Virgin polypropylene (PP) resin (left) comes in uniform pellets. Grinding plastic products down for recycling creates irregular shaped and sized pieces (right). Virgin pellets are combined with the regrind to be molded into new products. (Source: Schaefer Systems International)
This case study bears further analysis. Do the touted eco-benefits of the hybrid and electrical vehicles realized while they are in use outweigh the almost certain obsolescence of the entire vehicle because of the cost of replacement batteries?
Depending on overall quality of the design, engineering and manufacturing, a regular car's expected lifetime is somewhat open-ended as Warren pointed out. If the cost of the replacement batteries for a hybrid/electric vehicle eclipse the market value of the rest of the car, it seems like the expected lifetime of these cars is tied directly to the battery and is close-ended.
If third party aftermarket parties don't figure out a cost-effective solution to this puzzle, at least DfD will make parting out the car easier...
Good point...on the cost of ownership side, a friend is in auto financing and leasing. She said they are preparing for a flood of 1st generation hybrids that will have low residual values. The earliest ones are nearing end of life on batteries. The replacement cost will exceed the value of the car, which will boil down to the value when they are parted-out.
Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully as you integrate DfD in your design process, you'll find that assembly and serviceability of your products are both positively impacted as well.
Thanks for the 8-Step DfD guidelines. In addition to designing for assembly, I need to keep these tips displayed in front of me to prompt me to consider design for disassembly also.
What will be the very most interesting is to see how the aftermarket plays out in 5the EV battery area. I can easily see a possiblity that the battery packs will have an electronic serial number and manufacturers code and that the vehicle could be easily set up to not run without an OEM battery. That would assure a captive market for replacement battery packs, no matter how much they cost. So it would be quite prudent for a law preventing that sort of thing to be put in place prior to the problem becoming a big issue. Already we have computers and cell phones that won't function with other than OEM batteries, which happen to cost a lot more. How vwery convenient.
So purchasing a used EV will be an interesting excersize, possibly in frustration. That is my guess.
I'm not sure that the automotive industry itself was ahead of the curve. Excluding the used car market which for the purposes of design for disassembly can be viewed as an extension of the primary life of the product (same product use, different owner), it was parties outside of the Big Three that saw the opportunity and value of the car corpses. That vision took the form of reselling the used components, sub-assemblies or scrap metal and made that re-use/recycle stream a reality. Having worked in product engineering for GM for 5 years, I know that product "afterlife" was rarely given any consideration even when it was cost-neutral to do so.
The auto industry has gotten better in recent years, but that improvement hasn't really originated within the automotive industry - it has mostly been driven by European governmental policy which emphasizes corporate responsibility for product afterlife.
If I had to pick one point in time that seemed to have catalyzed the current trend of design for disassembly, I'd probably pick the investigative reports and documentation of the dumping of PCs and electronic peripherals in Third World countries and the major environmental poisoning resulting from it. For some reason, those stories had legs in both the media and around the "water coolers".
Good point, Rob. For some reason, the auto industry has yet to give much thought to the recyclability of lithium-ion EV batteries. The best guess I've heard is that we know it's about 80% recyclable. Beyond that, there's not much agreement on what to do with it.
Good point, Rob. With a standard ICE car, you know what to do when it gets old. You can replace the engine and transmission with a new or rebuilt one. You can put in a new gas tank. Upgrade the radio. Rework the suspension. You can add decades of life to a standard car. But what do you do with an old hybrid? We don't know, yet. But it ain't that easy or straightforward, I bet.
The automotive industry has long been head of the curve on the afterlife of its products. Even after a vehicle has been passed from owner to owner, the system of handling scrap cars is well developed. That is until electrical vehicles. The value of a used EV -- even a hybrid -- may be compromised by the cost of a replacement battery. Car buyers could long depend on the resale value of their existing car as they evaluated the worth of a vehicle. This is not clear with EVs and hybrids. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over coming years.
Government regulations, coupled with growing consumer sensitivity about data and identity theft, require that data storage organizations demonstrate proper protection and due diligence in protecting sensitive information stored inside datacenter enclosures.
When a crane doesn't have a monitoring system, crane owners schedule service every six months and simply scrap the parts they replace, even if a part has had little use and doesn't need replacing. This can cost thousands.
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