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Covestro has officially announced its participation in Kollert, a publicly funded, interdisciplinary research consortium in Germany dedicated to developing recyclable product concepts for automotive lighting, mechatronics, and electronic components.
Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) under the CircularGlowUp framework and supervised by the Karlsruhe Project Management Agency (PTKA), the three-year project runs from June 2026 to May 2029 with a total funding volume of €4.371 million.
Coordinated by Forvia Hella, the consortium brings together major industrial players and academic institutions, including BMW, Covestro, Geba, Fraunhofer IEM, Fraunhofer UMSICHT, the University of Paderborn, Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), and SW Maschinenservice.
The automotive industry faces increasing pressure from resource scarcity, supply chain vulnerabilities, and tightening European legislation—most notably the upcoming EU End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV) Regulation. Technological hurdles and insufficient recyclability have historically prevented plastics loops from scaling efficiently in high-performance automotive applications.
Kollert directly targets these bottlenecks by placing “Design for Circularity” at its center, complemented by four core R-strategies: Repair, Re-Use, Remanufacture, and Recycle.
Complex Component Circularity: Research focuses on how complex lighting and mechatronic assemblies can be designed for easy disassembly, repair, and closed-loop material recovery.
Polycarbonate Recovery Pathways: Covestro is contributing its material expertise in high-performance polymers—including its Makrolon, Bayblend, and Apec polycarbonate lines widely used in vehicle lighting—evaluating mechanical and chemical recycling pathways to retain high-quality material properties across secondary lifecycles.
End-to-End Value Chain Alignment: The consortium covers the full product lifecycle, spanning raw material synthesis, OEM component design, production logistics, and end-of-life recycling infrastructure.
“Kollert is a prime example of how we create value together with our customers and partners — going beyond material supply to co-designing solutions from the very beginning. By aligning early across the value chain with BMW, Forvia Hella and other partners, we can embed circularity directly into product development. That is what true co-creation looks like—and how we turn sustainability ambitions into tangible outcomes.”
— Monique Buch, Chief Commercial Officer at Covestro
The implementation of the EU End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV) Regulation, Design for Circularity frameworks for automotive engineering, high-quality polymer recycling pathways, and cross-value-chain OEM partnerships will be central topics of discussion at next year’s Go Circular Summit.
The European Union’s landmark Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) has officially entered into application across all EU Member States. Establishing a single harmonized legal framework for the EU Single Market, the PPWR replaces fragmented national rules to streamline compliance for cross-border businesses, accelerate waste reduction, and lower reliance on imported virgin raw materials.
A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has engineered a recyclable yarn made from polyethylene, offering a scalable solution to the global challenge of textile waste. Detailed in ACS Materials Letters, the research was led by Svetlana Boriskina, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, alongside first author SeongHyeon Kim and co-authors Duo Xu, Volodymyr Korolovych, Domingo Flores-Hernandez, Kaniz Moriam, and Daniel Braconnier.
The MIT team demonstrated that garments crafted from the engineered yarn can be melted down at the end of their lifecycle and respun into fresh fiber or molded into solid plastic hardware, such as buttons and belt buckles.
ABB and Swedish textile impact company Syre have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to explore how automation, electrification, and digital technologies can support the development of Syre’s first industrial-scale textile-to-textile recycling facility in Gia Lai province, Vietnam.
The exploratory collaboration provides a framework to assess how advanced process control, quality optimization, and electrical infrastructure can enable safe, efficient, and scalable production of circular polyester.