- Investor: Fengcheng Venture Capital
- Type: Industrial
- Certification: LEED BD+C v4 Gold
- Gross Floor Area: 30,000 sqm
- Location: Jiangxi, China
- One Click LCA Expert: TERAO Asia
- One Click LCA used for: Building life-cycle impact reduction and Innovation in LEED v4 design credits
Forvia is a French global automotive supplier headquartered in Nanterre, France. They are an automotive technology group at the heart of smarter and more sustainable mobility, bringing together expertise in electronics, clean mobility, lighting, interiors, seating, and lifecycle solutions to drive change in the automotive industry. Forvia, through its two entities, Faurecia and Hella, has demonstrated over the years a strong presence in China, with more than 28.000 employees at 95 industrial sites in more than 30 cities.
Forvia Fengcheng Mega Plant is located in Fengcheng High-Tech Industrial Park of Jiangxi province and will be a manufacturing hub for products in three areas: display technologies, cockpit electronics and automated driving, with a capacity of 2 million units per year. The Mega plant, with a total gross floor area of 29,912 sqm, mainly comprises one 1-storey production building offering a mix of production workshops, a high storage and packaging area, and one 2-storey office building.
Forvia Fengcheng Mega Plant
As part of Forvia’s wide commitment to Reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to its project, Forvia is interested in incorporating technical strategies into the design of the new plant to reduce its carbon footprint.
The objective of the Forvia group is to have 120 kWh/sqm. year energy consumption for the workshop and 130 kWh/m2 for the office area. The carbon footprint related to construction materials shall be < 700 kg CO2/sqm.
One Click LCA was used in this project for two purposes：
- Carbon calculation and optimization across the design and construction stage by using low embodied carbon materials to meet Forvia’s target “construction CO2 footprint (embodied) < 700 kgCO2e/sqm”.
- Calculation of the Whole Building Life Cycle Assessment of the Project as part of LEED certification;
The preliminary results indicated that the construction CO2 footprint (embodied) exceeded 700 kg CO2e/sqm and steel and concrete were the top 2 most carbon contributing materials in the building construction. Therefore, a study was performed on the impact of construction materials containing different recycled contents and the final strategy adopted was choosing steel profile materials containing 30% recycled contents, above the industry average level of 20% (the average steel market in China is composed of around 20% recycled contents, while in this project the recycled contents within the structural steel could be as high as 30% which significantly reduced the overall embodied carbon of the building materials), which reduced the construction CO2 footprint to 648 kg CO2e/sqm.
Moreover, the steel profile with higher recycled contents contributes to over 5% reduction of GHG emission, acidification of land and water and tropospheric ozone formation compared to the LEED baseline case, earning the project 2 points on Credit MRc1 Building Life-Cycle Impact Reduction.
As a result, the effective use of OneClick LCA combined with TERAO’s embodied carbon expertise in China enabled the project to meet the group’s embodied carbon target and get a Gold certificate for the project.
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Written by Eason Yu – Project Manager based in Shanghai, China. Eason is a professional with over 10 years of experience practicing building sustainability, energy efficiency consultancy services, and LEED AP certified.
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