ZF has been awarded the German Sustainability Award. The award is given by the German Sustainability Award Foundation, which selects the best in the field of conversion in different sectors. The expert jury awarded the award primarily based on ZF’s broad commitment to a sustainable circular economy. The remanufacturing plant in Bielefeld, which specializes in the remanufacturing of powertrain modules for vehicle manufacturers and the global aftermarket, plays a key role in this regard.
Last year, ZF won the Sustainability Award in the “automotive industry” category and this year it won the award in the “resource conversion” area. The jury emphasized that this area is one where special efforts, further innovations and rapidly scalable solutions are most needed to achieve sustainable development goals. “We are already continuously increasing the proportion of recycled materials in our products and making a significant contribution to the conservation of resources,” said Dr. Michael Karrer, responsible for sustainability, environmental management and occupational safety at ZF. Extended life cycles through recycling are an important lever for saving basic materials.
Since 1963, the technology group has been preparing used parts for a “second life” on an industrial scale in 25 remanufacturing facilities worldwide. These parts are disassembled into their individual components, cleaned, tested, refurbished and reassembled. This process is called REMAN, or remanufacturing.
Stating that REMAN is a very important part of ZF's sustainability strategy, ZF Aftermarket Türkiye General Manager Selim Aydınlıoğlu made the following assessment on the subject:
“With REMAN, ZF Aftermarket increases efficiency while making a significant contribution to the conservation of resources, reducing environmental impact and sustainable mobility, and leads the sector. Remanufactured products, which have completely equivalent functions to new parts, are offered to the market with the same warranty periods as new products after meticulous checks. ZF offers a simple, fast and efficient process that service and distributors can easily use for the REMAN system. ZF, which aims to continuously expand its remanufactured parts portfolio in line with the importance it attaches to sustainability, thus further increases its contributions to the conservation of resources and emission reduction. As ZF Aftermarket Turkey, we remanufacture transmission, axle and caliper components in our facility.”
Compared to a new part, the material consumption of remanufactured products is reduced by up to 95 percent on average, while energy and CO2 savings are up to 90 percent.
The “German Sustainability Award” has been awarded in various categories since 2008. The award program aims to reward companies that, among other things, are particularly successful in overcoming ecological and social challenges with their products and services and thus use sustainability as an economic opportunity. An expert jury decides in advance which companies will be honored as pioneers of transformation in the relevant sector and in five different transformation areas.
