Volvo Construction Equipment is pushing forward with the Construction Climate Challenge (CCC) in a bid to facilitate the funding of environmental research.
The Swedish equipment manufacturer and its partners plan to use the initiative to drive sustainability across the construction industry. In addition to the manufacture and operation of construction machinery – Volvo CE’s core focus – the CCC stretches to the extraction and production of building materials, road and general construction, and demolition and recycling.
“We’ve been working on reducing emissions through our own internal initiatives for many years – and to considerable success,” said Volvo CE president, Martin Weissburg.
“In December 2013, for example, we achieved carbon neutrality at our articulated hauler production facility in Braås, Sweden. However, we cannot address climate issues by ourselves.
“We joined Volvo Group’s commitment to the WWF Climate Savers programme in 2012, becoming the first construction equipment manufacturer to do so – but still that’s not enough,” he added.
To encourage a multilateral strategy for sustainable construction, the CCC aims to create a dialogue with industry representatives, academics, and politicians. The initiative has been designed to provide funding for research and to facilitate the sharing of existing environment-related knowledge and resources.
The first step in the CCC involves the evaluation of existing research on environmental management, identifying research that still needs to be carried out and then making this information readily available to interested parties in the industry.
To this end, Volvo CE invited researchers, professors and PhD students from across the world – as well as its own research and development personnel – to a two-day workshop on climate change during the second half of last year. Participants determined a total of 112 activities within four research themes that will now be refined and discussed by a working party of Volvo CE employees and other CCC participants.
In the future, researchers will be able to apply for funding for projects falling within these themes, whilst participants will be kept up-to-date with the latest findings.
“The CCC is the perfect complement to our work with the WWF Climate Savers programme and our commitment to be a climate leader in the construction equipment industry,” said Weissburg.
“Whereas the latter focuses on dramatically bringing down CO2 levels in the short term, the CCC is designed to foster a long-term, widespread culture of sustainability,” he concluded.
