One company at the forefront of sustainability is the BMW Group. In April, the German carmaker announced that it will head up a new project to explore the circular economy in automotive manufacturing. BMW is joining forces with representatives from the recycling industry, commodity processors and academia to work on ways to improve the quality of secondary raw materials obtained from recycling end-of-life vehicles.
Backed by $7 million from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in Germany, the Car2Car project will focus specifically on improving the quality and availability of recycled aluminum, steel, glass, copper and plastic. In the future, innovative dismantling and automated sorting methods will generate far greater quantities of these resources to be recovered from end-of-life vehicles than has so far been the case. This project also includes an end-to-end evaluation of both the ecological and economic impacts of closed-loop recycling of these materials.