Consumer electronics and home appliances manufacturing company Hisense South Africa has joined State-owned power utility Eskom’s 49M energy-saving initiative.

Speaking at the pledge-signing ceremony, held in Cape Town last month, Eskom strategic marketing senior manager Pieter Pretorius said the new partnership was in line with the initiative’s strategic intent to join forces with businesses on common projects to drive sustainable living.

“We are extremely excited about this collaboration, as we believe a collective effort will make a huge difference in our efforts to encourage the country to lead an energy efficient lifestyle,” he stated.

Hisense South Africa GM Jerry Liu stated that the company had always looked for ways of contributing positively to the environment in which it operated to focus mainly on energy- saving programmes.

“We strongly believe that partnering with 49M can only strengthen our efforts and the signing of the 49M pledge demonstrates our commitment to becoming a brand that cares about our society and environment,” he added.

Liu said Hisense South Africa had also been working closely with the Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) to educate the public on using consumer electronics and home appliances more efficiently to save energy.

Before the partnership with GBCSA, Liu said Hisense, with a workforce of more than 75 000 worldwide, had also ensured that energy efficiency was at the core of developing new products when they launched the new manufacturing facility, in Atlantis, Cape Town, in June last year.

“We decided to enter the field of green eventing when launching the facility. We did this in close collaboration with corporate communications company Bluemoon and corporate sustainability, carbon management green building firm Earth Patrol. This collaboration ensured that measures were taken to offset the launch event’s carbon footprint and to benefit the community of Atlantis. The event was themed Living Legacy to showcase that industry and sustainability can go hand in hand.

“With this in mind, we managed to achieve a carbon neutral event using globally accepted methods and approaches used to measure the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with the planning, logistics and execution of the launch,” he said.

Hisense South Africa’s pledge signing brings the number of businesses and organisations that have pledged to reduce their energy use by introducing various energy efficient solutions to 135.