Sustainable Design of Automotive Components Through Jute Fiber Composites: an Integrated Approach

Nowadays, the world faces unprecedented challenges in the social, environmental and economic dimensions. Industrial design has an important contribution shown in all of these dimensions with solutions that provide positive answers. In particular, due to its relevance, the automotive industry confronts a moment of crisis, and based on the ecodesign of products it has been transforming the challenges in opportunities. In the broad sense of Bertalanffy s (1969) theory, earth and its inhabitants form a single live body in constant evolutive dynamics, in which the human activity influences and is influenced by the environment. Since natural and artificial systems work in holistic relationship, synergy between and self-organization of living organisms maintains the global equilibrium of the systems. According to Uexkull (1982) there are different and tangible environments which depend on the environmental perception of each species. Thus, the activity and influence of each species in nature are directly related to biological scope. In this sense, the human being developed the ability to create goods and tools to ensure its survival in a hostile and unknown world, beginning a new age based, exclusively, on material consumption from local environment, in which societies perceived and recognized themselves as an integral part of nature. Thus, the consumption rate was consistent with the capacity of the natural systems to absorb waste and generate new natural resources. It did not imply large changes in the environment since it was constrained by biological limits of societies to reach so far lands. After the industrial revolution, landmark of human domain over nature, this equilibrium between natural and human (artificial) systems was changed drastically. The industrialized society expanded its natural limits, accelerating the consumption of natural resources hence the environmental impacts, unprecedented in human history. The human activity has reached a scale that resulted in severe perturbation of the nature (Schumacher, 1989) and as a consequence environmental issues constitute a central theme in international policy debates since the 60s. In this context, a group of researchers founded the Rome Club, which pointed out the limits for population and economic growth based on the finiteness of natural resources, through the well-known report “The limits to growth” (Meadows et al., 1972). From that moment, policy changes were perceived in some countries and sustainability became a central point among policy makers, managers, environmental