Closed loop recycling of automotive plastics - proposals for business sustainability

Abstract

Plastics have become one of the most important materials in the automotive sector due to their outstanding mechanical performances and high potential in weight reduction and thus enhancing the OEMs to reduce the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of the vehicles. The European Unions regulations for limiting CO2 emissions is one of the biggest challenges for the European automotive industry. On the other hand the European Commissions, End-of-life Vehicle (ELV) Directive requires higher recovery and recycling rates and reduce the amount of automotive shredder residue ending up as landfills. The increasing weight percentage of plastics in present new vehicles, will require high share of plastics recycling once they attain their end-of-life, to achieve the recycling targets. OEMs already started setting commitments to reduce waste and incorporate, for example up to 25% of recycled plastics materials in the new cars by 2025, which is a big challenge.Polypropylene (PP), the largely used thermoplastics in the automotive has enormous po-tential as a new supply source for the automotive industry in attaining the regulatory re-quirements for end-of-life vehicles. But the current recycling process is very challenging in terms of costs, technology requirements and quality. The processing steps of automotive (AU) plastics recycling includes: dismantling, sorting & separating, shredding, up-scaling by compounding. The volume of polypropylene recovered from the ELVs are currently not high enough, which makes the recycled material cost unattractive for the customers.This research focuses on analysing the automotive plastics closed loop recycling industry structure, the challenges and threats involved in the automotive plastics recycling process and finally to propose solutions to increase the plastics recycling volume, quality and their usage in the automotive sector, concentrating on the European market. The outcome of the study reveals that besides the ELV management, front loading of design for recycling during the plastics part development phase is crucial. This can avoid multi-material part design and hence ease the dismantling, sorting of materials from ELVs and additionally reduce the loss of plastic materials during ELV recycling process. The PP bumpers case study demonstrate that the standardisation of material specifications for automotive applications has great potential to increase the volume of quality feedstock for recycling.