The Impact of Joining Choices on Vehicle Recycling Systems

Stricter vehicle emissions legislation has driven significant reduction in environmental impact of the vehicle use phase through increasing use of lightweight materials and multi-material concepts to reduce the vehicle mass. The joining techniques used for multi-material designs has led to reduced efficiency of the current shredder-based recycling practices. Although the commonly used Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method is effective in assessing the environmental impacts of vehicles, there is a lack of consideration for the changing material and joining trends, and their delayed impact on the end-of-life vehicles (ELV) recyclability. This paper evaluates the temporal effects between vehicle designs and recycling phases using the System Dynamics approach. The behavioural patterns of the vehicle recycling systems show that the commonly used multi-material joining choices have led to increasing impurities and valuable material losses during ELV recycling, that can be characterised to well-known system archetypes: "Fixes that Fail" and "Shifting the Burden".