Renault breaks into the circular economy of the car industry
Renault Group launches The Future Is NEUTRAL
(sustainabilityenvironment.com) – The circular economy in cars to revolutionize the sector. This is the goal of The Future Is NEUTRAL, the company launched by the Renault Group entirely dedicated to driving the sector toward climate neutrality.
For its creation, the car manufacturer has gathered the skills of its partners to build a company capable of providing closed-loop recycling solutions for vehicles, at every stage of life: from the supply of parts to the identification of raw materials, production, use and end of life.
The goal declared by the car giant is a turnover of 2.3 billion euros and a 10% operation by 2030, to make The Future Is NEUTRAL European leader in the circular economy in the car industry.
Luca de Meo, CEO of Renault Group, said: “Today we are taking another step in our historic commitment to the circular economy. Our subsidiaries Gaia, Indra and Boone Comenor, as well as Refactory in Flins, have already demonstrated our ability to generate activities that create economic, social and environmental value throughout the life cycle of the vehicle“.
“Based on this experience – continues de Meo – we are accelerating and creating The Future Is NEUTRAL, which brings together all our industrial and technological assets, as well as our network of strategic partners. Its mission: to grow its business with ambitious strategic plans and new outlets by offering the automotive industry, facing the climate challenge, new regulatory requirements and increasing pressure on resources, closed-loop recycling solutions, from car to car. Our ambition is to bring recycling into a new era and become the European leader in the automotive circular economy.”
Bringing the circular economy into the car industry
A car made today contains on average between 20 and 30% of recycled materials, recovered from waste from various industries.
The objective of The Future Is NEUTRAL is to close the circle of the circular economy within the same sector, generating cars from cars. The company, says the Renault Group, will research innovative solutions thanks to the pooling of technical skills in advanced engineering, chemical and data use, but also technologies and resources from the existing partner network to increase the percentage of recycled materials in the automotive industry. However, the group is also opening a part of its capital to external investors, to make sure to co-finance a share of investments of 500 million euros by 2030.
The Future Is NEUTRAL will also serve as a circular economy consultant in the automotive industry, serving the automotive industry alongside the Flins-based Circular Mobility Industry (ICM) campus, as part of the ReKnow University of the group.
What if the raw material for new cars are the same cars?
Jean-Philippe Bahuaud, CEO of The Future Is NEUTRAL, explained that the problem of the circular economy of the car industry is that the least used resource is the car, despite containing high percentages of metals and plastics. “The Future Is NEUTRAL – he said – brings together the skills to convert this potential into new growth levers. This new entity aims to push the automotive industry towards resource neutrality by extracting from each vehicle the largest possible amount of material needed to produce a new model”.
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More than 11 million vehicles end up in Europe every year. With them, much of the 85% of metals and plastics are lost. The new cars, in fact, contain a percentage of recycled material that stands between 20 and 30% and is recovered mainly from other industrial sectors such as metallurgy or construction. From this awareness was born the idea of The Future Is NEUTRAL, with the aim of preserving the value of raw materials contained in end-of-life vehicles, to bring the car industry to higher heights of the circular economy.
