Decision aid tool and design approach for plastic recycling chain integration in the automotive industry

Abstract

The many uses of plastics in our society are now compromised because of the social and environmental impacts they generate: exhaustion of petroleum resources, waste management... Plastics recycling appears to be one of the best ways to solve these problems. But Plastics Recycling Chains (PRC) are still emerging system. The automotive industry is directly concerned by plastic recycling through the End of Life Vehicles (ELV) directive which compels it to respect recycling rate for their products and to increase the use of recycled materials. But at present the use of recycled plastics in this industry is strictly limited to low-quality products. Main reasons for this situation are that recycled plastics’ characteristics are often underestimated and can differ importantly from one supplier to another and also in time. It results in a lack of confidence in PRC’s capabilities. In order to increase the recycled plastics’ rate in new vehicles, especially in high-quality parts, PRC must respond to the supplier selection criteria. This implies that PRC must supply large quantity of high-quality materials with stable properties. As many stakeholders will be involved in PRC’s efficiency, we have built a dynamic model of these PRC, named ODEFIRE, to determine in which technical and economic conditions they might better satisfy the automotive industry requirements. On the other side, we have also developed for the automotive design departments an approach called DAIMRE based on accumulation of knowledge of recycled plastics’ characteristics and PRC’s capabilities which are, for a part, fed by ODEFIRE simulations.