Audi's MaterialLoop Project Recycles Car Parts For New Vehicle Production

MaterialLoop is a collaboration between Audi and 15 research, recycling, and supplier partners. It intends to put to the test the circular economy potential of end-of-life vehicles, or, to put it another way, to use materials retrieved from customer vehicles at the end of their lifecycle. Currently, only a portion of the materials used to manufacture new vehicles are recovered from old ones. Steel, for example, is a critical component in automobiles and is typically recycled as structural steel.
Audi intends to reuse secondary materials in the production of new vehicles as well, with a focus on avoiding downcycling, which is the loss of material quality after recycling. This allows the company to save valuable primary materials while also reducing the environmental impact of its products.

Another advantage of this approach, particularly in the current environment, is increased supply security because fewer raw materials would need to be extracted. In October of last year, 100 vehicles were dismantled as part of the MaterialLoop project, and secondary materials, such as large plastic pieces, were retained for recycling. Individual component disassembly alone allowed for the retention of high-quality secondary materials such as larger plastic pieces for recycling. In collaboration with the partner companies, the remaining car bodies were shredded and sorted into material groups consisting of steel, aluminium, plastic, and glass after disassembly.

Audi defined and piloted the further recycling process with project partners from the recycling industry, the Audi supply chain, and academia to test the reuse of such materials in the production of new cars. The pilot project will be completed by the end of April. Despite this, Audi has already put valuable MaterialLoop project findings into practise, with some materials now being fed back into automobile production. As a result, much of the scrap steel recycled during the project can be used to create new models.

Six steel coils made from approximately 12% secondary MaterialLoop materials were produced in an initial trial and meet Audi's high quality standards and can be used for the most demanding structural components. Audi intends to use the coils to manufacture up to 15,000 inner door parts for the Audi A4 at its press plant in Ingolstadt. Furthermore, according to research conducted as part of the project, the percentage of recycled steel from vehicles in the coil can be increased even further. As a result of the pilot project MaterialLoop, Audi, in collaboration with the Volkswagen Group, has created a guide for suppliers that explains how plastic parts can be designed in a way that increases the rate of recycling in automotive production. Audi intends to steadily increase the proportion of recyclates in its fleet over the next few years. Audi Procurement is working to establish material cycles for automotive applications wherever technically feasible and economically and environmentally sound.

Audi began gathering knowledge on the recycling of used automotive glass in the spring of 2022 to this end. In a different pilot project. Car windows that can no longer be repaired are broken up into small pieces and then sorted. The resulting glass granulate is melted down and transformed into new plate glass for the automotive industry, and it is already used in the production of the Q4 e-tron. Audi and plastics manufacturer LyondellBasell have established a process that uses chemical recycling for the first time to reuse mixed automotive plastic waste for the series production of the Audi Q8 e-tron, thanks to PlasticLoop, one of the brand's three plastics recycling projects.

Aluminium is managed within a recycling circle at the Audi sites in Ingolstadt, Neckarsulm, and Gyor, as well as at the Volkswagen site in Bratislava, since 2017. Aluminium offcuts generated during production are returned to the supplier. They are recycled there to make aluminium sheets of the same quality, which Audi then reuses in production. This conserves valuable primary raw materials and ensures that the cars enter use with a better environmental balance.