On environmental measures, including energy consumption and waste going to landfill, the report highlights much progress across BMW’s four UK manufacturing sites. At the MINI production plant in Oxford, for example, the amount of water used per vehicle made has been cut by 25 per cent in just three years.
However, while progress has been made, BMW chiefs sounded a note of caution about how new environmental rules can add costs to business. An estimated £100,000 is spent on dealing with the additional burden of rules that are not joined up or clearly defined.
Roger Twiney, BMW Group’s UK director of environmental affairs, pointed to three separate control regimes underpinning energy efficiency at plant Oxford, Integrated Pollution and Prevention Control (IPPC), the Climate Change Agreement (CCA) and the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
‘Each of these regimes has slightly different boundaries, improvement targets and different monitoring and reporting requirements,’ he said. ‘This is a prime example of how regulation adds to our costs and do little for the environment.’
The comments echo findings included in SMMT’s latest annual issues survey – Automotive Manufacturing 2005 – the industry perspective. Pooling the views of around 80 senior industry figures, results suggested that conflicting rules are the biggest barrier towards competitiveness for the entire automotive sector.
