Towards a sustainable material use in the automotive industry: Life Cycle Costing and socio-technical approach to material use

Abstract

The purpose of the article is twofold. We first present a Life Cycle Costing methodology applied at different scales to compare between design options in terms of materials use: in an automobile vehicle part, a whole vehicle, and a car manufacturer’s portfolio. The Life Cycle Costs consider costs for different stakeholders, including environmental damage costs (supported by the civil society), fuel expenses (supported by the customer) and materials costs (supported by the car manufacturer). The second objective of the article is to bring a management and socio-technical vision to the issue of material use in the automobile industry, in order to challenge the idea that all decisions regarding material use depend on purely technical and economic criteria. Through a qualitative research, we investigated the barriers to material efficiency and integrating the environmental criterion in decision making from a French car manufacturer’s perspective. Within the same company, we also collected material experts’ feedbacks on the LCC tool developed in the first Part, both in terms of methodology and potential integration in decision-making.

Sustainable development model for measuring and managing sustainability in the automotive sector

“…For example, the End‐of‐Life Vehicles Directive (2000/53/EC, n.d.) requires automotive companies to think more broadly about future costs (for instance, recycling, disassembly, disposal costs) from current production. Progressively tighter emission limits, such as Euro 5 and 6 (2019/631/EU, n.d.), place liability on car manufacturers for negative effects from the use of vehicles and thus pushes the whole industry toward electrification (Iken, Morel, & Aggeri, 2019). A number of national regulations oblige automotive organizations to reduce their environmental and social costs at their manufacturing sites (e.g., the UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme, Climate Change Levy tax and landfill tax).…”

Special issue on Materials and Society: the Circular Economy SAM-13

“…The next two papers illustrate how LCA methodology can be extended to reflect contemporary and pluridisciplinary issues: -N. Iken, S. Morel and F. Aggeri of Renault and Mine ParisTech [3] developed an in-house methodology based initially on an LCC framework to examine the cost of various automobile systems (car and manufacturer's portfolio) and subsystems (parts) from the standpoint of different stakeholders, the car owner (cost of ownership), the car manufacturer (materials costs) and civil society (environmental cost). The usefulness of the tool inside Renault was further assessed by internal experts, especially in terms of decision making for improving design.…”