Our tool for managing your permission to our use of cookies is temporarily offline. Therefore some functionality is missing.
MINI AND SUSTAINABILITY – SUPPLY CHAINS
“THIS IS REAL DETECTIVE WORK.”
Ferdinand Geckeler has been in charge of sustainable supply chain management at MINI for the past 13 years, which also means he oversees the responsible manufacture of vehicles. This includes ensuring the supplier network’s compliance with strict environmental criteria and social standards. This may sound banal, but it calls for a detective’s fine instinct, as Geckeler, who lives in Munich, explains in the following interview:
MINI goes fully electric from 2030.
Mr Geckeler, please describe your routine working day.
What is mica and where does it come from?
Sounds like a big challenge.
How do you make sure there are no infringements?
When we look at the raw material supply chains, we focus on research and risk analysis to ensure traceability. This is real detective work because every step of production and delivery comes under our scrutiny. Before building a new model, we consider which materials we really need for which component. Also, all our contracts with suppliers contain clauses in line with the UN Framework Principles on Human Rights and the Environment or the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.
Can all this be controlled from Munich and the MINI factory in Oxford?
It’s a new challenge every day. Thanks to regular training, inspections and subcontractor audits conducted by independent bodies, though, we can verify that our supply chains function compliantly. This also includes thorough – as well as unannounced – site checks.
How do you manage to stay motivated?
It’s our mission to achieve a highly transparent level of production in the automobile industry. This is not an easy task, but it is one worth fighting for.
THERE IS NO PLANET B.
Each of us is responsible for conserving and protecting our environment. That’s why we here at MINI have set ourselves the ambitious goal of fully electrifying our brand’s entire model range by 2030 onwards. But that’s not all; we also want our supply chains to be fair and transparent, our factories to be low on energy consumption and high on human friendliness, and our materials to be resource-conserving and recyclable. We want to lead the way forward – and get as many people to join us as possible. Why are we doing this? Because it’s in our DNA.
Here at MINI we’ve always been about turning something small into something great. The first classic Mini was designed in the late 1950s, at a time when the Suez crisis had made the industrial nations of the West realise that fossil fuels were not an infinite resource. MINI has been striving ever since to make a brand of mobility possible within the limited confines of urban space, imagining cars which combine that go-kart feeling with deep environmental awareness. This is something we owe to our community and to the generations still to come.