Market Sector Approach: Automotive
Business Opportunities
Industry Priorities for Advancing Circularity: Automotive
Possible business model supports include:
- Fair and feasible producer responsibility paradigms (i.e., extended producer responsibility [EPR]) requiring producers to pay for the collection, sorting, and recycling of end-of-life durable automotive plastics.
- Federal and state-level initiatives to stimulate investment in national durable plastics recycling infrastructure for collecting, separating, sorting, and processing EOL automotive plastics.
- Tax incentives/rebates for vehicles incorporating recycled content.
Possible business model supports include:
- Automotive OEMs should include recycled content standards as part of their material certification process, informed by automotive market analysis to define segments that place premium value on recycled content.
- Such standards should provide allowances for certain additives and other trace chemicals in durable goods that can be recycled to provide a policy "on-ramp" for durable automotive plastics recycling components.
Successful approaches in near term will likely require intermediary physical separations of key components during disassembly, prior to shredding; economic trade-off studies are needed to identify for which components disassembly does and does not make business sense in the recycling scheme. Longer term, new technologies and business models will be needed to automatically separate ASR material best suited to physical and chemical recycling methods to facilitate optimum automotive recycling approaches, including the ability to separate fibers from resins for automotive composites. Such approaches require strong chain-of-custody solutions and life-cycle analyses of chemical recycling processes to ensure the methods have lower environmental impact than alternatives.
Right-to-repair legislation could offer a beneficial alternative to recycling by making it easier for consumers to remanufacture, refurbish, and reuse durable automotive plastics. It would provide consumers with access to diagnostic tools for assessing defective components, repair information for safe disassembly and separation, and spare automotive replacement parts. Increasing the repairability of automotive components could improve the sustainability and circularity of durable plastics and ultimately lead to greater acceptance of reused and refurbished parts at the end of their useful lifespans.
Recycling automotive components today is often complicated by the multi-material nature of automotive components such as seats, doors, instrument panels, or headliners, because they include adhesives, webs, foams and other materials.
Such centers may be able to accommodate durable plastics from other market sectors to further enhance economics. The EU model for end-of-life management has proven to be effective and offers motivation to establish a sub-economy for dismantling.
The automotive industry is highly global in nature; existing EOL vehicle requirements in the EU will drive global automotive standards and practices. Such global regulations should be a basis for U.S.-based requirements.
EU requirements are driving the development of tools and data sources to comply (e.g., the automotive industry's International Material Data System [IMDS]). Leveraging this investment to inform North American regulations will benefit the automotive industry and durable plastics suppliers by driving consistency for these global companies.