Implementing life cycle engineering efficiently into automotive industry processes

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool which supports life cycle engineering. It can be used as an environmental management instrument within the product development. For successful life cycle engineering the formal incorporation of life cycle thinking into the company policy is a necessary pre-requisite. Additional success factors which have to be met are the transformation of LCA results into measurable targets for engineers. Based on given environmental targets, such as a certain target value for greenhouse gas emissions, LCA can be used to calculate a specific technical target such as the weight of a component, the fuel consumption of a vehicle or the minimum amount of recycled content in a product. The transformation of pure LCA results into measurable target values, which can be understood by engineers, will clearly show the added value which LCA can give in terms of life cycle engineering. Even for very complex products with a huge variety of different materials and a complex value chain life cycle assessment can be performed with a reasonable time demand, with good quality and integrated efficiently into business processes.