Plastics are increasingly a preferred material choice in designing and developing complex, consumer products, such as automobiles, because they are mouldable, lightweight, and are often perceived to be highly recyclable materials. However, actually recycling the heterogeneous plastics used in such durable items is challenging, and presents very different scenarios to how simple products, such as water bottles, are recovered via curbside or container recycling initiatives. While the technology exists to recycle plastics, their feasibility to do so from high level consumer or industrial applications is bounded by technological and economical restraints. Obstacles include the lack of market for recyclates, and the lack of cost efficient recovery infrastructures or processes. Furthermore, there is a knowledge gap between manufacturers, consumers, and end-of-life facility operators. For these reasons, end-of-life plastics are more likely to end up down-cycled, or as shredder residue and then landfilled. This paper reviews these challenges and several alternatives to recycling plastics in order to broaden the mindset surrounding plastics recycling to improve their sustainability. The paper focuses on the automotive sector for examples, but discussion can be applied to a wide range of plastic components from similarly complex products.

The circular economy re-interprets the recovery of materials by promoting designing out waste from products, retaining materials for reuse, and emphasizing key elements universally accepted for sustainability. The current efforts to target, isolate, and reduce single-use items, particularly plastics, have only recently begun in earnest. Unfortunately, the recovery and recycling of materials have been disrupted by global market uncertainty, and recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic and its impacts complicate materials recovery, the core of the circular economy still depends on efficiently capturing and returning spent materials for production. Arguably, our perception and common understanding of the recovery process is influenced significantly by the recycling of simple consumer products, such as plastic bags and beverage bottles. However, there are greater difficulties when managing multiple materials from significantly more complex consumer products, for example, from end-of-life vehicles. This paper presents an overview of how waste recovery-related issues vary between simple versus complex consumer products. Using food packaging, tires, cell phones, furniture, and end-of-life vehicles as examples, this paper provides a commentary on the challenges facing complex product recovery compared to simple consumer products in the Canadian context in order to establish how this classification concept can be beneficial for describing a given product and its materials recovery prospects. A categorization framework is developed and applied to these case study products to provide a relative comparison of product complexity.

This research outlines a digital imaging method under development to systemize a rapid in-field corrosion evaluation measure, to evaluate and monitor the degree of corrosion on target corrosion-prone parts on light-duty vehicles. This procedure uses digital imaging to study and compare corrosion levels of 228 vehicles that were treated with aftermarket applications of corrosion prevention products versus 141 vehicles that were untreated. It introduces a Corrosion Index (CI) as a common measure. Single-factor and two-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the digitally-based corrosion measurements show statistically significant correlations between CI and treatment (treated versus untreated), as well as CI, vehicle age, and treatment. The ANOVA results show that the aftermarket-treated vehicles have statistically significantly less corrosion than the untreated vehicles, demonstrating that digital image analysis is a viable method of measuring corrosion on corrosion-prone vehicle parts, offering the potential to monitor and track the performance/efficacy of aftermarket corrosion treatment in real-time.

Corrosion can compromise the integrity of the vehicle. Instead, “rust proofing” a vehicle can prolong its usable life span, reducing material waste overall and permitting greater salvageability at the end of the vehicle’s life. For rust proofing, a definitive and consistent approach for detecting corrosion could be beneficial. Instead, most vehicle corrosion detection and assessment is performed visually and in an ad hoc manner without following any particular guidelines. The visual examination of corrosion depends highly on the method of analyzing and interpreting the corrosion, as well as operator’s experience in assessing and applying rust proofing. As a result, any visual assessment strategy needs standardization to minimize human error. An automated method is proposed to identify and analyze surface rust and appraise its severity for vehicles. The method demonstrated is 96% effective, low-cost, and has low computational complexity. Subsequently, the method has the potential to be conveyed to different advanced devices, such as smartphones, to measure corrosion, decreasing errors and improving measurement accuracy. Low implementation cost, and high reliability of the method contributes to its ease of use in the field, and hence, advances its accessibility to automotive professionals to identify and monitor corrosion levels, without the interference of human errors.