Sustainable Business Development Automobiles Essay

Sustainable Business Development Automobiles - Essay Example The automobile industry plays a critical role in making sure that their products are created more responsibly, as well as ensuring that more sustainable facilities are used for production. Moreover, the industry also plays a role in ensuring that their product is created for more eco-friendly, efficient, and innovatively imagined options of personal transport that take the burgeoning world population into account. The growing awareness of environmental issues is bound to significantly impact on the automobile industry and, therefore, it is important for the industry to create more sustainable products that satisfy the public (Conley & McLaren, 2012: p52). According to gov.uk (2014: p1), there were close to 35 million licensed vehicles for road use in the UK in 2013, which represented an increase of 1.5% compared to 2012 and the biggest year-on-year increase since the global financial crisis. This represents a trend, in which the number of vehicles in the UK has increased annually since the end of WWII except 1991. Moreover, there are close to 2 million vehicles that reach the end of useful life in the UK and are withdrawn from service (gov.uk, 2014: p1). These facts are the main justification for the selection of the automobile industry in this essay, specifically because of the environmental implications of so many vehicles on the roads, as well as in the waste streams. Whereas the bulk of attention regarding the environmental impacts resulting from automobiles has mainly focused on fuel economy, climate change, and emissions, this essay will approach the automobile as a product across its lifecycle. This paper seeks to investigate the environmental impacts of automobiles across their life cycle, as well as discuss how these impacts can be mitigated. The term sustainable development first came into use in the International Union for the Conservation of