Digging for gold in scrap: inside Stellantis’ circular economy gambit

Last year, her company unveiled its biggest investment so far – the Sustainera Circular Economy Hub at the Mirafiori plant in Turin, Italy – as a location to strip old cars, recycle materials and retrieve usable parts. 

However, the investment stays true to the Stellantis spending ethos in that hub usefully fills space and employs workers in one Europe’s least utilised plants, making it a win politically as well as economically.

Circular Economy will have 500 workers once the Mirafiori hub is up and running, Stellantis said. Renault’s The Future is Neutral has done something similar with the Flins plant in France. 

Stellantis is looking at adding additional hubs, Jones said, but so far hasn’t indicated where. 

“I have to make sure that I continue to be profitable while I'm making the transformations and the investments,” said Jones. 

Jones’s role as head of the unt is to make sure all the strands tie together as a coherent whole, encompassing sales, engineering and manufacturing. “I’m going in asking questions of people who’ve been doing it for years and years,” she said.

For example, Circular Economy is now looking at parts that were previously considered unprofitable to repair but are now become viable.

“Historically, reman has mainly been on engines, gearboxes, some alternators, callipers. But actually you can expand that product range,” Jones said.

“Headlights are an example of where historically we've said no," she said – but as headlights become ever more complex, repairing the glass after a front-end collision now makes economic sense.

“It's about finding either in-house engineers or working with suppliers who are prepared to invest the time to find a way to do it,” Jones said.

The decision on which parts to focus on depends on the number of models using a particular part are still left on the road. 

A team of engineers in Europe or in Stellantis’s US R&D centre in Auburn Hills, Michigan, go through a list of parts, identifying potential candidates, checking specifications and talking to suppliers prepared to recondition old parts.

Keeping used vehicles on the road by feeding the parts supply can only go so far. When a model becomes too old, the demand for parts dwindles, as does supply of parts to recondition.

In the US, Stellantis will go back to the year 2000 for engines, but because you need two old engines to make one good reconditioned engine, you need a healthy supply.

There’s still more to be done. Right now, only around 15% of the total parts and service catalogue are supplied by Stellantis’s Sustainera-branded reconditioned parts. The target is 40% by 2030.

Parts taken off cars that don’t go through the reconditioning services come under ‘reuse’, and here Stellantis has set up a brand-agnostic e-commerce platform that links dismantlers with customers. Called B-Parts, it claims to offer seven million parts.

Meanwhile, cars and parts beyond their useful life are a source of recycled materials. Last year, Stellantis and its partners recycled two million parts, a 84% increase on the year before.

A dead car is of course a useful supply of steel – the material that Stellantis uses more of than anything else. Last year, the company bought 7.87 million tonnes of the metal, accounting for 75% of all its material consumption. Light alloys such as aluminium were next, at 1.02 million tonnes, accounting for 10%. 

Making sure recycled materials from scrapped Stellantis cars stay in the loop and return to their maker is one of Jones’s biggest challenges.

“Many industries are looking at their own sustainability goals, so you’ve then got people competing for material,” she said. “That's the more difficult part.”

Batteries are also on Jones’s radar, and Stellantis is looking to use its Ellesmere Port electric van plant in the UK to repair and remanufacture battery packs.