Rosa García Piñeiro is likely to have sufficient experience in the fight for sustainability in industrial groups, even if she also has Volkswagen wakes up One of her favorite stories is that of women knitting at a mine in Anglesea, Southwest Australia. They sat down on folding chairs in front of the Alcoa plant and protested against the pollution there. The result: the protest went viral, Alcoa caved in and closed the mine in 2015.
Piñeiro’s lesson: if you don’t focus on sustainability, you lose.
García Piñeiro, who studied industrial and environmental engineering, has been working for Alcoa, one of the largest aluminum manufacturers in the world, for more than 20 years. The Spaniard is currently Vice President for Sustainability; she has also headed the Alcoa Foundation since November 2016. And Volkswagen’s technology board member Thomas Schmall (58) has now won her as a member of the supervisory board for the subsidiary PowerCo. Schmall praised in one LinkedIn post
García Piñeiro for her ecological efforts at Alcoa: The US group offers “the lowest-carbon aluminum refining process in the world”.
The Spaniard completes the now twelve-strong PowerCo supervisory board. With her, the proportion of women on the board will rise to over 40 percent, said Schmall, chairman of the supervisory board, on Tuesday. In the future, García Piñeiro will ensure that the VW gigafactories – at least seven are planned – produce clean battery cells. The Wolfsburg want to sell green electric cars. Few would be worse than a scandal about child labor in raw material mines.
The focus on the PowerCo is immense. He was even Chancellor at the beginning of July when the foundation stone was laid for the first battery cell factory “SalzGiga”. Olaf Scholz (64, SPD) came to Salzgitter. The Lower Saxony location is an example of the transformation of the car manufacturer. Thousands of petrol and diesel engines are manufactured there every day. From 2025, Salzgitter will then primarily stand for the production of battery cells.
Cell production should be rolled out as identically as possible in the other factories; as efficient as possible – and, including recycling, also as clean as possible. By the end of the decade, PowerCo is expected to build batteries for up to five million electric cars a year. Narrow and still CEO Herbert Diess (63) were just in Canada, to secure the PowerCo’s commodity insurance.
Rose García Piñeiro holds both engineering masters degrees, an MBA from the University of Geneva and a masters degree in commodity trading. In addition to Spanish, she speaks English, Portuguese and French. In addition to her main job at Alcoa, she also sits on the board of directors of Spanish steel producer Acerinox.