For the tenth year in a row, Mercury Marine has earned a Green Masters designation from the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council. Once again, Mercury achieved a score within the top 20% of all applicants to earn the designation. A small, further step towards green boating.
While the whole world is (slowly) going green, and the UN has launched a huge project with the Sustainability Development Goals, many governments, both on a National and local scale, have their own programs in order to reward companies that respect the environment (and not only, as the ESG certification boom shows).
Wisconsin, the State where Mercury Marine is based, has a Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council (WSBC), which has just presented the results of 2020 Green Masters Program, and Mercury has been awarded with a Green Masters designation for the tenth consecutive year.
Green boating is also this: why Mercury got the Green Masters achievement
The Green Masters Program measures companies’ achievements on a range of sustainability categories, from energy and water conservation to waste management, community outreach, and education. Ibut not just: companies are evaluated in the contexts of transportation, supply chain, workforce, and governance.
WSBC Green Masters Program requires applicants to cite sustainable business practices and initiatives undertaken in the past year, and to show improvements over previous years.
On their side, in order to get this Green Master designation, in 2020 Mercury kept expanding the energy efficiency and eco-friendliness of the manufacturing operations. Initiatives include modernization of heating / air conditioning / lighting systems, containment of compressed-air systems, optimization of power cycles for equipment and facilities, redirection of the heat generated during manufacturing into multiple purposes, and enhancement of facilities design to include natural lighting and passive heating. The company also expanded their recycling and reuse of materials and water used in manufacturing.
Read about United Nation’s huge Sustainable Development Goals program
As for the aspect that most concern our readers, i.e. the outboard motors themselves: according to WSBC, in the past year the company manufactured engines that have better fuel efficiency and lower emissions than ever before. This means that each new Mercury engine sold to replace an older one, there is an improvement to the environment. Of course we all want to see greener and cleaner engines on the market, as the pollution of our seas grow and limitations and marine preserves come out.
But there’s more, on the company side: at the beginning of the year, employees at Mercury’s world headquarters in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, participated in a series of lighting fairs, purchasing 8000 energy-efficient LED bulbs for their homes. Collectively, their purchases resulted in an environmental improvement roughly equivalent to removing 76 cars from the road each year.
See the Mercury report about sustainability and company’s goals
Significantly, in 2020 Mercury also initiated plans to expand its commitment to derive more energy from renewable sources. We hope the road to a real green environment, for Mercury and all the companies in boating, doesn’t stop here.
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