Elongating Polypropylene Usability in Automotive Bumpers

I worked for Evonik in Germany for six months. The project aimed to maximise the use stage of polypropylene used in automotive bumpers so the material could be reused into new bumpers rather than downcycled to lesser products.

The bumpers were shredded and needed to have the coatings removed so that the chemicals from the coatings did not negatively impact the material properties during remanufacture.

The solution to remove these coatings was a mixture of chemical and mechanical processing. The ideal process parameters were found after many tests, changing many variables to find the quickest process that used environmentally friendly chemicals and mechanical methods.

Final testing of the processed material revealed that the mechanical properties were massively improved relative to the untreated shredded material. This meant that a large percentage of treated polypropylene could be used to produce new bumpers, when mixed with a percentage of virgin polypropylene material.

This project was very much outside of my comfort zone considering I was mainly in a lab using chemicals, however it taught me many things. Firstly, just how broadly an engineering mindset can be applied even when it seems far away from how you were taught to use it. Moreover, the intricacies of recycling processes and how the business side of it works alongside the engineering.