German car company Audi, is working with industry partners on a project that it says takes the next step towardS closing more material cycles in the automotive industry.

Together with 15 partners from the, research, recycling, and supplier sectors, Audi is looking into the reuse of so-called post-consumer materials, which are taken from customer vehicles at the end of their lifecycle for use in the production of new cars. 

“The MaterialLoop project underscores our ambitious vision to operate a highly efficient circular economy concept for end-of-life vehicles,” says Audi CEO Markus Duesmann. “It is our goal to recover as many materials as possible at a high level of quality and reuse them in production. This will save valuable primary materials and lower the products’ ecological footprint. Simultaneously, direct access to secondary materials can contribute to increased security of supply. Raw materials would no longer have to be extracted.”

The pilot project has already resulted in positive progress, for example, the production of high quality steel coils using 12% recycled steel from scrapped Audi vehicles. These coils will be used to produce up to 15,000 inner door parts for the Audi A4 at the Ingolstadt press plant.

Audi is also gathering knowledge on the recycling of used automotive glass. Car windows that are beyond repair are first broken up into small pieces and then sorted. The resulting glass granulate is melted down and turned into new plate glass with some already used in the production of the Q4 e-tron.

On plastics, Audi and plastics manufacturer LyondellBasell have established a process that employs chemical recycling for the first time to reuse mixed automotive plastic waste for the series production of the Audi Q8 e-tron. 

Audi and its supply partners are also looking to introduce a “design for circularity” concept. This means that, as far as the material selection, composition and modularity are concerned, automotive parts and their components are to be designed in such a way that they can be sorted by material type during end-of-life recycling.