that operate on both biogas and diesel. Using diesel technology increases environmental efficiency compared with current gas-operated buses.

Today, Volvo Trucks will initiate public field testing with methane diesel trucks that can run on liquefied methane gas. At the same time, Sweden’s first filling station for liquefied methane gas will open at Stigs Center in Göteborg.

The Volvo Group takes a positive view of the European Commission’s ambition to present a proposal for European carbon-dioxide legislation that will regulate emissions from trucks. However, one requirement is that emissions are measured based on the transport work conducted by the vehicles and not exclusively on the basis of the individual vehicle’s emissions.

In only 10 weeks, employees of the City of Gothenburg have succeeded in reducing their carbon emissions through changes in their commuting habits using Commute Greener, a new mobile phone and web application from Volvo IT. One of the groups actually succeeded in reducing its carbon emissions by as much as two thirds. To date, 9,900 zero-emission kilometers have been registered – a distance corresponding to 235 marathons.

The Volvo Group has once again qualified for inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI). Each year, the DJSI assesses the 2,500 largest companies in the world on the basis of economic, environmental and social criteria, with a focus on long-term shareholder value. The 300 highest-ranked companies, one of which is the Volvo Group, are included in the DJSI World.

Professor Harold Mooney of Stanford University in California has been named recipient of the 2010 Volvo Environment Prize. He is one of the world’s leading researchers into biodiversity and ecosystem services, an area currently attracting global attention.

Volvo CE’s Eco Operator is a unique training course. Instead of the customer coming to Volvo CE, an instructor from Volvo CE visits the customer. This gives the instructor a better picture of the machine operators’ unique working conditions and challenges.