New Publication: Closed-loop recycled plastics from end-of-life vehicles: Sensor-based sorting of automotive shredder residues and simulation of closed-loop rates
Source: https://cec.cs.tum.de/en/news/article/neue-veroeffentlichung-closed-loop-recycled-plastics-from-end-of-life-vehicles-sensor-based-sorting-of-automotive-shredder-residues-and-simulation-of-closed-loop-rates Parent: https://cec.cs.tum.de/en/news
2026-02-20 CEC
New Publication: Closed-loop recycled plastics from end-of-life vehicles: Sensor-based sorting of automotive shredder residues and simulation of closed-loop rates
Plastics make up a significant proportion of modern cars, but until now have been almost completely lost at the end of the vehicles' lives. The plastic fractions end up as automotive shredder residues in thermal utilization. As part of the “Car2Car” research project, hundreds of cars of various vehicle classes and powertrain types were recycled. The resulting automotive shredder residue fractions were sorted using mid-infrared spectroscopy in a newly developed recycling process to specifically separate the most common thermoplastics in cars – polypropylene, polyamide, polycarbonate, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. The results show that it is technically possible to recover these plastics from shredder residues, albeit with significant losses.
Using a dynamic simulation model, the results were extrapolated to a modeled EU vehicle fleet, and various scenarios for calculating closed-loop recycled contents for new cars were simulated. Among other things, changing vehicle compositions and extended dismantling requirements were considered. A greenhouse gas assessment shows that sensor-based sorting of automotive shredder residues generates lower greenhouse gas emissions than their incineration. The study shows that processing end-of-life vehicle plastics via the shredder path can be a potential step toward a more circular economy in the automotive sector – though further efforts will be required to effectively close the loop.
The study was published in Waste Management and is available open-access here.