IREES colloquium: Transforming automotive manufacturing towards „zero environmental impact” and beyond for sustainable  development – results and experiences from an applied industrial research project|Malte Gebler

Speaker |dr.ing. Malte Gebler, (Publication:  “A global sustainability perspective on 3D printing  technologies.”  Energy Policy).

Title | Transforming automotive manufacturing towards „zero environmental impact” and beyond for sustainable  development – results and experiences from an applied industrial research project

Summary | The current exceeding of six out of nine planetary boundaries imposes the need for societal transformations to return back to the “safe operating space” for human mankind Focusing on industrial manufacturing, current production and consumption patterns do not contribute to a sustainable development – while a transition towards sustainable manufacturing practices is urgently needed.

During my Phd-research at Technical University Braunschweig (Germany) and as an environmental engineer at the department of Group Production at Volkswagen, I have studied industrial manufacturing from an environmental perspective and developed concepts to describe industrial transformations towards “zero impact” of factories and “positive impact” in a greater systemic relationship. I have based my research on data from a factory development project in Wrzesnia (Poland), where I have worked as a project engineer in 2014-2017. In my presentation I will outline how current research in the field of sustainable manufacturing can stimulate the necessary transformations in industry and why impact-based assessment tools are necessary to support decision-making and stakeholder communication.