Editorial

Dear readers,

Climate change and finite resources are topics that we all encounter every day. Devoting attention to energy and the environment, resources and efficiency is no longer just an “extracurricular activity” but instead has become a “mandatory course”.

Our work as a supplier of all kinds of drive and control technologies ever aims to optimize consumption, emissions and performance for machinery and equipment. The approaches are many and varied. They start with development and manufacturing, embrace daily operations, and extend to updating and modernization. Under the “Rexroth 4EE” banner our firm offers a systematic method for exploiting these potentials.

And of course, as they say, “charity begins at home”. We are striving to reduce our own carbon footprint, as well. In concrete terms, this means that by the year 2020 we will have lowered CO2 emissions in our own facilities by 25 percent. Drastic reductions in pollutants are also the order of the day for diggers, tracked vehicles and other mobile working machines. Our support for customers in meeting the tough limit values soon to be imposed by the “Tier 4 Final” exhaust standards is described here.

Active concentration on climate change and resource scarcity is by no means limited to lowering consumption and emissions. Tapping renewable energies — wind, sun and the sea — also plays a central part. Calculations by the Global Wind Energy Council show that wind power alone can save 1.5 billion tons of CO2 annually by 2020. To ensure that the world’s never-ending winds will generate power reliably, Rexroth has, for instance, developed a gearbox engineered for 175,000 hours in operation. It will do its job faithfully for a full twenty years. You can read more about renewable energies here.

I hope you will enjoy reading about these efforts and that they will lend you new energy to master today’s challenges.

Dr. Karl Tragl,
Executive Vice President for Sales, Bosch Rexroth AG