The German automaker BMW Group has announced that, together with its partners, it has demonstrated through the Car2Car research project that significantly higher recovery rates of automotive materials can be achieved through advanced sorting and recycling technologies, especially with high results for steel. ,
,In accordance with the standard recycling market conditions, the total Car2Car production rate for the five material groups was six percent. Thanks to additional processing and optimized sorting routes, this figure has increased to 51 percent. The project defines the Car2Car recycling rate as the proportion of materials from an end-of-life vehicle that can theoretically be recovered with sufficient quality to be reused for new industrial purposes. In particular, for steel, the utilization rate increased from one percent to 81 percent.
,An additional sorting step reduces copper contamination ,
,According to BMW, one of the main problems when recycling expired automotive steel for high-quality use in the automotive industry is copper contamination of cables, connectors, and other components.
The Car2Car project has demonstrated that an additional sorting step can selectively reduce the copper content of steel scrap, improving its quality sufficiently for use in new flat steel products for the automotive industry. Steel Coils
Made from improved scrap, they were subsequently tested and introduced into industrial production. At the BMW Group plant in Leipzig, more than 100,000 production parts were made from this material for use in cars.
Additional infrastructure investments are still needed.
The project also showed that further progress will require additional investments in infrastructure for dismantling, sorting and recycling waste. Advanced measures tested during the project included improved pre-sorting, modified shredding, classification, sensor-based sorting, and more precise separation from aluminum alloys. BMW noted that high-quality closed-loop recycling is currently more advanced for metals than for plastics and glass. Further developments are still needed to meet the automotive industry's quality requirements for these materials.
The results obtained will be used by the BMW Group in the further development of round-shaped car concepts and in the development of a design based on a circular approach. The company also stated that the results obtained
