Volvo's oldest, most productive car plant now climate neutral

Volvo Cars on Wednesday concluded a nearly four-year effort to make its oldest and most productive car plant climate neutral.

The Torslanda factory, near Gothenburg, which produces about 300,000 vehicles annually and opened in 1964, is the Swedish automaker's first vehicle assembly plant to achieve climate neutrality.

At Volvo to reach this level a plant must register "no net increase in the emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere" as a result of electricity and heating usage, the company said.

Torslanda has been powered by climate neutral electricity since 2008, and it now also has climate neutral heating, half of which come from biogas and the rest mostly from using industrial waste heat.

Torslanda is the second overall factory in Volvo's network after its engine plant in Skovde, Sweden, to become climate neutral. Skovde did so in 2018.

The main reason it took Torslanda longer than Skovde is because of its paint shop.

Head of global production operations Geert Bruyneel told Automotive News Europe that the energy demand from Torslanda's paint shop, despite a recent upgrade, is more than three times that of the most demanding job at Skovde, which is the machining process for the engine.

He said that the paint shop also requires a lot of biogas to heat the boilers and ovens used during the process.

Bruyneel said that was another tough obstacle he faced during the years it took to make Torslanda climate neutral was altering the mindset of people.

"In the beginning the biggest challenge was convincing everyone that this was the right thing to do, even if the rest of world and our competitors maybe did not do the same," he said. "In the end, we said, "No, this is the right thing to do for the company and for our future."

Addressing Torslanda's CO2 impact was a big step for Volvo, which aims to have a climate neutral global manufacturing network by 2025.

Bruyneel said Volvo will first focus on making its factories in Europe -- including its plant in Ghent, Belgium -- climate neutral, followed by its U.S. manufacturing site in South Carolina and concluding with its three vehicle assembly plants in China.