Jaguar Land Rover is working with chemical company BASF to test innovative recycling processes that can turn plastic waste into new high-end materials that can be used in future vehicles. It is estimated that by 2050, the total amount of plastic waste worldwide will exceed 12 million tons. Not all plastic waste is now recyclable for automotive applications, especially some automotive parts that need to meet the strictest safety and quality standards.
Jaguar Land Rover is a member of the ChemCycling pilot project, which will upgrade domestic plastic waste that would have been landfilled or discarded to incineration plants to new high-quality materials.
This kind of plastic waste can be transformed into pyrolysis oil by using thermochemical process, and then such pyrolysis oil becomes a substitute for fossil energy as a secondary raw material, enters BASF's production chain, and can finally produce new, high-end, high-quality, replicable high-grade New material for quality and high performance "raw" plastic. Most importantly, such materials can be tempered and tinted, making them the ideal sustainable solution for the design of dashboards and exterior trim for Jaguar Land Rover models.
At present, Jaguar Land Rover and BASF are testing the materials in the trial stage of the Jaguar I-Pace prototype's front-shelf overmolding process to verify whether the material can also meet the same strict requirements compared to the existing original parts. Safety requirements.
Before the progress of the test of bringing such chemically recycled materials to the market, the use of new high-end materials means that Jaguar Land Rover can use plastics recovered from China in all models, while the quality and safety of the vehicle will not be affected. influences.
Jaguar Land Rover said this is the company's latest effort to address the plastic waste challenge. The company has also partnered with Danish textile brand Kvadrat to provide customers with luxurious and sustainable seating options. Initially, such high-end materials appeared on the Land Rover Range Rover Velar and Land Rover Range Rover Evoque models. Each car's seat material combines a durable wool blend with faux leather fabric made from 53 recycled plastic bottles.
In the UK business, Jaguar Land Rover has achieved the goal of ZeroWasteto Landfill by 2020, which includes the removal of 1.3 million square meters of plastic product production lines from the production line. In the business operation, 14 million pieces were replaced once. Sex plastic products.