REMOTIVE - Complementary use of mechanical, physical and chemical technologies to develop effective and sustainable recycling concepts for plastic-based automotive components

Car handles, boot covers and centre consoles: many vehicle parts are made of plastic. This has many advantages over metal - among other things, plastic is significantly lighter, which has a positive effect on the fuel and energy consumption of cars. However, the disposal or recycling of plastics is much more difficult, not least because the individual vehicle parts are made up of different plastic components.

There are three main processes for recycling plastics: chemical, solvent-based and mechanical. REMOTIVE is now carrying out a comparison of all three recycling options on automotive components for the first time in order to compare their efficiency and effectiveness, environmental balance and costs, among other things. At the IKK, the focus is on mechanical recycling methods, which are essentially based on multi-stage cleaning in a so-called recycling extruder and subsequent further processing of the resulting granulate for injection moulding applications. The research team at INSC is looking at sustainable and green approaches for chemical and solvent-based processes. The aim is to investigate the limits, possibilities and synergies of the recycling approaches and to derive findings for functional product design in order to enable optimised and sustainable recycling in the future.