Supply and Value Chains

Water is an important resource within our supply and value chains – from the makers of the parts and components that go into our vehicles to the dealers who sell our cars to the consumers who fill our vehicles with gas or diesel fuel, which require water to produce.

As part of our CEO Water Mandate commitments, we will work to reduce water impacts in our supply and value chains worldwide by:

• working with suppliers to understand the water intensity of raw materials;
• identifying and engaging suppliers in water-stressed regions where we operate, sharing water stewardship practices, and supporting actions to implement water efficiency improvements; and
• working with our dealership network on water-saving technology opportunities.

Working with Suppliers

The nature of our business means that we are a large purchaser of water-intensive materials, parts and components. Like us, our suppliers face similar risks in terms of the increasing cost and competition for water and community concerns in water-scarce areas, and encouraging them to understand and manage their risks can help to make our supply chain more stable and resilient.

Beginning in 2014, we will start asking our major suppliers – those we consider to be Tier 1 – to voluntarily report on their water use through CDP Water as part of our efforts to better understand the water risks, implications and accounting within our supply chain. This builds upon the work we are already doing within the supply chain and is similar to the requests we already made of our suppliers for greenhouse gas emissions. We are asking both production and nonproduction suppliers who have been identified as having high water use and/or operate in highly water-stressed regions to complete the CDP Water questionnaire. The suppliers selected were based on literature-identified high water intensity materials and/or commodities such as the following:

• aluminum
• steel
• rubber
• carpets/textiles
• plastics
• coatings
• batteries/lithium

Once we understand which of our suppliers have the largest water footprints, we aspire to work with them to achieve reductions. Our goal is to teach our suppliers about the water savings initiatives we have implemented across our plants with hopes that they will implement some of our initiatives within their own facilities. These suppliers may, wherever feasible, take these successful initiatives and mirror them in other locations, and so on.

See the Supply Chain section for more on our supplier work.

Working with Dealers

We have been working with our dealer communities on initiatives to help them save water (and energy) at their locations. Our “Go Green” program helps dealers improve environmental efficiency on their lots.