Designing for Material Separation: Lessons From Automotive Recycling

Abstract

Virtually all of the material in today’s automobiles can technically be recycled. The challenge facing engineers is making this recycling process economical, especially for materials in such components as seats and instrument panels. Recycling these components requires the different materials to be separated so that each can be recycled individually. This separation can be accomplished either manually, where workers disassembly and sort the vehicle components by hand, or mechanically, where the vehicle is shredded and the materials sorted by properties such as conductivity and density. In this paper, the usefulness of including likely separation techniques in DFR guidelines is discussed. Three vehicles were dismantled at the VRDC as part of an effort to establish a baseline of current vehicle recyclability. Concurrently, this allowed examination of the effectiveness of the early design for recycling (DFR) efforts. The applicability of common design guidelines to the two types of separation is discussed, and a simple method for determining the appropriate separation process in the early stages of design is presented.

Integrated design of remanufacturable products based on product profiles

“…Three cases about car disassembly were studied and a method is proposed to take into account the process of separation at the beginning of the design [22].…”

A Manufacturing Informatics Framework for Manufacturing Sustainability Assessment

“…Many sustainable development strategies [4][5][6][7][8] have been proposed by government agencies and academia since the late 1990s. Research in sustainable manufacturing field can be categorized into the following four main themes [9,10]: a) Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) [11][12][13][14][15], b) design-for-X principles and design for sustainability [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]; c) end-of-life studies [26][27][28][29][30][31]; and d) energy efficiency monitoring and studies [32][33][34][35].…”

Assessing the benefits of design for recycling for plastics in electronics: A case study of computer enclosures

“…Although much work has been published on quantitative methods for DFR in general, including methods for predicting product disassembly times [8] and [9], methods for scoring product demanufacturing complexity [10], [11] and [12], and methods for predicting product disassembly costs [13] and [14], little work has been published that addresses the two challenges described above for the specific case of plastic enclosures. The most relevant work to date includes analyses by Huisman [15], Lee et al [16], and Chen et al [17].…”