On Road to Net Zero, GKN Tackles Easiest Improvements First

GKN Automotive sustainability director says unified standard could help sustainability reporting.

August 11, 2025

Chris Clonts

Regardless of whether the shifting political climate in America affects U.S. OEM and supplier sustainability efforts, the world isn’t pausing on the reduction of carbon emissions from the supply chain. When experienced sustainability leader Tom Salisbury of GKN Automotive was in Detroit to speak to the Suppliers Partnership Innovation Summit, SAE Media was able to check in with him on the current state of sustainability.

SAE Media: One of the things that jumps out in your report is that you’re making good progress on renewable energy use in all countries where you have factories except for America, where the percentage of renewable energy in use is zero. Given our current regulatory and policy climate, is that something you can affect change on?

Salisbury: The U.S. will be more of a focus in the future. The approach we’ve been taking on renewables has been quite phased because even just purely a capacity point of view to be honest. When we signed our first PPA [Power Purchase Agreement] in Europe, that was a big cross functional project and it would have been impossible to have done the U.S. in parallel.

And in Europe, we particularly have more customer red lines in terms of using renewable electricity, so that meant the commercial rationale was strongest in Europe [initially].

And where will you focus next? I assume the United States is kind of low on the list of targets…

We’ve been looking at Brazil, where there is a good financial benefit from going to renewables. And it’s a similar situation in India. So, we’ve been really growing our renewable electricity usage in India where there’s been strong business cases. You can’t do everything at once, but aligning with commercial priorities and looking at the finances of different regions. It’s quite a lot to navigate, really, as you’ve got completely different regulatory regimes around the world.

You said that AI has not affected sustainability efforts positively or negatively just yet but did caution that it has the potential to become a serious sustainability problem due to the massive energy use of data centers. Can you elaborate?

There will clearly be roles for AI to enable more efficient operations, but we’ve got to make sure that the other side of that is not actually worse.

You have a goal of hitting net zero carbon emissions across your value chain by 2045. Do you expect that to get harder the closer you get?

We have 50 percent target for this year, and then 75 percent for 2030 and then we need to get to 100 percent. You kind of tackle the low hanging fruit first. For example, switching out your forklifts to be electric rather than powered with gas is relatively straightforward compared to where you’ve got high heat processes which use gas and then to electrify those you know that’s a significant [capital expenditure]. That’s the type of thing that’s going to require a lot of planning and looking at when you’re replacing equipment as well and what’s the timeline on that. We’re trying to have the right phased approach to all of it.

We have more than 50 sites around the world, but we looked at the top 20 by carbon emissions and defined what the key actions are that will get those sites to zero.

You said you have a relatively small core sustainability team. Does that mean that all departments and suppliers must take responsibility for much of the effort?

We have this infographic which is basically our net zero target. What I like talking about [with] this slide is that you know you’ve got a role for engineering to play in terms of R&D. And product design again has engineers engaging with our customers and what we’re doing on renewables, which is obviously procurement, how they’re buying energy.

I always say this isn’t just for me to do. This is all the different parts of the business, and they all need to play a role. But to do that they need to properly understand the why – why this makes sense for them in their roles. So [the sustainability team is] starting the conversation. There’s a lot of noise outside, from regulations, customers, investors and consumers, and the goal posts are continually moving. That’s where the sustainability team comes in to translate all that into basic business language.

You said one of the pain points of sustainability efforts is all the different data streams coming from suppliers, your own manufacturing sites and even the team itself. Is that the sort of thing where having a standard dataset would be useful? Or are we too far down the road on proprietary systems like Catina X?

I think it’s possible to do it in a simpler way, and in a bit more of an industry-coordinated way. We see M2030 being something more used by North American OEMs whereas Catina X has been driven more by some German OEMs. I just think it’s really critical that we become more joined up on these types of things.

Diversity and inclusion efforts have traditionally been a part of company sustainability reports. Not sure how much that will change moving forward in America due to the political climate despite solid data that diverse companies perform better, but it clearly won’t in the EU and Britain. Because not only do businesses believe in it, but there are compliance issues around it.

As long as you have a business that truly understands that value and that it is being articulated or measured properly, right. Then the regulation kind of is a secondary concern in a sense because you see the value of keeping the attention of an engaged workforce. Why would you change?

One of the things that we’ve been really proud of over the last 18 months is what we’ve been doing on STEM and launching STEM programs at some of our key strategic sites to make our philanthropic programs more strategic, which is linked to wanting to build engineering talent for the future.

But for those to be successful, we’ve had to find the right partner organization at each of those sites. And in Salinas Victoria [Mexico], it’s been the local university. In Poland, it’s a local educational NGO.