Society’s interest in social impacts of products, services and organizational behaviors is rapidly growing. While life cycle assessments to evaluate environmental stressors have generally been well established in many industries, approaches to evaluate social impacts such as Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) lack methodological consistency and standardization. The aim of this paper is to identify past developments and methodological barriers of S-LCA and to summarize how the automotive industry contributed to the advancement or application of this method. Therefore, a qualitative content analysis of 111 studies published between 2015 and 2020 is used to gather information on past scientific and political milestones, methodological barriers impeding S-LCA and the participation of the automotive sector. The review shows that a broad range of sectors such as the automotive industry contributed to the testing and advancement of S-LCA in the past but that S-LCA remains a young and immature method. Large-scale application is impeded by major barriers such as the variety of impact categories and sub-categories, the lacking integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), issues of linking LCA structures to social phenomena or the difficult tracking of social impact pathways. Further research on standardization possibilities, the connection to political social targets and the testing of methods is necessary to overcome current barriers and increase the applicability and interpretability results.

In various countries, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) represents one of the plastics with a very high recycling rate. Since currently there is no analytical method enabling direct distinction between recycled PET (rPET) and virgin PET (vPET), there are various attempts to differentiate these materials indirectly. One of these approaches claims that the recycling of PET leads to polymer chain degradation, which is reflected in changed thermal, mechanical and crystalline properties, and testing of these properties can therefore be used to distinguish rPET and vPET. However, there are many sources leading to changes in the molecular structure and consequently to the changes of the above-mentioned properties of the PET. The purpose of this study is to analyze the glass transition and melting temperature, degree of crystallinity as well as bending and impact properties of 20 different commercially available PET recyclates from 14 suppliers and evaluate the results with respect to the literature values for vPET. The main results of this study show that the range of vPET properties is so broad that all of the corresponding properties of the tested rPET lie within this range.

The bio-based plastic market is forecast to grow in the next years. With a growing market share and product range, the implementation of circular thinking is becoming more and more important also for bio-based plastics to enable a sound circular economy for these group of plastics. Therefore, it is important to assess the environmental performance for different end-of-life options of bio-based plastics from an early stage on. This review presents a comprehensive overview on the current status quo of different end-of-life options for bio-based plastics from an environmental perspective. Based on the status quo and the corresponding impact assessment results, the global plastic demand as well as the technical substitution potential of bio-based plastics, the environmental saving potential in case of the different end-of-life options was calculated. The review shows that there is a focus on polylactic acid (PLA) regarding end-of-life assessment, with studies covering all end-of-life options. The focus of the impact assessment has been set on global warming potential (GWP). With respect to GWP, the analysis of a future global potential of PLA showed, for mechanical recycling, the highest saving potential with 94.1 Mio. t CO₂-eq. per year in comparison to virgin material.

The plastic economy, despite offering unique properties in fulfilling the functions of products in different industrial sectors over decades, has so far been mainly linear, that is, “take‐make and dispose” with only a small fraction of plastics being recycled worldwide. With ever‐increasing circular economy initiatives and the urge to conserve resources and prevent plastic pollution from affecting ecosystems, more emphasis on the resource recovery of plastic products after its use has been made over the last few years. It is necessary for manufacturers to understand the value chain as early as the design phase while manufacturing and distributing plastic products across the world. The current study provides an overview of the status quo of plastic waste management and analyzes the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies of different End‐of‐Life (EoL) options for plastics. Based on the LCA studies, a preliminary, country‐specific Circular Footprint (CF) is calculated and Design for Recycling (DfR) strategies are identified. Results show that the environmental impacts of different EoL options differ significantly for different plastics. The CF highlights the lack of data regarding the composition and recovery of plastics in different countries thus showing the necessity to consider the whole lifecycle when quantifying the environmental impacts of plastics.

In this paper, we introduce a mesh-free numerical framework using the finite pointset method for the modeling and simulation of injection molding processes. When compared to well-established mesh-based methods, which have been widely applied for these applications, our approach avoids the need for extensive preprocessing and enables accurate treatment of free surfaces and other associated phenomena. To accurately model the polymer injections, we consider a detailed material model, with temperature dependent viscosity and density, while also considering shear thinning behavior with a strain rate dependent viscosity. Our numerical investigations show that injection molding-specific problems such as the modeling of viscous flows and the fountain flow effect can be successfully implemented using our presented framework. For a thorough validation of our proposed model, we compare the simulated flow behavior with injection molding experiments, which are also performed in this work. The experimental setup considers the injection of a polymer melt into a spiral mold. The flow behavior is investigated experimentally at varying melt injection and wall temperature, with different threshold pressures. Our numerical simulations show a good comparison with these experimental results, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We also introduce a correction mechanism to ensure energy conservation, which has often been challenging in mesh-free approaches. This is the first time that the flow behavior in a mesh-free injection molding method has been experimentally validated and successfully applied to the simulation of an actual industrial vehicle component.