Manufacturing materials count in vehicles' impact on planet

It's good for the auto industry, good for consumers and good for our planet to see increasing awareness throughout the automotive supply chain, where a true accounting of vehicles' impact on the environment includes the total life cycle, including materials.

For too long, the regulator-driven focus on fuel economy has encouraged an "out of sight, out of mind" dismissal of major environmental costs that must be factored into any serious discussion on sustainability.

In the steel industry, the demands from our automotive customers for stronger steels and lighter components have driven historic innovations in advanced high-strength and ultra-high-strength automotive steels, including ongoing development and commercialization of stronger and more formable third-generation advanced high-strength steels.

Consumers benefit from these advances with lighter, safer and more cost-efficient vehicles. However, automakers' need to meet government regulations have moved faster than our ability to take a comprehensive review of all the environmental costs and benefits associated with the vehicles we design, build, operate and eventually recycle.

In the real world, auto companies design their light vehicles to comply with these regulations. Corporate average fuel economy standards' focus on fuel efficiency has pushed automakers into increasingly incremental engineering decisions to wring fractions of grams from parts in the name of lightweighting.

Fuel efficiency is a good idea for our industry and our planet. However, many of the engineering decisions made to improve fuel efficiency are damaging. This is most obvious in the materials that make up today's cars and light trucks.

Automakers and suppliers have experimented with a variety of materials in their pursuit of weight savings. Aluminum is a perfect example of incurring environmental debts elsewhere in the life cycle for potentially saving weight in the next model year. Smelting 1 ton of aluminum requires more electricity than the average American home uses in an entire year. These factors need to play a role in any comprehensive life cycle accounting but don't show up when the only consideration is weight.

If we're going to talk about the life cycle impacts of automotive materials, then it only makes sense to do so for steel. The North American steel industry has made extensive sustainability strides in recent years. Today's steel has lower energy use and CO2 emissions per ton than aluminum and magnesium, among other automotive materials.

Two recent peer-reviewed studies from the Steel Recycling Institute clearly illustrate that advanced high-strength steel-intensive vehicles had lower or equivalent life cycle emissions than aluminum-intensive vehicles for every class of vehicles tested — sedans, pickups, crossovers, SUVs and alternative powertrain vehicles. And that the use of advanced high-strength steel for large-scale automotive fleet lightweighting results in an immediate and sustained decrease in greenhouse gas emissions associated with production, use and recycling of automobiles, whereas the use of aluminum for lightweighting the same vehicles results in an increase in overall greenhouse gas emissions lasting for several decades.

This is the kind of comprehensive environmental accounting that will drive true sustainability for the automotive industry in the future.

We are encouraged to see the increasing awareness throughout the industry that it's time for automotive environmental accounting to require life cycle considerations and not just tailpipe benefits.