INNOVATION | WEEE AND ELV
Above: The ZEvRA project team at the kick-off
meeting in January 2024 at Fraunhofer IWU in
Chemnitz, Germany
worldwide every day, and by 2030, 50m modules are expected to be returned annually in Germany alone. “Increasing module performance makes the replacement or upgrade of existing PV modules economically interesting for many system opera- tors,” said MGG CEO Christian Müller-Guttenbrunn. North America has also had positive develop- ments in the e-waste sector. In June CompuCycle, an IT asset recycler based in Houston, Texas, announced the expansion of its plastics recycling system. CompuCycle claims to be the only com- pany in the US that provides businesses a responsi- ble and sustainable disposal solution for both metals and plastics in-house utilising no further downstreams. “Properly managing all components of electronics is a cornerstone of sustainability and environmental responsibility,” said CEO Kelly Adels Hess. “Making single polymer plastics that OEMs can reuse while adhering to international recycling standards is a gamechanger.”
On the right road There is crossover between plastics recovered from WEEE and materials from end-of-life vehicles (ELV), particularly in the broad group of engineering plastics – market prospects have been assessed by AMI Consulting in its report An Introduction to Recycling of Engineering Polymers Europe 2023 (see Plastics Recycling World January-February 2024). The European Commission is planning to
strengthen the EU’s ELV Directive, with one proposal being that OEMs are required to ensure that 25% of the plastic used in new cars comes from recycled sources (of which 25% derive from closed-loop material). By 2035, the EU aims for new vehicles to be manufactured almost entirely of recycled, refurbished, repurposed, repaired, or reused parts, saving over 1.5 tonnes of material per vehicle. Established recycling routes for plastics from ELV focus on polyolefins with low mineral and fibre content which can provide limited feedstock
52 PLASTICS RECYCLING WORLD | July/August 2024
for low-performance exterior automotive compo- nents. The high share of technical thermoplastics, mainly ABS, PC/ABS, PA6 and PA6.6 and filled or fibre-reinforced polyolefins, are a large challenge for the recycling industry. “Regarding the proposed ELV regulation, I see challenges in relation to the legislative process as well as in the implementation of the proposed measures,” said Stefan Vellekoop, Manager Circular Solutions at Otto Krahn Group. “The 25% mini- mum recycled content quota for plastics is a challenge, especially as the figure is high and does not include a staggered time scale to allow the market to develop accordingly. At the same time, recycled content quotas are being introduced for other product groups as well, which correspond- ingly limits the available quantities. Additionally, only post-consumer material is counted, but not post-industrial material. As a result, there is a risk that this valuable waste stream, which can usually only be processed with higher effort, will be lost as there are no incentives to recycle it.”
Sorting chains In collaboration with manufacturers of sorting technologies, Fraunhofer IVV is developing advanced sorting chains, including wet and dry sorting technologies, that allow the production of regrinds from ELV shredder residues characterised by high shares of target polymers and low contami- nants. This has been tested and demonstrated within a pilot project in co-operation with Audi by the enrichment of thermoplastics such as PA and PC/ABS or fibre-reinforced polyolefins in concen- trated regrind fractions containing 80-90% of the target polymer. At present, these may not be sufficiently pure for mechanical recycling. Fraunhofer IVV has also developed and opti- mised physical dissolution recycling to purify and recover pure thermoplastics from sorted ELV plastic streams and complex post-industrial composites.
www.plasticsrecyclingworld.com
IMAGE: FRAUNHOFER IWU
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