Concept And Exemplary Application Of Industrialized Re-Assembly To An Automotive Use Case In The Context Of Circular Economy

Abstract

To reach set climate goals recent paradigms of production need to be reconsidered. Within the automotive industry, approaches like electric mobility focus on the use phase. However, the production of an electric car is resource and energy intensive, which diminishes the ecological advantage of electrification in the use phase. Established approaches aiming for the production phase often involve saving energy or resources, which is in a single-digit range when it comes to the reduction of emissions. In contrast to that, applying the concept of Circular Economy can reduce the ecological impact of products over their lifetime significantly. This paper introduces Re-Assembly as a plannable concept to extend the lifetime of products while reducing emissions and increasing the margins for the OEM. By combining the concept of Re-Assembly with other R-strategies, this paper aims to demonstrate the ecological and economic potential of circular business models, especially in the automotive sector. This is done by introducing the results of a use case and deriving specific enablers for the concept. The resulting enablers can be understood as fields of action for establishing Re-Assembly in practice.