Vehicle Recycling Partnership Plant

Argonne's new six-stage plastics recycling plant, which builds on the Laboratory's award-winning foam recycling process, is the first continuous, multistage plastic separation plant in the world. The new recycling process works for just about all mixtures of plastics generated by industry. Once the plant achieves full operation, it will recover four to five products from a single waste stream. The new plant advances the state of the art because it is the only plant — at an industrial scale — that can be used to separate plastics with overlapping density ranges — and it can do that cost-effectively. One of the most noteworthy features of the process is its design capacity: it can process 1,000 pounds of plastics per hour.

Separating high-purity plastics from the rest of the waste stream has been a challenge because many conventional separation methods depend on material density or employ large quantities of organic solvents, which pose environmental risks. Argonne's process is the only technology that can successfully produce recycled acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) with a purity of greater than 99%. Already, the process has been used to recover selected plastics from automobile shredder residue, disassembled car parts, industrial scrap plastics, and consumer electronics.

Late last year, Argonne, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Vehicle Recycling Partnership of USCAR (a partnership of DaimlerChrysler Corp., Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp.), and the American Plastics Council announced the signing of a five-year, multi-million dollar cost-shared Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) designed to enable cost-effective recycling of end-of-life vehicles. Much of the work will be conducted at Argonne's new recycling facility.