Å kodaAuto ANNUAL REPORT 2006 - Skoda Auto

Soil and Groundwater Protection,
Water Management
The Company has fully secured its
operations to prevent environmental
damage and is successfully cleaning up
legacy damage caused by insensitive
industrial production techniques used
before the Company joined the
Volkswagen Group.
By the end of 2006, over 80% of
environmental damage requiring
clean-up had been resolved at a cost of
CZK 515 million. No accidents requiring
clean-up work occurred in 2006. During
the year, the Company completed
clean-up of legacy environmental burdens
at the Kvasiny and Vrchlabí plants, and
extensive clean-up work continued at the
Mladá Boleslav plant to remove
contaminated floors and underlying
sediments in the older manufacturing
halls and to lay new floors that do not
allow hazardous materials to seep
through into the soil. In the water
management area, the Company built
a back-up water supply system for the
Kvasiny plant based on groundwater
resources and secured new lots and
car-parks to prevent any possible water
contamination from petroleum-based
products.
One of the Company’s most fundamental
tasks is to keep water consumption to the
bare minimum and return water to the
ecosystem while burdening the
environment as little as possible. The
success of the measures we have taken to
fulfil this task are demonstrated by water
consumption and wastewater discharge
figures per vehicle produced, as well as by
the fact that, thanks to newly implemented
technologies, the purity of the wastewater
we discharge is substantially higher than
the prescribed limits.
Waste Management
A number of waste-reduction measures
have been implemented in our
development and production processes.
Right from the development stages,
vehicles are engineered to maximise the
use of recyclable materials in production.
With the aim of minimising negative
impacts of waste on the environment, all
waste is sorted and most of it is recycled.
Of the total amount of waste generated in
2006, only 12% ended up in landfills or
incinerators. Most of the waste we
produce, including metals, is put to
further use. Such waste materials include
glass, paper, waste oils, solvents, cables,
toner cartridges, foundry sand, plastics,
and plastic film. Special attention in this
area is paid to recovering and reusing
materials from non-returnable containers.
The effectiveness of the measures taken
can be documented by figures showing
the amount of waste generated (not
including metals) per vehicle produced.
In 1997 this indicator was 84 kg/vehicle,
while by 2006 it had fallen to 41 kg/vehicle.
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