We were happy and proud to be invited by the OEM advisory board to kick-off the Automotive Circle conference on sustainability in product and production engineering. Together with participants from automotive OEMs and suppliers, we intensively discussed the current challenges and solutions for implementing circular product development.

Selected insights from the conference:

• Major challenges are designing lucrative business models for the circular economy, securing enough scrap for the growing demand of secondary raw material, and defining the right set of KPIs to steer circular product development.
• The automotive industry urgently needs norms and standards for the circular economy in order to pull together in one direction.
• Professionalizing and automating the recycling process is just the beginning; in the future, it will be even more important to address the more effective r-strategies such as rethink, reduce or reuse.
• The circular economy has come to stay.