The international automotive supplier Forvia Hella receives the John Deere Award in the sustainability category. The leading manufacturer of agricultural machinery honors Forvia Hella for its heat recovery system at the Großpetersdorf site in Austria. The system saves around 175,000 kilowatt hours of natural gas per year and therefore around 32,000 kilograms of CO2. The award was presented at the John Deere European Supplier Conference in March 2024 in Mannheim, Germany.

"We are proud to have received this award from John Deere. We are continuously working to save energy and make our business more sustainable," says Christine Romirer-Maierhofer, responsible for Energy and Environment at Hella Fahrzeugteile Austria GmbH. With the global "Think.Act.Save." program, Forvia Hella is pushing for systematic energy savings in production. The company aims to achieve CO2-neutral production worldwide by 2025 at the latest (Scope 1 and 2, at least 80 percent absolute reduction compared to 2019 and compensation of the remaining direct emissions).

With this in mind, a heat recovery system with compressors has been in use in Großpetersdorf since March 2023. A large proportion of the energy used to generate compressed air is converted into heat, which is transferred to the painting facility and used for space heating in winter. This allows 90 percent of the electrical energy used to be converted into usable heat. The heat recovery system has an amortization period of less than two years and helps to significantly reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions at the site.