Studying Stakeholders in the Circular Economy of Automotive Aluminum Extrusion Processes
Objectives:
Identify and characterize the technical process stages across the automotive aluminum extrusion (AAE) lifecycle, along with the stakeholders involved at each stage and their relevant roles, responsibilities, and needs.
Model interactions between processes and stakeholders using integrated process maps and bipartite network representations to explicitly capture technical dependencies and social linkages.
Evaluate how circularity interventions propagate through the AAE system, using network robustness metrics to assess the system’s preparedness for unexpected disruptions or failures.
Define equity in the context of automotive aluminum recycling and manufacturing, and develop equity-oriented metrics to quantify how impacts, burdens, and benefits of interventions are distributed across stakeholders.
Provide a systems-level framework that enables designers and decision-makers to anticipate trade-offs across environmental, economic, and social dimensions when implementing circularity interventions.
Main Impact:
Provides a system-level representation of the AAE lifecycle that explicitly connects manufacturing processes with the stakeholders responsible for their execution and coordination.
Enables early identification of process stages and stakeholder roles that are critical to system stability when circularity-related changes are introduced.
Supports evaluation of how recycling and circularity interventions propagate through the manufacturing system, revealing potential failure points and coordination bottlenecks before implementation.
Offers a structured approach for assessing system robustness under unexpected disruptions arising from process changes, supply variability, or policy-driven shifts.
Provides decision-makers with a systems-level tool to select circularity interventions that balance environmental performance with robustness, fairness, and long-term operability.
Lead EMBERlab Researcher: Abdalla Elbassiouny (past project members: Ella Lunseth)
Collaborator: Dan Cooper
Project Partners: Ford Motor Company, Hydro, PADNOS, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Funding: U.S. Department of Energy
