​American Honda today released “Every Drop Counts,” the second in a series of short films on the initiatives of Honda associates to fulfill the company’s vision for reducing Honda’s environmental impact and creating a more sustainable business. Watch film now. The new film highlights a project undertaken by associates at Honda’s Marysville, Ohio auto plant to capture and use the energy present in water falling from rooftop cooling towers. The project began as a simple drawing sketched on a notepad by a retired plant engineer. Inspired by the sketch, Honda engineers from different areas of the plant teamed up to create a unique small-scale hydro power generation system. Built almost entirely from spare parts and materials in the plant, the team converted a simple AC motor for use as an alternator to generate energy from water as it falls 35 feet to a sump. The low-cost, low-maintenance system produces 50,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year and offsets roughly 77,000 pounds of CO2 emissions from the consumption of grid-supplied electricity. “Think of a miniature water wheel and you’ve got the basic premise of this system,” said Dirk Nordberg, senior staff engineer at Honda of America Mfg., Inc. and manager of the plant’s facilities and environment. “This is a great example of our associates’ ongoing effort to increase efficiency and reduce waste. Not every initiative has a huge impact, but this project demonstrates how little gains can add up to big improvements in our total efficiency. That’s the principle behind this effort.” The Honda Environmental Short Film Series, featured on Honda’s YouTube Channel, highlights associate-driven environmental innovation across Honda in North America. It focuses not only on Honda’s efforts at developing more fuel-efficient, low emissions vehicles, but also Honda associates’ efforts to reduce energy use, emissions and waste in all of the company’s operations, including in manufacturing and shipping logistics. The series was launched in August 2012 with the film, “Paint by Numbers,” which told the story of Honda engineer Shubho Bhattacharya who, inspired by his belief that global warming is one of the greatest challenges facing mankind today, developed technology to reduce energy use in the auto body-painting process at Honda manufacturing plants in North America. For more information on Honda’s other Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives, please visit csr.honda.com. Honda Environmental Leadership Honda is a leader in the development of leading-edge technologies to improve fuel efficiency and reduce CO2 emissions. Honda has led the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) rankings of overall vehicle environmental performance since 2000, and a Honda vehicle has topped the list of America’s greenest vehicles from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) for eleven out of the past twelve years. The company leads all automakers with twelve LEED-Certified “Green Buildings” in North America, and last year announced that ten of its 14 North American manufacturing facilities are zero-waste to landfill. In 2006, Honda became the first automaker to announce voluntary CO2 emissions reduction targets for its global fleet of automobile, power sports and power equipment products and its global network of manufacturing plants. In 2011, the company set a new CO2 emission reduction targets for 2020, including a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions from its products compared with 2000 levels.