Our current way of doing business results in an overexploitation of nature and earth’s raw material reserves. So many raw materials are currently being used for fuel, technology and industry that they will not be enough in the long term. Last year, for example, around 1.75 Earths would have been necessary to cover global resource consumption.
This should change with a fundamental approach: researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) want to establish the circular economy process more strongly. Used products should be reconditioned so that they leave the factory as new products. The photo shows a practical example of this: a technology for remanufacturing metal components. It is part of a project to create the circular factory of the future.
To implement this project, the project is divided into three areas. How the circular factory is planned and controlled is regulated by a separate department, while measurement strategies for recording, modeling and evaluating the product condition are managed by another group. A final area takes care of a production system that should always adapt to new product instances.
“Our basic research forms the basis for the change in the economy from linear to circular models and the enablement of a circular factory for the eternal, innovative product,” explains Gisela Lanza, head of the wbk Institute for Production Technology at KIT. In the future, these machines will be used on a large scale, even on an industrial scale.