Volvo Paint Shop to Be Easy on Energy, Emissions

Volvo will create a new paint shop it calls a key part of its strategy to achieve climate-neutral global manufacturing by 2025.

It plans to replace its current paint shop at the Torslanda, Sweden, car-manufacturing plant to reduce paint-shop energy consumption and emissions by at least one-third. Construction will begin in 2020.

The Torslanda plant is Volvo’s largest manufacturing facility in terms of volume, building 291,000 cars in 2018. It employs 6,500 manufacturing staff and produces cars on the company’s in-house-developed scalable product architecture (SPA) platform, which underpins the company’s 90 and 60 Series cars.

Other climate-friendly initiatives launched by the automaker last year include solar-panel installation at its Ghent, Belgium, factory and its Skövde engine plant in Sweden, the latter becoming the first climate-neutral facility in Volvo’s global manufacturing network.

Javier Varela, senior vice president-manufacturing and logistics at Volvo, says: “We have identified our paint-shop operation as one area in which we can achieve significant reductions in energy consumption and emissions. This investment also strengthens our plans for the Torslanda plant to remain globally competitive.”