Sustainability and CO2 footprint reduction are major topics throughout industry and society, and they aren’t going away. Younger generations, urgently active on these matters, widely see older generations as having made a horrendous mess which stands to render Earth uninhabitable, and so everyone must do their part to ameliorate the problem.
In the automotive sector, action has started with BEV development and application of sustainable materials. Across wide swathes of consumer industry, new rules are coming—like the Right to Repair legislation from the European Commission, aimed at stopping corporations making their products technically or legally unfixable by the end user or their choice of repairer.
Everyone is part of the problem, so everyone must be part of the solution—including those of us here in the vehicle lighting community. We must embrace a change of mindset. When we think about CO2 footprint, we think about recycled materials and reduced power consumption as the main contributors. Those factors are relatively easy to tackle; tier-2s are identified, solutions are known, this is manageable by R&D teams at the automaker level, and OEMs can put pressure on their suppliers.
But zooming out for a broader look, the circular economy is complex and difficult to set up. It stands to disrupt the entire automotive value chain, over the complete life cycle of every product, and requires a complex ecosystem which is developing, but does not yet fully exist—and this has to happen fast.
There are positive signs that things are moving in the right direction. In this week’s DVNewsletter, for example, you’ll find coverage of an interesting initiative from GM with Llink to rebuild collision-damaged headlamps. And Valeo participated in the Remade Circular Economy Tech Summit last month in Washington, DC, to talk about headlamps in the circular economy. Founded in 2017, the Remade Institute is a public-private partnership established and funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies. Remade is the only national institute focused entirely on developing innovative technologies to accelerate the U.S transition to a circular economy.
I have decided to summarize my understanding of Valeo’s presentation, including additional information I collected during our DVN Munich sustainability session; ISAL 2023, and the recent DVN Detroit event (with presentation from L1 earth, Volvo Cars, and Covestro).
Sincerely yours,