Interaction between new car design and recycling impact on life cycle assessment

The use of lightweight materials and multi-material concepts in car manufacturing has been focused to produce more sustainable vehicles. This has resulted in significant reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions during use phase to achieve the strict vehicle emission standards. Nevertheless, the varied range of joining techniques used to join multi-material vehicle designs presents challenges at the end-of-life, especially the feasibility of current recycling processes to recover materials in a closed-loop recycling. Life Cycle Assessment has been widely used to assess the environmental impacts throughout the vehicle life cycle stages. However, the correlation between the increasing development in new multi-material vehicle designs, and the commonly used shredding process for material recovery is not captured well in the current analysis. This paper presents a dynamic hypothesis that illustrates the time effect on life cycle analysis of a car to investigate the challenges associated to the material recovery efficiency. It shows that the short term effective reduction in environmental impact through multi-material structures have consequently created a long term effect of increasing waste produced. Thus, the current evolution in automotive industry adheres to the widely studied "Fixes that Fail" system archetype.