Edinburgh Napier University

  The continuing debate on the global environmental progress through achievement of smarter clean/green-policies, reasoned with the need for carbon-emissions’ reduction/prevention (The Economist, 2015a; 2016a), has reached a higher level of interaction between German’s federal government, automotive industry, and society (BMUB, 2016). When embedding achieved operational universal-guidelines, this research provides an initial step towards a conceptual-framework, and furthermore, contributes to further discussion on what can be achieved with clean/green-technological initiatives, why those initiatives matter, and especially, how German automotive industry’s key, strategic clean/green-technological initiatives can be transferred to and implemented by sustainability managers within diverse industrial sectors towards the establishment of a low-carbon German economy (ACEA, 2016a; Shrivastava, 1995; The Economist, 2016a). Thus, this research questions ‘what were key, strategic clean/green-technological initiatives applied by German’s automotive industry to address the ongoing global carbon crisis?’ and ‘how and why have those initiatives contributed to create sustainable-value?’. Hereto, this research critically-explores, identifies, and classifies single-applied and collaborative-contributed environmental and social sustainability initiatives of Germany’s influential three original equipment manufacturers (abbreviated as OEMs) and seven leading OEM-parts suppliers within the time frame of 2010 to 2015.