Biogas vehicles help Nokia to reduce emissions

Nokia and Gasum are cooperating for mutual advantage: Nokia’s biowaste is taken to a biogas plant, and growing numbers of Nokia employees can fill up their company cars with biogas. For Nokia, this cooperation is one way of striving to reach environmental targets.

Nokia is seriously committed to environmental targets. The company aims to limit emissions originating in its operations so that the rise in global temperature can be restricted in accordance with the Paris Agreement. Under the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the deadline for achieving climate targets is 2030.

Reaching these ambitious targets calls for numerous actions. As one of these actions, Nokia is encouraging its employees to exchange their company car for a biogas-powered car. Cooperation between Nokia and Gasum since 2018 has resulted in Nokia employees being able to change a biogas car as their company car. In the same context, biowaste originating in Nokia is taken to a biogas plant for processing into biogas.

Cooperation has resulted in gas cars already accounting for more than three hundred of Nokia’s company vehicles. Drivers are pleased with their cars and it is mostly the network of gas filling stations that to date has restricted the choice of a gas vehicle. Jarno Pajunen, Global Category Manager at Nokia, thinks that cooperation with Gasum is the circular economy at its best: in practice, all the biowaste originating in Nokia’s sites in Finland is processed into biogas with which Nokia employees can refuel their vehicles.

Biogas motoring is one way to reduce emissions

Encouraging biogas motoring is just one way to reduce emissions. Efforts have been made over several years to reduce the emissions from Nokia’s more than 10,000 company vehicles worldwide. These efforts have resulted in a halving of carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles during this period.

Encouraging low-emission motoring also has other long-term consequences: company vehicles are generally driven for a few years before ending up on the used car market. All the same, these vehicles still have a useful life lasting years or even decades after this. Pia Tanskanen, Head of Environment at Nokia, points out that if all companies were to act in the same way, there would begin to be a significant impact on traffic emissions in Finland.

New mobility services around the corner

Nokia is currently studying and developing various mobility services and their use. Jarno Pajunen hopes that soon, Nokia will be able to offer its employees not only low-emission company cars, but also various mobility as a service packages. This would mean that an employee could decide, depending on need, whether to use a car, public transport or, for example, an e-scooter for business trips.

Updated 22.9.2020