Yes. What is the first thought when you hear electronics in the car? What do you think?
You can’t repair that easy anymore. And you have lots of problems with recycling because so many critical materials are in these electronics and so on.
Yeah, this is my next question. Yeah. What do you think? Are cars that include electronic components easier or harder to adapt to circular economy principles than regular car?
Oh, Much harder. Much harder. It’s a very mixed of different materials, very critical materials and lots of materials that are not that expensive. So they will probably not be recycled. Lots are lost in this way. And yeah.
What can the automotive industry do to promote circular economy?
The first thing is that they use recycled materials and we do recycling for in principle automotive parts and we can do it quite good already. But we need the people, the customers that buy the recycled materials. And that is mainly the problem because we have to competent to to the primary production. Primary production is very, very cheap because the people are not fairly paid. The environment is destroyed. So the primary production prices are not the correct prices. And when we have our secondary production prices and we of course normally more expensive and that makes it very difficult.
Do you have concerns about privacy and personal data stored by car electronics? When thinking about reusing of car electronics?
Yes, of course. Yeah. Everything was the start up protection, especially in Germany. We see it very critical. Yeah? Yeah. (Why?) Yeah, because they can follow up everything. What I do, right? If I kill someone, they will find out.
And electronics in general.
Uh, yeah. Also in the households. All these intelligent things, they are all quite dangerous, I would say.
are The general concerns about privacy in thinking about circular economy practices.
Yeah, but in the sense of free use, of course. For example, I mean cars you had as an example, but also mobile phones, laptops and so on. It’s for for experts. Even when you delete the information, they can regenerate it. So yeah.
Uh, does recycling and reusing mean different things to you?
Of course, yeah. Reuse is really reuse a product, and recycling means to break it down to the different materials and that it needs much more energy, much more chemicals and so on.
On a scale of 1 to 5, one means not at all concerned and five extremely concerned. How concerned are you about issues of environmental waste and pollution?
Five (Why?) Uh, yeah, because I’m very really an expert in that field and I follow up the numbers and how much we it is increasing, how much materials we extract every year, and that is only getting worse and worse. And I think it’s not enough done up to now to to yeah, get rid of that.
What, if any, actions do you take in your life to promote sustainability?
Yeah, I have my company, I have the institute. I’m teaching that we also from the company, we try to teach wherever we can in conferences we have workshops about I try to live vegan as far as possible. I try not to drive the car. I use reuse or remanufacture a lot of things. So yeah, I’ll try to do it the best way I can.
How much responsibility has each individual or does each individual have to make lifestyle and consumer choices that help protect the environment?
Yeah, everybody is very, very responsible and we have so many possibilities to to help here. We can consume in a responsible way. We can vote the right parties and we can do the right financial decisions.