Few sectors carry as much weight as transportation. It connects people, moves goods, and underpins trade across the continent. It also accounts for around a quarter of the EU's greenhouse gas emissions, and unlike most sectors, those emissions are still rising. The instinct, for a century, has been to make more — more vehicles, more volume, more scale. Levent Kirkayak starts somewhere else.
“Mass production and high-volume targets are not valid anymore. Why? Because we are facing different challenges nowadays, such as global warming, and our resources are limited.”
The wrong target
For most of the industrial era, success in transport manufacturing meant one thing: output. Build more, build faster, drive the unit cost down. The logic was coherent in a world that treated raw materials as effectively unlimited and emissions as someone else's problem. Neither assumption holds anymore.
Under the European Green Deal and the Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy, Europe has committed to cutting transport-related emissions by 90% relative to 1990 levels, on the path to becoming the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Those targets cannot be met by producing the same vehicles more efficiently. They require rethinking what the vehicles are made of in the first place.
"We have to change our mindset and redesign new materials and new manufacturing techniques, rethinking vehicles from the automotive industry to the aerospace industry to build a lighter, greener and more sustainable environment."
That shift — from volume to value, from more to better — is where Levent Kirkayak argues Europe's real advantage lies.
Where materials meet meaning
A lighter vehicle burns less fuel, emits less, and performs better. That basic physics is why structural composites matter: they let engineers build components that are stronger and lighter at the same time, across automotive, aerospace, and beyond. The challenge has never been whether composites work. It has been making them recyclable, affordable, and producible at industrial scale.
"At LIST, we work where materials meet meaning. We develop the next generation of structural composite materials that make these objectives real: lighter, stronger and more sustainable."
At LIST, the Structural Composites Research Unit treats sustainability not as a finishing touch but as a design constraint from the first line of the model. The aim is materials that cut fuel consumption and emissions across entire value chains — not in a laboratory demonstrator, but in vehicles that can actually be manufactured and, at the end of their life, recovered.
Designing supply chains from the inside out
Getting there means changing how materials are conceived, not only what they are made of. The unit's work brings together AI-driven modelling, digital design, and advanced manufacturing to engineer composite structures that hold several demands in balance at once: high mechanical performance, recyclability, and the ability to scale industrially.
"We rethink supply chains from the inside out, designing materials that are not only efficient, but responsible."
It is a deliberate inversion of the old sequence. Rather than design a part and then ask how to dispose of it, the team designs for the whole lifecycle from the outset — what the material does, how it is made, and what becomes of it afterward. Responsibility, in that framing, is engineered in, not bolted on.
Innovation that is fairer, not just faster
Levent Kirkayak returns, in the end, to a question that runs deeper than fuel economy: who is innovation actually for?
"This is a future where innovation is not just faster, but fairer. Where advanced materials strengthen both industry and society. And where technology serves people while respecting planetary boundaries."
A transport system rebuilt around lighter, cleaner, recyclable materials is not only better for the climate. It strengthens the industries that adopt it and the societies that depend on them. The harder work is making sure the technology stays in service of people — that performance and sustainability advance together, within the limits the planet sets.
Can mobility get lighter without getting weaker? Can industry decarbonise without slowing down? Can the materials we build with carry both progress and responsibility at once? For Levent Kirkayak, that is the only competition worth entering.
Join the 2026 edition of the Sustainable Composite Materials & Manufacturing Industry Day to continue this conversation.