INNOVATION | AUTOMOTIVE
IMAGE: AUDI
Above: Audi’s PlasticLoop project has
used chemically recycled plastics in a seatbelt buckle casing
Wipag, Remondis, Lavergne and Circularise. “The MaterialLoop project underscores our ambitious vision to operate a highly efficient circular economy concept for end-of-life vehicles,” said Duesmann in March. “It is our goal to recover as many materials as possible at a high level of quality and reuse them in production. This will save valuable primary materials and lower the products’ ecological footprint. Simultaneously, direct access to secondary materials can contribute to increased security of supply. Raw materials would no longer have to be extracted.” The seatbelt buckle cover in the new Audi Q8
E-tron was developed as part of the PlasticLoop segment of the project. At least 70% of the plastic granulate for the seatbelt buckle covers (including fillers and additives) consists of pyrolysis oil produced through the project. The recycled content is attributed to the Audi product via a mass
balance approach. Audi says: “This means that Ecocycle, an independent external certification agency, confirms that the project members have replaced the amounts of fossil resources required for the seatbelt buckle covers with pyrolysis oil produced from mixed automotive plastic materials. It is intended to provide sufficient pyrolysis oil in the above-mentioned volumes for the entire production run of the Q8 E-tron on the basis of currently planned production figures.” The PlasticLoop project followed on from Audi’s work with KIT in 2020. In this, Audi provided used plastic components, such as fuel tanks, wheel trim parts and radiator grills, from Audi models return- ing from the German dealership network. LyondellBasell, which is the materials partner in
PlasticLoop, says plastic components from custom- er vehicles that can no longer be repaired are dismantled, shredded, and processed by chemical recycling into pyrolysis oil. The oil is then used as a raw material in LyondellBasell’s established process for the production of new plastics, replacing virgin fossil feedstocks. LyondellBasell says: “With this process, Lyondell-
Basell, Audi, and chemical recycler SynCycle (Next Generation Group and BDI), succeed in recycling a stream of material which today is mostly only suitable for energy recovery. This reduces the usage of fossil-based primary materials for the Audi Q8 E-tron and keeps valuable feedstocks in a circular loop. Materials produced from pyrolysis oil are of the same high quality as virgin materials and have the same properties. Chemical recycling offers an alternative to energy recovery and complements mechanical recycling.”
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