New recycling processes for polyamides from end-of-life vehicle

BASF has developed a chemical recycling process that sets new standards in the recycling of technical plastics and demonstrated the capabilities in a pilot project. This process makes it possible to recycle even heavily used and contaminated plastic parts - in this case also ZF Group used oil pans from end-of-life vehicles - efficiently and sustainably at the end of their life cycle. At the core of the process is depolymerization, where the long polyamide chains are broken down at their inherent cleavage points into their original building blocks - the monomers. In the subsequent step, the monomer caprolactam obtained from the depolymerization of PA6 is purified.