Sustainability in Automotive: Closing the Loop with End-of-Life Vehicle Disassembly

Abstract

In end-of-life vehicles (ELV) recycling currently about 90% of the material can be recovered and reused in different industries. Most of the recycled content lacks material purity to maintain required properties of the material to be reused in a vehicle itself. The state-of-the-art shredding and sorting approach implies material contamination decreasing the quality outcome. By increasing the material purity prior to the recycling processes a higher quality without additional effort during recycling could be achieved. The thesis analyses the potential of ELV disassembling to reveal valuable materials for recycling compared to the shredding and sorting approach.In qualitative interviews with industry experts along the vehicle lifecycle the technological, ecological and economic aspects of a potential disassembling approach are discussed and analyzed. In addition, industry investigation identifies the key impact factors creating the baseline for a multi-future scenario study. A business evaluation including a sensitivity investigation completes the framework for the disassembly approach.As a result, the thesis suggests a disassembling concept separating the ELV into modules followed by clean separation processes if required for a specific module according to recyclability. The depth drives investment in addition to vision and recognition systems that can handle the variety of vehicle brands, models and model years. Manual processes show high sensitivity to the process depth and operational costs while the more beneficial automated disassembly line is mainly impacted by the material market prices which create the revenue for the process. Another economic weight is the supply of ELVs which is currently seen interrupted by export trends and requires regulation or motivation systems. To limit additional costs and emissions for logistics, disassembly installations should be regionally decentralized.The circular economy benefits from collaborations across the industry, and this analysis strengthens the opposition of working in silos, which is predominant in a competitive environment. The competition of a disassembly approach is the improvement of sorting processes after shredding. When those developments enable the required recycling material purity an additional disassembling process would be obsolete. In the same way design for recycling prioritizing mono material components can simplify or supersede disassembly.The thesis displays those important indicators, suggests concepts for technology and business evaluation and proposes details to be researched for a viable option to improve circular economy in automotive.