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There are several reasons why end-of-life
is an important part of life cycle engineering
and sustainability.
First, we want to move from a linear economy
to a circular economy.
That means we want to close material flows,
we want to use materials and products again.
And one motivation is there's a huge potential in using
in secondary materials because secondary materials very often
have a much lower environmental impact compared
to primary materials.
So that means the embodied energy in secondary materials
is much lower than the embodied energy in primary materials.
Another motivation is, of course, we
want to have a controlled circular economy.
So we want to control material flows and we want not
that our materials and products end up in landfills,
or even worse end up in countries with lower
environmental standards and cause an environmental impact
or are harmful to the local environment.
And of course, another motivation
is proper end-of-life systems would
allow us to separate potential hazardous materials
from valuable materials so we don't mix hazardous materials
with valuable materials.
And of course end-of-life is also a business opportunity.
It can create jobs.
For example, we can come up with getting spare parts out
of used products and use them to repair existing
products in the market.
Or we can come up with a second life of products
and then the product will be much, much cheaper
than the product at the first stage.
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Unfortunately, there are a lot of challenges and barriers,
or at least there are some challenges and barriers
we have to overcome.
So one challenge is if you look
into the development of products over the years
then what we see is that more and more we
use different materials and we mix
them to come up with products.
For example, if you look into a very old phone
and you compare it to your smartphone,
then you would see that the number of materials we
are using is totally different.
And using materials also in a very small amount
beside having a large number makes it
in very different in end-of-life to separate
these different materials, or in some cases even really
impossible to separate them again.
So this is one of the challenges we have to look at.
Another challenge is that the place where products
are designed, produced, and used could
be quite different to a place where the product is recycled,
or at least where the product is produced
and the place where the product is used and recycled
is very different.
And very often we use the products for many years.
So there's also a large time span
between the creation of a product in use
and the end-of-life.
So why is this a challenge?
This is a challenge because there's an information gap.
So very often people or companies
in the business of end-of-life, they
have no or very limited information about a product.
What kind of materials are used in the product?
Are there hazardous materials inside the product
or valuable materials in the product?
So what are the best technologies
to recycle that material?
This information is very often not available today
in the end-of-life stage.
So and of course the separation of the different materials
may require suitable separation technologies.
And very often this kind of separation today requires
manual labour for disassembly and that means we have high
labour cost.
Or we use technologies, for example,
shredding technologies.
But often if we use those technologies then
we are not able to have an output which
is the same quality as a primary material.
So there are still different materials are mixed
and we typically call this downsizing.
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So now what are the solutions we can think of?
We can address this challenge from two sides.
The first one would be to come from the end-of-pipe.
So that means we develop smarter or better disassembly
technologies.
For example, we could think about robots
that help us to make an automated assembly or we can
use smart algorithms so that the system can even
learn how to better dismantle and separate products.
Or we can come up with new separation technologies,
new shredding technologies, that allow
us to better separate different kinds of materials
from each other.
But of course there is an other side
and that is the beginning-of-pipe.
So that means we start already when we design the product
and we try to design the product in such a way
that it's easy to disassemble and recycle.
To do so this requires method and tools
to support decision making during the design phase
and to support the design for disassembly and recycling.
And another solution or another part
of this bridging the end-of-pipe and the beginning-of-pipe
would be that we also bridge the information gap I
talked about in the beginning.
So that means we have to think about how
we can bring the information from when the product is
designed, and generated and produced
towards the end-of-life where the company or the people doing
the disassembly and recycling need information
about the product so that they can do informed decisions.
And here we also can come up with maybe the product
has a small storage and takes some
of the information about what kind of materials
are used inside the product or maybe we
think of a platform, a web-based platform, where
this information can be shared.
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