More than 800,000 tonnes of plastic from end-of-life vehicles are being incinerated or sent to landfill across Europe every year, highlighting a growing waste challenge where the solution is known—but the system to deliver it at scale is still missing.

 

A coalition of eight major industrial players—BASF, Covestro, LG Chem, LyondellBasell, Mitsubishi Chemical Group, SABIC, SUEZ and Syensqo—has now tested what it would take to change that.

 

Working pre-competitively through the Global Impact Coalition, the companies processed 100 end-of-life vehicles through full dismantling, shredding and sorting, recovering around 8 metric tonnes of plastic from cars of different ages, makes and conditions.

 

The results point to a clear technical breakthrough.

 

 

The pilot confirms that recovery is technically possible: plastic components from scrapped vehicles can be extracted and processed into material suitable for recycling. But the bigger challenge lies elsewhere.

 

Commercial viability has not yet been proven. The bottleneck, according to the findings, is not technology but coordination—along with economics and the lack of a unified value-chain framework that aligns incentives across automakers, dismantlers, waste processors, and chemical producers.

 

As GIC CEO Charlie Tan notes in the report foreword: "Closing the loop on automotive plastics is no longer a question of ambition, it is a question of execution."

 

 

Regulatory pressure is rapidly tightening in Europe. Under new EU rules, new vehicles will be required to contain 25% recycled plastic by 2036, including at least 20% sourced from closed-loop vehicle recycling. Today, the closed-loop share sits at just around 2.5%, exposing a significant gap between policy targets and current capability.

 

That gap also represents a major industrial opportunity.

 

The shift is not confined to Europe. China processed more than 7.9 million end-of-life vehicles in 2024 and, in December 2025, introduced a national action plan aimed at increasing recycled material use in automotive manufacturing by 2030. The pressure to build scalable recycling systems is becoming global.

 

 

The Global Impact Coalition says the pilot will guide the next phase of work focused on unlocking the end-of-life vehicle recycling value chain. That includes assessing economic viability, building component-level scenario models, and running targeted experiments in automation, chemical recycling, and design-for-recycling approaches.

 

The conclusion is increasingly clear: the materials can be recovered—the race now is to build the system that makes it profitable and repeatable at scale.