As early as 2010, the title of the Lightweight Engineering Symposium was “Sustainability as an innovation driver in efficient lightweight system construction”. The vision formulated at that time already described our world in striking detail. Lightweight engineering in general and the Dresden Lightweight Engineering Symposium in particular have long played a key role as drivers of ideas and innovation for resource-efficient, competitive and socially balanced economic activity.

Today, however, the way we live and consume is itself under debate. Often, the honest efforts to protect the climate are mixed up with the urgent demand for a socially just, globalised world. What is needed are the reliable guard rails called for in 2010, which are still developing too slowly.

What does the emission of a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere cost? A question that has only recently become part of the broad social debate. Every product, every process, every action needs a price that also reflects its ecological impact. Only in this way will we be able to use the highly dynamic forces of the market economy as catalysts for environmental protection and resource conservation. Savings will develop into a profitable business model worldwide. In this way, we can use the limited resources available to us to create a livable, socially just world for future generations.

More than ever, therefore, we need new, holistic technical-technological solutions that enable us to make a proactive contribution to reconciling growth and progress with environmental protection and resource conservation. There is a need for comprehensive approaches for the development, manufacture, use and recycling of technical structures with the aim of not exerting a lasting influence on our environment or the remaining global resource potential, or on our globalized society. We call this “resource-neutral lightweight design”. From today’s perspective, this approach is still an ideal concept that can only be partially realized with the technologies of our time, but which must determine our actions to a large extent.

The Lightweight Engineering Symposium 2020 is entirely dedicated to this idea. Innovative examples of successful “cradle-to-cradle” approaches will be presented, but also open flows of recyclable materials will be shown and approaches to their sensible recycling will be discussed. Current developments in life cycle assessment as well as their embedding in a continuous CAD-CAM workflow will be presented in an exemplary manner and will be visualized in the context of concrete product developments. “Adding value by saving resources” – this is the basic tenor of all the technical and overview presentations, which are intended to give you new ideas and concrete approaches for your own work on resource-neutral lightweight design.

The 24th International Dresden Lightweight Engineering Symposium 2020 is particularly suitable for this purpose as it is a firmly established discussion platform for the transfer of knowledge and experience between academia, industry and politics and serves as a forum for the cross-material and cross-product, trend-setting brainstorming of ideas under the aspects of resource-neutral lightweight design.

Board of the Institute of Lightweight Engineering and Polymer Technology
from left: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Maik Gude, Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Hubert Jäger, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Niels Modler, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Prof. E. h. Dr. h.c. Werner Hufenbach