Back to a new life

The life cycle of vehicles tended to end rather abruptly up to now. For all the time spent taking trips together, sharing experiences and creating countless memories, the scrap heap was often the final resting place with only a small proportion of the materials being reused to produce new vehicles.

As part of a pilot project involving 100 used vehicles, Audi is now looking to forge new paths and aiming to ensure that the greatest possible proportion of materials make their way back into the automotive value chain. In the future, a growing number of material cycles are to be closed on balance in collaboration with partner companies. The MaterialLoop project provides Audi with a wide range of new insights on its journey toward implementing a circular economy.
 

Can nature act as a role model to show car companies how they can economize? “Yes”, says Dennis Christian Meinen with conviction. The expert for circular economy at AUDI AG pauses briefly and then adds: “Waste is an alien concept in nature, it’s all about material cycles. Audi is therefore using nature as a model to close increasingly more cycles along the value chain.”

The circular economy contrasts with the traditional, linear business model, which focuses on large quantities of easily accessible raw materials and low-priced energy. Yet the world’s resources are finite and energy is becoming increasingly precious – the efficient use of both is essential. And not only in economic terms: “There is a clever definition of sustainability that we also strive to follow at Audi: anything we can make last forever is sustainable – with the emphasis on ‘forever’,” says Dennis Christian Meinen.

Valuable primary materials can be saved by reusing automotive materials. Meanwhile, direct access to the secondary materials could also lead to improved certainty of supply in the future. Regulatory standards are also increasingly moving in this direction, for example, in the EU with the End-of-Life Directive, which is currently being revised – this was another reason why the Four Rings launched the MaterialLoop project in fall 2022.

With a total of 100 end-of-life vehicles and in collaboration with 15 partners from industry and research, the project involves examining how vehicles that are no longer serviceable can be used as material sources for producing new vehicles, identifying which recyclable materials offer yet further potential, determining which new technical processes need to be developed and establishing what is already economically and ecologically feasible today.

In addition, the project acts as a source of valuable information for designing future models. “Design for Recycling” also plays an important role in optimizing the recyclability of products. The idea is to design parts and their components in such a way that they can be separated and sorted by material type during the recycling process when they reach their end of life. “Our objective is to make it even easier to reconcile recyclability with all of the technical requirements for our product. This is a major challenge, but offers us the opportunity to establish end-of-life vehicles as a high-quality material resource,” says Philipp Renner, who is responsible within Technical Development for matters relating to the circular economy.
 

The insights gained in the project will be collated in guidelines in collaboration with Technical Development and other departments and should help to optimize recycling-friendly component development. The MaterialLoop project focuses on the four material groups aluminum, steel, plastic and glass.

On the topic of glass, Audi already took the first steps in April 2022. “We developed a process together with our project partners which allows automotive glass that can no longer be repaired to be reused to produce new windshields,” says Philipp Eder describing the preliminary outcome of another of Audi’s pilot projects with three partner companies from the automotive glazing industry.

Remanufacturing damaged automotive glazing means that less energy and fewer raw materials need to be used overall to produce new windows. Ultimately, the use of processed material allows a reduction in the demand for primary materials such as quartz sand, for example. In addition, up to 30 percent less carbon dioxide is emitted during remanufacturing when compared with producing new glass. “This process will be tested for series production until 2023 in order to gain experience of material quality, stability and costs. If glass recycling can be performed economically and ecologically, this process should be used to produce windshields for the Audi Q4 e-tron in the future,” says Philipp Eder.

Philipp Eder, Dennis Christian Meinen and Philipp Renner are well aware that many processes cannot simply be converted overnight. But with the courage to embrace innovative technologies and new requirements in vehicle development it is possible to integrate numerous materials and parts into smart cycles – as proven by the MaterialLoop project. Philipp Eder: “Over the course of recent years we have learned from various circular economy projects that we can benefit from specialist know-how from the most diverse areas of the company and also from other industries. If all partners pull together, then more and more cycles can be closed.” This is what Audi is aiming to achieve with the MaterialLoop project – after all, the potential of the circular economy is far from being exhausted as yet.