Material efficiency through wear protection - The contribution of tribology for reducing CO2 emissions

In the future, humanity will be under great ecological pressure to efficiently use resources and reduce energy and resource consumption. Tribology is not a directly visible consequence of human activities and is divided into energy consumption due to friction losses and additional resource consumption through wear and failures of machine elements and products. Based on the material streams allocated to applications with tribosystems or those depending on tribosystems, the contribution of increased longevity to reduce CO2 emissions is refined. Depending from the absolute amount of material stream considered, its portions allocated to tribology and assuming doubling the service life result in average in savings of 1.06-3.70 gigatons in mass of resources per year or of embedded 1.68-6.77 gigatons CO(2)eq.per year.