Axion Polymers urges auto design sustainability

Automotive engineers and manufacturers should consider using “simpler” plastic and metal materials rather than composites at the initial design stage, says Keith Freegard, director of United Kingdom-based plastics recycling firm Axion Polymers.

Freegard says such thinking upfront in this way means new motor vehicles can then be more readily recycled at the end of their lives.

With no currently viable recycling routes for many of the recently developed composite materials used in modern lightweight vehicles, Freegard says, “These vehicle components and body parts might only be suitable for energy-from-waste schemes at end of life.”

Freegard is calling on the sector to look at locally-sourced, sustainable options first, such as what he calls innovative, highly specified 100-percent-recycled-content polymers derived from a stable, long-term supply of end-of-life vehicles. These closed-loop plastics offer carbon savings of between 50 and 75 percent when compared with virgin polymers, he says, while the embedded carbon cost from selecting new materials can become a major proportion of a new vehicle’s total life cycle footprint.

At the Materials Innovation Showcase organized by the Knowledge Transfer Network at the 2015 Cenex Low Carbon Vehicle Event, which takes place Sept. 9-10 in Millbrook, U.K., Freegard says he will explain how Axion’s range of Axpoly® 100-percent-recycled-content engineering polymers can help satisfy the design requirement of the next generation of low carbon vehicles.

“While I applaud the use of novel new materials to make lightweight motor vehicle bodies and structural components for cars, my challenge to materials scientists and designers is to think about the simpler alternatives: mono-materials that save carbon and can be eventually recovered for reuse at end of life,” states Freegard.

“It is tempting to use more unusual composite and reinforced fiber products that can make exciting lightweight components,” he continues. “Yet there appears to be scant regard given to how these very technical, high-performing and complicated composites are treated at the end of a vehicle’s life as they currently cannot be recycled.”

Adds Freegard, “In my view, our rapidly growing automotive sector offers tremendous opportunity for innovate thinking and product design with the development of electric and hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles requiring completely new concepts. Crucially, the potential for incorporating sustainably sourced recovered materials that can offer cost savings in new components should not be overlooked.”

Axion Polymers says its Axpoly® plastics are extracted from end-of-life vehicles at its shredder waste advanced processing plant (SWAPP) at Trafford Park, U.K., and then further refined at its nearby Salford facility.