Project impacts

The CarE-Service impacts and benefits were carefully investigated and quantified. In particular, It is expected that CarE-Service will have impacts on diverse European Industries and Sectors, as the following:

Car sharing

The CarE-Service solutions offers significant economic opportunities for the market of E&HEVs car sharing services: it will lower the TCO of vehicles guaranteeing performances. Besides economic impact, a considerable social impact will be generated. Apart from the social opportunities arising from higher mobility possibilities, citizens will improve their quality of life, by experiencing lower traffic congestion in urban areas, risk of accidents, no parking troubles, and will have more free time available. These benefits will apply to the 14 million European car sharing members that are estimated in 2025.

Automotive

CarE-service solutions will directly contribute to the automotive e-mobility industry by developing a model where the car manufacturer sells the fleet of EVs to a linked car-sharing service provider, under a post-use contract agreement. The new use model will bring an additional demand for electric cars, estimated at 160 vehicles by 2020 and at 31690 vehicles by 2025.
In addition, CarE-service will increase the added value of the EU automotive sector creating new workplaces.

Renewable energy

CarE-service will contribute to the renewable energy industry by providing low cost remanufactured certified batteries re-using automotive modules. These low cost second-life batteries could help integrate variable renewable energywhen the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow, thus improving the efficiency of renewable energy systems, and boosting their market penetration in private building, offices and homes, in addition to large scale installations. Moreover, CarE-service will increase the added value of the EU renewable energy sector creating new workplaces.

Plastic Production and Convertion

CarE-Service will contribute to the plastic conversion industry by providing high-quality and certified secondary raw materials from dismantled techno-polymer made parts. After having identified and disassembled homogeneous plastics parts, they will be shredded, extruded and re-granulated to obtain high quality and pure secondary material for new products. This will shorten the end-of-life value-chain of post-use high-value plastics parts. Due to the high quality of the recovered materials, the price of products embedding these materials will remain unchanged. Therefore, the cost reduction will directly increase the added-value for the plastics industry.

In addition, CarE-Service will have impacts on Society and the Environment:

Resource efficient transport system

The European Commission recently adopted a roadmap, “Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system”, of 40 concrete initiatives for the next decade to build a competitive transport system that will increase mobility, remove major barriers in key areas and fuel growth and employment. The ambitious targets settled may not be concretely reached without a stable transition towards new consumption patterns in e-mobility sector that can boost the reduction of TCO for E&HEVs. CarE-Service will contribute by creating sustainable local eco-systems targeted to the maximization of E&HEVs use.

Nox, PM2.5 and Co2 emissions

In addition to greenhouse emission, other emissions of traditional vehicles are particularly dangerous in cities. In many metropolitan areas, concerns over air quality have grown, in particular, the health impacts of particulate and NOX emissions, especially pollutants such as PM2.5. The diffusion of E&HEVs could reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 60 percent in 2030 in specific urban areas. By promoting the penetration of e-mobility and concretely contributing to substitute about 32,000 ICEVs with EVs by 2025 in urban areas, CarE-Service will contribute to target the near-zero emission goal.

Charging infrastructure

Having the right charging infrastructure available could have a reinforcing effect on the uptake of EVs, and vice versa. The locations and types of charging infrastructure would clearly be different for private EVs versus CarE-Service car-sharing services. The latter would offer the possibility to concentrate charging stations in specific density areas of the service, thus leading to higher utilization of the infrastructure, favouring fast-charging methods. This would enable, lower investment risk, higher service level, and lower costs of installation with respect to the current distributed system.

Social impacts on workers

CarE-Service will monitor the impact of the developed solutions on day-by-day work of operators at industrial level, developing training courses for industrial users on the CarE-Service solutions and workshops. These specific training courses will increase the acceptance of the developed SMMs by workers and improve their ability to correctly operate the process, also being aware of the safety measures and guidelines. In addition, the product re-design guidelines developed in CarE-Service will contribute to increase the skills of the European manufacturing workforce and to ultimately boost the creation of new knowledge-intensive jobs in circular economy Europe.

Health and safety

The handling of Li-Ion batteries is extremely dangerous if the product is treated improperly, due to the risk of combustion. Safety is therefore a severe challenge while handling Li-Ion batteries that is particularly critical for post-use products. CarE-Service will develop specific procedures and safety guidelines to process EV Li-Ion batteries aiming at reducing the risk and the magnitude of potential accidents that could harm lives and environment. Moreover, CarE-Service will strongly contribute to the citizens’ healthy reducing plastics materials being disposed to landfills by recycling high performance plastics that could be profitably re-used in a circular economy.

Climate change and renewable energy

E-mobility can benefit from the renewable energy sector by decreasing the GHG emission linked to the battery charging process. Compared to combustion engine vehicles, GHG emissions could decrease by 80% if electric vehicles use renewable electricity. Inversely, renewable energies can become more attractive because of low-cost stationary storage systems by second life Li-Ion batteries. This could accelerate EVs uptake by lowering power prices and resolving specific grid issues that currently inhibit electric vehicles. CarE-Service will contribute to these double-sided effects by increasing the use of e-mobility solutions and providing efficient and safe technologies for re-use batteries.

Urban traffic and congestion

The urban traffic and congestion is a big matter for daily quality life and it is estimated to costs more than 1 percent of GDP globally. In addition, it is foreseen that by 2030, 60% the world’s population. As a consequence, in developing dense metropolitan demand for mobility may nearly double, reducing at the same time the attractiveness of private car ownership. CarE-Service will demonstrate concrete solutions to support this transition, by maximizing the utilization of shared e-vehicles during their life-cycle, reducing simultaneous use of multiple vehicles, and by designing integrated transport solutions grounding on e-mobility in urban areas.

Lastly, CarE-Service will have impacts on:

Standardization

Legislation

While designing and providing new solutions, the CarE-Service will deal with the Regional and European regulatory frameworks for different aspects: safety, transport, storage and environmental implications towards second-use applications, and recycling. Even if there is a general framework for the re-use, remanufacturing and recycling of automotive parts (including E&HEVs components), in some cases the directives do not include all waste streams, are not precise neither aligned with the latest developments of Circular Economy concepts.

CarE-Service will provide specific suggestions for completing and adapting the legislation and standardization framework with the clear indication of potential benefits associated to proposed modifications, according to the sustainable business practices that will be developed.