GKN Automotive Examines Life Cycle Analyses in Automotive Applications

With the average car containing close to 30,000 parts, the automotive manufacturing sector has one of the most complex supply chains, creating challenges not limited to quality control, performance and cost. Sean Worrall, chief engineer of product sustainability, GKN Automotive, recently examined life cycle analyses in automotive applications.

Today, total life cycle impact – for both vehicles and components – is a prominent consideration for stakeholders and customers alike, with regulations such as the European Green Deal acting as critical drivers. This is asking new questions of designers and will influence the technologies we see in vehicles moving forward.

To this end, Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) are a powerful tool, enabling manufacturers to unearth the environmental impact of every variable of a product across its entire life cycle. Using these insights, manufacturers can identify opportunities to reduce the total emissions – both embedded and operational – associated with a product.

Worrall explores three cases of how LCAs can deliver tangible results in the drive for sustainable manufacturing:

Curbing embedded emissions
Adopting a recover, remanufacture, reuse approach
Curating a responsible supply chain

Curbing embedded emissions

Traditionally, initiatives to make the automotive industry more sustainable have focused on reducing in-use greenhouse gas emissions, such as optimizing fuel economy. This comes as no surprise when you consider that road transport is currently responsible for more than 15 percent of global energy-related emissions, with most of that occurring at the tailpipe. However, for net zero emissions to be achieved by 2050, electric vehicle (EV) sales will need to reach around 60 percent of total sales of light-duty vehicles.

This is an area that GKN Automotive can make a real difference. Our core offering of side shafts to global OEMs is powertrain-agnostic, and we have expanded our product portfolio to support EV production. To date, more than 2.5 million electrified vehicles have been produced with GKN Automotive’s eDrive systems, and since 2010, we have supplied components for over 15 million electric vehicles.

As the number of electric vehicles (EVs) on the roads continues to rise, embedded emissions in the manufacturing process will represent a much larger portion of lifetime emissions. It is here that manufacturers can make improvements to curb their embedded emissions.

For example, by upgrading energy-intensive production equipment, as well as heating and air conditioning systems, our team at GKN Automotive contributed to a reduction in direct (Scope 1 and 2) CO2 emissions by 30 percent in 2024. Further reductions towards our 2045 net-zero target are being achieved through process optimizations, such as leakage reduction during compressed air production, furnace standby temperature reduction, and new manufacturing shutdown procedures to reduce energy use and emissions.

Enabling the global transition goes hand in hand with achieving our own emissions reduction targets and by using Product Carbon Footprints (PCFs) and LCA analysis at the design stage of a product, optimizing design, weight and material choices, we can show a significant reduction in embedded emissions.

Adopting a recover, remanufacture, reuse approach

Manufacturers can also take a ‘recover, re-manufacture, and re-use' approach. By taking parts from end-of-service vehicles and re-manufacturing them for a second life, teams can achieve significant savings.

At GKN Automotive, we remanufacture 300,000 side shafts annually, resulting in a 63 percent reduction in embedded CO2 emissions compared to new products. This saves about 6.72 kg of CO2eq per part or over 2,000 tons yearly. Our plants also clean and recycle all the water used in the remanufacturing process, saving 40,000 liters per year.

The use of LCAs here can help identify ways to improve the ease of removal, replacement, and installation of components, shifting to modular units that are designed to be dismantled and reused, thereby reducing the lifetime embedded emissions.

Curating a responsible supply chain

Scope 3 emissions account for 95 percent of GKN Automotive’s total emissions. The majority of these emissions are generated by downstream Scope 3 in the in-use phase of a market that is still predominantly internal combustion driven. The extraction and processing of metals such as steel and aluminum dominate our upstream Scope 3 emissions from our supply chain. As the automotive industry moves away from fossil fuels, these proportions will shift from in-use to upstream and manufacturing.

We, therefore, treat Scope 3 emissions as a key systems engineering challenge to be optimized alongside traditional fundamentals, such as cost and performance. This requires a fundamental shift in engineering attitude – sustainability must be embedded in every objective, with the carbon impact considered from the outset. Here, developing product LCA can help to reveal the embedded emissions associated with every variable of a product. This unearths the cost and impact associated with sourcing resources globally.

Using these insights, companies can then identify opportunities to localize inputs to minimize transport costs, reduce emissions, and improve the resilience of their supply chains. In 2023, 67 percent of GKN Automotive’s global business was sourced locally, achieved by engaging with strategic suppliers to bring their manufacturing operations closer to our plants, thereby reducing transportation mileage and emissions.

Working closely with suppliers across their value chains also allows manufacturers to ensure that products and materials are responsibly sourced, whether already localized or not. To help with this, we work closely with our strategic suppliers to ask that they provide us with their sustainability roadmaps and targets, enabling greater transparency across our value chain.

Building out the capability to deploy LCAs for every product design is a significant challenge for manufacturers that requires a great commitment. This requires teams to use commercial data sets from across the supply chain and work with suppliers to create “primary data” of specific products and processes. A repeatable, standardized process must synthesize data from these various sources to develop LCAs reliably and at a scale that can be used to support strategic procurement and manufacturing decisions.

While posing its respective challenges to manufacturers, suppliers and customers alike, the drive for sustainability will help to deliver a better future while catalyzing cost reductions and improved performance. For innovators like GKN Automotive, it’s a differentiating factor alongside cost, quality, and performance, and one that pushes the automotive industry to reduce waste, control energy usage and better understand production throughout all tiers of the supply chain.

The bottom line is that challenges associated with prioritizing sustainability within the supply chain are not only necessary but something that must be faced head-on to guarantee a sustainable future for transport and mobility.

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