Germany-based automaker BMW Group has announced that, together with its partners, it has demonstrated through the Car2Car research project that significantly higher recovery rates for automotive materials can be achieved through advanced sorting and processing technologies, with particularly strong results for steel.
Under standard market processing conditions, the project achieved an overall Car2Car rate of six percent across five material groups. With additional processing and optimized sorting routes, the rate increased to 51 percent. The project defines the Car2Car rate as the share of materials from an end-of-life vehicle that can theoretically be recovered at sufficient quality for reuse in new industrial applications. For steel specifically, the recovery rate increased from one percent to 81 percent.
Additional sorting step reduces copper contamination
According to BMW, one of the main challenges in recycling end-of-life vehicle steel for high-quality automotive applications is contamination by copper originating from cables, connectors and other components.
The Car2Car project demonstrated that an additional sorting step can selectively reduce copper content in steel scrap, improving its quality sufficiently for use in new flat steel products for automotive applications.
Steel coils produced using the improved scrap were subsequently tested and introduced into industrial production. At BMW Group's Leipzig plant, more than 100,000 series-production components were manufactured from the material for use in vehicles.
Further infrastructure investment still required
The project also showed that further progress will require additional investment in dismantling, sorting and recycling infrastructure. Advanced measures tested during the project included improved pre-sorting, modified shredding, classification, sensor-based sorting and more precise separation of aluminum alloys. BMW noted that high-quality closed-loop recycling is currently more advanced for metals than for plastics and glass. For these materials, further development is still required to meet the automotive industry's quality requirements.
The findings will be used in BMW Group's further development of circular vehicle concepts and its Design for Circularity approach. The company also stated that the results could provide input for future regulatory frameworks, including the European End-of-Life Vehicles Regulation, by identifying the technical and economic conditions required to achieve higher recovery rates and more closed material loops.
