Tomorrow's earth, today's journey: Exploring pathways to sustainability
Market View
Produced by:
Interview with
Tom Salisbury
DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, GKN AUTOMOTIVE
Tomorrow's earth, today's journey: Exploring pathways to sustainability
Market View
Produced by:
Interview with
Tom Salisbury
DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, GKN AUTOMOTIVE
About Tom Salisbury
Tom Salisbury is the Director of Sustainability at GKN Automotive, a position he has held since January 2023. With a wealth of experience in sustainability across various sectors, including telecommunications and FMCG, Tom now leads the implementation of GKN Automotive's sustainability strategy, overseeing its implementation and managing the company's sustainability reporting and governance.
How do you balance environmental goals with financial and operational objectives in your strategy?
I think, sustainability teams often act as interpreters, translating external factors like opportunities and regulations into the business context, and building the case for our sustainability initiatives. This interpretive role helps us to identify numerous synergies between environmental and financial objectives.
Many sustainability efforts are about improving efficiency, which has clear financial benefits. For instance, our focus on energy efficiency directly impacts our bottom line positively. A key part of our climate strategy involves purchasing renewable electricity. While the financial benefits of long-term renewable electricity contracts can vary by market, we generally see a positive financial impact.
Additionally, the growing emphasis on carbon emissions from our customers, serves as a clear commercial driver for our climate initiatives. Over the past year, we've seen a significant increase in customer requests for life cycle assessments. They want to understand the carbon emissions of our products, considering both our operations and our supply chain. As our customers set ambitious net-zero carbon reduction targets, I expect to see these insights increasingly becoming factored into commercial decisions. This trend further strengthens the business case for our climate action.
It's crucial to position sustainability not as an add-on but as an integral part of our business strategy with a clear commercial and financial case. This approach ensures that sustainability is viewed as a core business function rather than mere philanthropy, reflecting its true value to our organisation and stakeholders.
Sustainability teams often act as interpreters, translating external factors like opportunities and regulations into business context, and building the case for our sustainability initiatives.
How important is supply chain visibility in achieving your sustainability goals, and what tools aid in this?
Supply chain visibility is increasingly crucial as we focus on life cycle emissions and our net-zero target for 2045. This includes Scope 3 emissions, which currently account for over 90% of our total emissions, largely due to the use of our products in internal combustion engine vehicles.
In our sector, the shift towards electric vehicles is particularly interesting. While the total carbon footprint of an electric vehicle is lower than that of an internal combustion engine vehicle, the proportion attributed to the supply chain becomes the largest part. This shift means increased scrutiny on tier-one suppliers and further down the supply chain.
As the industry transitions to electric vehicles, the focus on our supply chain emissions will grow. We have a comprehensive plan to tackle these different areas, which is enhanced by our global manufacturing presence. Because we manufacture locally in many regions, we have the opportunity to implement local sourcing strategies. This approach not only improves our supply chain visibility but also allows us to be more responsive to local market conditions and regulations.
Our strategy isn't about a centralised operation trying to manage a global supply chain. Instead, our local manufacturing approach enables us to implement tailored sourcing strategies, crucial for achieving our sustainability goals in different regions.
How do you measure the impact of your sustainability programmes?
We've been working diligently over the past year and a half to improve our environmental reporting. This includes enhancing our Scope 3 methodology and implementing a new platform to gather operational data from our 50+ sites worldwide.
Our goal is to approach environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data with the same rigour as financial reporting. This involves not only improving our tools and software but also fostering a culture that recognises the importance of accurate ESG data. Regulatory requirements, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and growing assurance requirements, are also driving this need for enhanced rigour in our reporting.
Our goal is to approach environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data with the same rigour as financial reporting. This involves improving our tools and fostering a culture that recognises the importance of accurate ESG data.
What role do data analysis and visualisation tools play in shaping your sustainable environmental strategy?
Data analysis and visualisation tools are crucial in shaping our strategy. We firmly believe that you can't improve what you don't measure. Better quality data and smart analysis allow us to identify improvement requirements and gaps, distinguishing between lagging and leading indicators to enhance performance.
In January this year, we rolled out a new platform to gather environmental data from all our sites. This platform has significantly improved our data collection and analysis capabilities. It includes built-in tools for managing tolerances, explaining significant changes, and allowing users to build their own charts. The platform also incorporates governance processes, such as the ability to send back data with queries for resubmission.
While we've made progress, there's definitely potential for us to do more in this area. The challenge now lies not so much in how we collect the data, but in how we can make the process more efficient and automated. We're also working on building a culture where sustainability data is prioritised and held to the same standard as financial data.
Looking ahead, what emerging trends or technologies are you most excited about in sustainability management?
I'm particularly excited about the potential for technology to improve the efficiency of sustainability reporting. I hope we'll reach a point where technology enables sustainability professionals to focus more on creating impact rather than just disclosure.
While I'm cautious about claims of 'silver bullet' solutions, I believe technology will play a crucial role. Just as technology has improved the efficiency of financial reporting, I expect it will do the same for sustainability reporting, allowing us to focus more on tangible impacts.
Additionally, technological innovations will be key in reducing environmental footprints and carbon emissions. In our sector, advancements in future mobility technologies present exciting opportunities for sustainability. While there are challenges ahead, there's also much to be optimistic about in the realm of sustainable technology and management.
Our approach to managing this complex supply chain landscape is enhanced by our global manufacturing presence. Because we manufacture locally in many regions, we have the opportunity to implement local sourcing strategies.
About GKN Automotive
GKN Automotive is a world-leading global automotive technology company at the forefront of innovation. Its origins date back to 1759 and for the last 70 years it has been putting key technologies into series production. It is the trusted partner for most of the world’s automotive companies, specialising in developing, building, and supplying market-leading drive systems and advanced ePowertrain technologies.
