Politics and business are calling for products to be recyclable and for recycled materials to be used in the manufacture of new products. However, all these approaches are only possible if the relevant material data for the products is available so that they can be recycled in a technically sensible and economically viable manner and made available for the manufacture of new products.

Within a wide variety of European and national legislations, the use of recycled materials in new products is either mandatory or indirectly required through documentation requirements. The first set of legal regulations to formulate this requirement is the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive, which requires car manufacturers to use a certain percentage of recycled materials in their vehicles – part of which must come from recycled materials from vehicle dismantling. Another overarching set of regulations is the Ecodesign Regulation, which requires the use of recycled materials in one of its sub-sections. This is a core aspect that should also be included in the digital product passport (DPP). Ultimately, the use of recycled materials is also the subject of the environmental chapter of a sustainability report. This clearly requires not only that the topic be addressed, but also, if it is recognized as material, that the use of recycled materials be verifiable.

Resource availability for a functioning economy

One might ask why politicians and business leaders are making such efforts to initiate and promote the circular economy. The background to this is the “crises” of the past five years, such as the pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, which have taught Europe that the constant availability of resources cannot be taken for granted. On the contrary, industry and trade have felt that when international markets close, energy and material resources have an immediate effect on the European economy. A very clear example of this is the shortage of lithium, manganese, and cobalt, which are essential for the production of vehicle traction batteries. Without these raw materials, drive batteries cannot be manufactured and the entire production of electric vehicles comes to a standstill. The political response to this predicament was the development and implementation of the Battery Regulation. However, it is not only the availability of resources that is often unpredictable and impossible to plan for, but also their pricing. This situation poses immense problems for European companies and severely reduces their competitiveness. But how can these challenges be met?

Recyclability as the relevant turning point

Recyclability as such follows relatively simple rules and can be described in terms of its process dependency as follows: The nucleus of any recyclability assessment is the material or substances that make up the individual products that constitute the end product. It goes without saying that substances that are already classified as harmful today and may be banned tomorrow make the recycling process more difficult or even impossible. In broader terms, this can turn entire batches of recyclable materials into waste that can only be treated thermally. It is equally obvious that a large number of different materials in a product or overall product quickly makes the costs of dismantling and separating the individual materials very expensive and uneconomical. Ultimately, this means that the less polluting the materials and substances contained in a product are and the less diverse the materials are, the better the recyclability of the product.

However, the intelligent selection of the materials used is only the beginning of the process. The products integrated into an overall product are linked by a constructive interrelationship that must be decoupled during the dismantling process. In this context, dismantling as such is structured very differently from assembly in terms of the process. When dismantling a complete product, the individual products require different dismantling times, which, in addition to the storage and transport costs of the individual products and the fractions resulting from dismantling, have a significant impact on the economic design of the end products. All in all, this means that the price of the end product “recyclate,” for example, must be viewed as a function of the dismantling costs (fractionation down to the material level), the storage and transport of the materials, and the costs of recyclate production.

Digitized dismantling visualization and parameter determination are becoming indispensable

In order to map this process holistically, a software solution for visualizing the dismantling process and recording all dismantling parameters, including the resulting fractions, is essential. In addition to the material fractions that go into the recycling process, product fractions such as used parts or replacement parts must also be taken into account. However, it is not enough to simply generate the relevant data; it is much more important to place this information in an economic context.

Stefan Nieser, Managing Director of tec4U-Solutions, comments:

“Only if we succeed in designing the dismantling of products and materials in a sensible way, optimizing the composition of the resulting material fractions in line with market requirements, and reflecting the entire process in the economic possibilities of the markets will circularity be possible in Europe.”

A legal requirement alone is not enough to promote recyclability in Europe—Europe is not an isolated market. All in all, this would mean that, due to the overriding requirement for resource security, we in Europe would ultimately bring products to the international market that would no longer be able to compete as such. Circularity in Europe therefore only makes sense if intelligent circular systems allow the dismantling and recycling parameters to be set dynamically and adapted to continuously evolving technical possibilities. It is imperative that the entire process itself is constantly scrutinized from an economic perspective so that the recyclates resulting from the process can withstand all economic tests of the market.

EcoValueHub: Software for visualizing the dismantling process and calculating recyclability indicators

tec4U solution has been active in this field for over 30 years and has developed both system and product solutions with a wide variety of players. The most extensive development is the creation and updating of the EcoValueHub software with the motto: Efficiency meets Circularity. The module is used to visualize the dismantling process and to calculate recyclability indicators. The updating of the system solution and its adaptation to changing legal and normative requirements as well as to different software ecosystems is the subject of previous and current projects. In this context, tec4U Solutions draws on its extensive experience in the automotive industry as well as in industry projects such as the Catena X project. EcoValueHub can be used by a wide variety of market participants in a wide range of areas, e.g., for:

  • Developers who want to develop in a compliant manner while also making sense from a circular economy perspective
  • Production facilities that are required to use recycled materials
  • Controllers who need to calculate provisions for recycling end products at the end of their life cycle
  • Companies that have to dismantle products at the end of their useful life or feed the resulting fractions into circular systems

What all these players have in common is that they need system-related support for these purposes that combines specifications, state-of-the-art technology, and market conditions.

The first version of EcoValueHub will be available from the third quarter of 2026 and will be able to map many of the necessary system requirements. This will make EcoValueHub the first application that can map the complex processes of the circular economy in a single system. Discussions are currently underway with individual industry associations and major economic players to adapt the application to the various requirements, either holistically or individually.

 

Additional information about EcoValueHub and the accompanying training and consulting services can be found at: https://ecovaluehub.com/en/ecovaluehub-software-for-disassembly-circular-economy/

However, the most important information remains knowledge about the materials and substances used in the products. Without this information, it is virtually impossible to generate high-quality quantitative baseline data. It becomes impossible to calculate or simulate recyclability. Here, too, EcoValueHub has a decisive advantage, as the solution is based on the DataCross material data communication platform, which has been proven over more than 10 years. DataCross enables material data to be communicated along the supply chain or, with the CoChecker module, much of the data to be determined using artificial intelligence.

tec4U-Solutions therefore already has a system environment that can develop the extensive material database required to calculate the circular economy. Building on this, tec4U-Solutions has system environments for calculating recyclability that are unique on the market and are currently being merged into the new EcoValueHub solution. We would be happy to discuss this consolidated offering with you in detail, whether you are an individual company, a group, or an association representative. Feel free to contact us!