It makes environmental sense to use water-saving processes and to re-use as much water as possible.
We don’t mind when it rains. In fact, at the Audi factory we welcome a good downpour because we collect rainwater in our underground cisterns – from an area of almost 450,000 square metres – to use in our car production. Since adding an additional storage facility in 2006, over 14,000 cubic metres of water can be stored in reservoirs at our Ingolstadt plant. And we’re looking to increase this figure. In 2007, this supplied nearly 240,000 cubic metres of water – that’s enough to serve the needs of a small city.
On top of these innovations, we also feed 96.3 per cent of our total water use into a closed-loop system. All this means the demand on water (and therefore the amount of wastewater used in the production of each vehicle) has been reduced from 4.9 cubic metres per car in 1988 to 1.5 cubic metres per car in 2007 – that’s a 69 per cent reduction.
Article source: www.audi.co.uk