Webinar for LCA in Automotive – Summary and Resources

ALMA and sister cluster project FLAMINGo organized a webinar on LCA in the Automotive Sector on the 9^th of February 2023. The webinar brought together projects involved in lightweighting concepts to reduce the overall weight of vehicles while increasing sustainability, and was meant to discuss the use of lifecycle assessments to ensure that the lighter materials and concepts chosen do have a positive net impact on the environmental footprint across all lifecycle phases.

An interesting fact we have learnt through LCA is that as electric vehicles are powered more and more by green electricity, the emissions during driving will become less significant compared to the emissions generated during the manufacturing of the car. In line with this, ALMA’s BEVSIM tool and LEVIS iEDGE Toolkit aim to make LCA as a design tool more accessible to non-LCA experts so that it can be better integrated into the design and engineering processes of automotive parts. Integrating LCA methods into the ecodesign of vehicles allows for more intelligent choices and trade-offs at design time, while also offering a diagnostic function that allows engineers to focus on sustainability hotspots identified through the LCA.

We also got to hear about how each project has a particular approach to dealing with the particular challenges in the automotive sector. For example passenger vehicles are expected to stay on the road for 10 to 15 years – so the LCA has to deal with technological and material changes in the future. Some projects provide different scenarios for this, while others offer a sensitivity analysis for critical parameters. The SALEMA project also offered a modular approach to help separate and more explicitly integrate ‘external’ contributing factors such as recycling and circularity factors. A lively discussion surrounded the topic of Aluminum as an alternative material, and whether this could be considered a critical raw material in the future. 

With over 80 people attending, and with a lively questions, answers and discussion the webinar was a great success in sharing knowledge among the experts and allowing stakeholders in the industry get a glimpse on what LCA can do for the automotive sector.  If you missed it, you can still watch the presentations on our website, and of course you can also get in touch to find out more.

On behalf of the ALMA consortium I would like to express our thanks for the support and participation of the other EnlightEV cluster projects, REVOLUTION, LEVIS and Fatigue4Light. Finally also our thanks and recognition to the European Commission for the funding received through the H2020 innovation and research program that has made this and many more great projects possible.

In case you missed it, and are still interested, below you will find the recordings of the webinar and the presentations.