Sustainability plays an essential role in the design and construction of all Wirtgen Group products.

Ramesh Palagiri, Managing Director & CEO – Wirtgen India

How important is sustainability to your company’s mission and values?

At the WIRTGEN GROUP, sustainability is a firmly rooted element of our corporate principles and a guideline for our day-to-day actions: The WIRTGEN GROUP understands sustainability as a social commitment and simultaneously as an opportunity for furthering the success of our company and the business activities of our customers. This is the reason why the WIRTGEN GROUP firmly anchors the topic of sustainability in all of its corporate processes. Sustainability already plays an essential role in the design and construction of all WIRTGEN GROUP products, and is a key factor in all further phases of the value chain – up to and including the use of the machines in projects around the world. Our vision: smarter, safer and more sustainable road construction.

What specific technologies or features do you incorporate into your sustainable construction equipment (e.g. electric or hybrid power, reduced emissions, recyclable materials)?

At the Group level, Hamm has already made a start in the electric construction machine segment with a choice of eight electrified tandem rollers. The MOBIREX MR 130(i) PRO impact crusher with the E-DRIVE drive concept and an external electric power supply op-tion. The new battery-electric MINI 500e and MINI 502e Mini Class road pavers from Vögele are the ideal choice for local zero-emission asphalt paving projects.

How does your company ensure that the equipment is environmentally friendly throughout its entire lifecycle, from production to disposal?

To enable us to achieve our sustainability goals, we focus on three fields of action: Operations, namely how we manufacture our products in our factories; Machine efficiency, i.e. the development of innovative product solutions and Production Systems, system solutions for special usage cases.

What other steps is your company taking to promote sustainability in the construction industry beyond producing sustainable equipment?

We take a holistic view of the road construction process chain and, with our Production Systems, offer efficient and sustainable end-to-end solutions that enable a significant reduction of harmful emissions. Our Production Systems use more recycling materials, alternative fuels and combustibles and, depending on the specific application, can also reduce site logistics requirements to the bare necessities. For our customers, this results in the optimisation of their carbon footprint and the certainty of contributing to more sustainability in the road construction process chain.

Our customers also remain the focus of our thoughts and actions in the achievement of our goals. We know that our customers enjoy direct benefits on their own emissions balance sheet when we reduce emissions in SCOPE 3 (use of sold products). Equally, the world of nature also benefits from more sustainable solutions for road construction.

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