Automotive Circularity Platform: From Automotive to Automotive: an ecosystem approach for closed loop end-of-life vehicle recycling
ACP is a pilot project designed as an open platform ecosystem to create a direct link between market players that dismantle end-of-life vehicles (automotive dismantlers), and those that use high quality recycled materials.
ACP provides dismantlers with transparency about which materials / parts industrial manufacturers need, separates materials directly within the dismantling process and sells it to industrial customers at open market values. At the same time data, tracking allows flows of material to be monitored, and OEMs to fulfil their regulatory and legal obligations.
With further scaling, the involvement of multiple materials remanufacturers and multiple OEMs, accelerated learning and efficiency improvements can be expected. Further additional value-added services can also be envisaged where a high-quality secondary material is further enriched to the specification of individual customers.
The ACP solution creates a unified sector-wide open platform in which supply and demand for high-quality low carbon recycled materials can be openly traded and tracked to satisfy customer demands and regulatory goals.
The platform is designed to be a digital, connected solution for end-of-life vehicle recycling for the twenty-first century. It aims to create a new sustainable value chain approach benefiting multiple parties (manufacturers, dismantlers, materials producers and policymakers). Beyond the direct connection between the market players that collect and use high quality recycled materials in the automotive sector, ACP will help create the conditions for supply chain resilience, material sovereignty, new skilled employment and making ‘recycled in the EU’ the norm.
- The development of the ecosystem begins with steel, aluminium, glass and test runs for plastics. The clear ambition is to expand to all valuable ELV materials that can be separated into dedicated material flows at dismantler level and returned to the industry.
- More materials will have value-added reuse or recycling routes, and dismantling efficiencies will improve. The ecosystem logic and the connection of stakeholders along the recycling chain can also be scaled to other industries where downcycling still takes place e.g. the construction industry.
- The specific use case in the automotive industry can therefore serve as a blueprint for gathering experience on how to successfully close end-to-end post-consumer loops.