DEVELOPMENT OF A SUSTAINABILITY SCORING METHOD FOR MANUFACTURED AUTOMOTIVE PRODUCTS:A CASE STUDY OF AUTO BODY PANELS

摘要

Undoubtedly, motor vehicles are among the most important, yet difficult to maintain and environmentally damaging consumer products on the planet. In light of the ongoing climate change discussion, sustainability considerations are currently taking a more prominent role in material selection decisions for automotive applications. This paper presents a new sustainability evaluation methodology for computing the potential benefits of using lighter materials, such as aluminum, in auto body applications, through a "Sustainability Scoring" method. When evaluating the "level of sustainability" built in any product, several major contributing factors (sustainability elements) need to be taken into consideration. Six major integral sustainability elements considered in this work are: product's environmental impact, societal impact, functionality, resource utilization and economy, manufacturability and recyclability/remanufacturability. Each of these elements has corresponding sub-elements and influencing factors which are categorized as having varying levels of importance to the product. The paper compares the use of aluminum with the traditional use of steel alloys in a given automotive application using the newly developed comprehensive sustainability scoring method by considering all sustainability elements and sub-elements associated with a vehicle over its total life-cycle.