Operations
Resource Conservation and Emissions Reduction
In the late 1990s many manufacturers were beginning to require suppliers to implement and certify an environmental management system (EMS). In 1997, in a farsighted move, CEO Masatoshi Ono announced that all major Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. manufacturing facilities would achieve ISO 14001 certification by the year 2000. In support of this initiative, Mr. Ono signed the Bridgestone/Firestone Environmental Policy in February 1998.
Later that year the first two manufacturing facilities of Bridgestone/Firestone, Inc. were certified to the ISO 14001:1996 standard. Currently, 47 Bridgestone Americas facilities have been certified.
In 1998, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) launched the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program to transform the way buildings and communities are designed, built and operated, enabling an environmentally and socially responsible, healthy, and prosperous environment that improves the quality of life. LEED provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction of and operation of buildings. Currently, the LEED program has grown to more than 14,000 projects in the United States and 30 countries covering over 1 billion square feet of development area. The hallmark of LEED is that it is an open and transparent process where the technical criteria proposed by the LEED committees are publicly reviewed for approval by the more than 10,000 membership organizations that currently constitute the USGBC.
In 2009, Bridgestone become the first tire company in the world to attain the LEED certification of not only one but two of its tire manufacturing facilities. These facilities are located in Warren County, TN, and Aiken, SC.
Bridgestone has made a corporate-wide effort to conserve energy and natural resources used in manufacturing and to reduce emissions generated from operations. From 2003 to 2008, when indexed against production; total waste has decreased, total water usage and waste water have decreased, carbon dioxide emissions have decreased, and total energy has decreased. Each of these improvements occurred while production increased by 8% from 2003-2008.
In addition to its involvement in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED program, Bridgestone is also actively involved in the EPA SmartWay program both through our truck tires and our private (shipper/carrier) fleet. Click on the SmartWay logo on this page to learn more about Bridgestone's involvement in the EPA SmartWay program.
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