Back in February 2019, the Volkswagen Group decided to launch its own Carbon Fund as an internal initiative to reduce pollution and save energy. One year later, the automotive giant has announced the results of several projects that were funded by the initiative.

The Volkswagen Group injects €25 million into its Carbon Fund every year, and all twelve brands within the company can receive money if their submitted projects are approved. However, there are requirements: the proposed projects must be scalable and transferable to many of the Group’s sites.

So far, more than 100 projects have been decided, and some of the approved initiatives have already succeeded in reducing emissions or saving energy.

The most significant project announced by the Volkswagen Group is what is called “LED Lighting,” consisting of 33 measures to replace assembly plant lighting to LEDs—which is said to have reduced CO2 emissions by 116,000 metric tons a year so far.

Energy-saving refrigeration units, new energy efficient pumps, load-dependant volume flow control systems for paint shops, frequency converters retrofitted to industrial washing systems, new temperature regulation technology for existing die-casting machines—all these projects contributed to an overall C02 emissions reduction of 170,000 metric tons since the launch of the Volkswagen Group’s Carbon Fund. The automaker has stated that the fund will be repeated year after year for the foreseeable future.