Sustainable Automotive Polymers

Challenge

Automotive manufacturers face mounting pressure to reduce their environmental impact. Plastics are increasingly essential in enabling lighter vehicles, yet their diversity of formulation and function make these fossil-based materials difficult to reuse or recycle.

Electric vehicle manufacturers like Polestar are striving to transition to more sustainable materials. But these must still meet strict requirements for performance, safety, aesthetics and scalability all while avoiding greenwashing, compromising product integrity or losing cost competitiveness.

Solution

Supported by a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Sustainable Automotive Plastics, our team is collaborating with Polestar to tackle this complex challenge. Across both interior and exterior plastics, our team of researchers is helping to define, analyse, optimise and trial materials that are authentically sustainable.

The collaboration aims to improve the sustainability of the diverse array of automotive plastics through increasing recycled content, developing new carbon-negative polymers and increasing mechanical and chemical recyclability at end-of-life. The project critically evaluates sustainability, safety, and scalability to enable translation into Polestar pilots and prototypes, with specific components designed around increasing recycled content, sustainable multi-materials and design for end-of-life to lower the carbon footprint of automotive parts towards a more sustainable future for automotive plastics.

Systems-level tools (e.g., life cycle assessment coupled to techno-economic analyses) to quantify economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Through significant and consistent engagement with Polestar, barriers for translation to industry (including product performance, safety, and environmental risk) will be anticipated and mitigated.

Impact

While we cannot share much of our early results, our project has focussed on improving reliability for PHB polymers, recycling multi-material blends, recovering impact strength in polypropylene parts, and developing intersectoral transitions for automotive PET applications.