Designing & Collecting Automotive Supply Chain Packaging for Recycling

Kellen Mahoney, Director, Suppliers Partnership for the Environment (SP), and Bridget Grewal, Director, Packaging CI, Magna International

Leading companies in the automotive industry have announced long-term sustainability goals aspiring to advance positive environmental, economic, and community impacts on the road toward carbon neutrality. Alongside major industry sustainability efforts related to vehicle design and manufacturing operations, we have been working to address additional sustainability impacts and opportunities within a much less visible but still critical aspect of the industry – automotive packaging materials.

Many different packaging materials are currently used in the automotive industry to ship parts damage-free through the supply chain. Returnable containers are a staple in the automotive industry for domestic shipments, and the outer container is typically recycled or reused after the life of the program.

The internal plastic dunnage – including materials such as cross-link foams, plastic films, and other low-weight plastics – however, can often end up in a landfill today due to mixed material compositions and challenges in economically collecting and transporting these materials from automotive facilities to recyclers. Considering the scale and volume of materials moving through the automotive supply chain, the potential to recapture these plastic dunnage materials presents a significant sustainability and economic opportunity.

Working through the industry association, the Suppliers Partnership for the Environment (SP), we are bringing together a team of automakers, component suppliers, packaging suppliers, and recyclers to identify new opportunities to support the development of viable cyclical material recovery processes for these plastic dunnage materials.

As a first step, our team recently led the development of new sustainable packaging guidelines for the automotive industry identifying actionable opportunities to minimize automotive packaging waste by addressing potential barriers to recyclability in the design phase and highlighting more readily recyclable alternative designs.

These new guidelines seek to encourage the use of more recyclable polyethylene and polypropylene mono-material designs as the primary focus for returnable or expendable plastic dunnage and seek to discourage the use of more challenging multi-material designs where possible to improve recyclability. As the new guidelines published by SP gain traction, we expect to see an increase in the usage of more recyclable packaging designs and more consistent streams of scrap materials providing support in reaching the economies of scale needed to support viable recycling systems.

However, transporting low-weight scrap material can be the costly side of recycling packaging dunnage, potentially limiting the effectiveness of a truly circular system. If effective processes were in place to collect and densify plastic dunnage, the industry would have the potential to shift these materials from a cost liability to a valued commodity, with potential economic benefits for transporters, processors, and others along the value chain.

“As demand for recycled materials increases with industry sustainability commitments, we aim to develop this new source to help increase the supply of needed recycled material feedstocks and support the industry in its carbon reduction efforts.”

To address this challenge, our team has been working through a NextCycle Michigan Recycling Supply Chain innovation challenge program organized by the Michigan Department of Great Lakes and Environment (EGLE) to address the necessary research and process development to identify and validate practical and economical solutions to collect, densify and transport these low-weight materials.

With the support of grant funding awarded through this program, our team is launching a pilot project to design and test a viable model for collecting, aggregating, and pre-processing automotive dunnage materials that may be sent to landfills in the State of Michigan today. 

Considering the significant concentration of automotive sites in Michigan, we are working on testing and validating the model in key automotive counties within the State first, with the intention to scale this model to additional states and regions in subsequent phases.

As we move forward, we will be examining methods to collect and aggregate plastic dunnage materials from various OEM and tiered supplier sites to develop the volumes needed for a consistent stream of feedstock for recyclers. We will also be evaluating the positioning of densification equipment within individual facilities in order to compact these low-weight plastic materials for efficient shipment to recycling facilities. Corrugated board is successfully recycled today at many automotive manufacturing locations using similar machinery, so that process model will be used as a reference.

A key objective of this work will be to ensure the collected materials are able to meet end-market specifications so that they may be viably returned for use in new automotive packaging products as recycled content. Studies have shown that the use of recycled materials can both reduce landfill mass and save energy in the production of raw materials, thus reducing the carbon footprint of these materials over their lifecycle. As demand for recycled materials increases with industry sustainability commitments, we aim to develop this new source to help increase the supply of needed recycled material feedstocks and support the industry in its carbon reduction efforts.

Through promoting sustainable design guidance, understanding the business model that will drive this supply chain, and identifying crucial infrastructure and capital investments that will be needed, we are working to allow these valuable materials to be collected and recycled in a cost-effective way while reducing the amount of automotive packaging material that may be sent to landfill into the future.