The project "Climate neutral Business in Ostwestfalen-Lippe (Climate bOWL)" started on 01.04.2022. Over a period of three years, it will be funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Innovation, Digitalisation and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (MWIDE NRW) with 1.86 million euros as part of the “Spitzencluster it's OWL”. The total project volume is 3.16 million euros.
A rising awareness of sustainability among the population and rising energy costs are leading companies to increasingly focus on the goal of climate neutrality. A central step in this process is to improve the material and energy efficiency. This is where the joint project Climate bOWL comes in, in which scientists from the Chair of Lightweight Automotive Construction (LiA) work together with the Software Innovation Campus (SICP) of Paderborn University and Bielefeld University and the companies NTT Data Business Solutions AG, GEA Westfalia Separator Group GmbH, Miele & Cie. KG and Phoenix Contact Smart Business GmbH on an interdisciplinary basis. The aim of the project is to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions in order to minimise negative environmental impacts and save costs. The entire product life cycle is taken into account, from production and product use to recycling.
The sequence of mitigation measures towards climate neutrality is minimisation, substitution and compensation. Consequently, a holistic approach is needed to aggregate and assess greenhouse gas emissions and to identify and prioritise reduction measures along the entire value chain. The "Climate bOWL" project therefore focuses on two aspects: The first sub-goal for creating transparency and benchmarking is the development of a product-specific carbon footprint tracking system. This is intended to provide information about emissions along the product life cycle and show target values for product design. The second sub-goal is the development and application of an intelligent assistance system that automatically allocates greenhouse gas emissions to their sources on the basis of energy and material flow data, derives efficiency potentials and proposes practical optimisation measures. This is intended to support companies in minimising their greenhouse gas emissions all the way to climate neutrality. Among other things, LiA will contribute its expertise in the areas of developing sustainable production processes and product designs. As an important basis for this, life cycle assessments (LCA) of products and their value chains will be calculated and analysed in order to derive optimisation potentials with the goal of climate neutrality.
