Recycling at BMW: 95% of a new 7 series BMW qualifies for ecofriendly reutilisation.
The reporter cannot believe his ears. “This one’s next”, remarks Torsten Winter, pointing to a seemingly immaculate, white BMW M3. It is the latest model and has been on the market for just a year. “Surely you can’t do that”, begs the reporter, “give it to me, I’ll slip away with it and no-one will be any the wiser.” But Winter stands firm, the M3 drops into a gigantic crusher and emerges, a few minutes later, as a cube. Thousands of vehicles have already been diced up at the BMW Group’s Recycling and Dismantling Centre. The northern outskirts of Munich are where BMW researches the environmentally friendly and efficient reutilisation of its cars.
Although the plant is an officially certified and authorised facility, it only recycles the BMW Group’s test vehicles. The intact, metal coat is deceptive, as the cars have already lived out their lives in high-speed motion on test tracks and test benches. Among the sheds of the dismantling centre is a collecting station for the various fluids and used oils, and people are thinking seriously about the sustainable disposal of urea. The aqueous solution is needed to clean the exhaust gases in the new BluePerformance diesel. There is a separate building devoted to safely deactivating airbags, seat belt tensioners and the new crash-active headrests. BMW disposal specialists have developed a safety cabin with an extraction system that can be lowered over the car and an interface to the on-board electronics, specifically for this purpose. This means that all the pyrotechnic components can be neutralised within a few minutes.
BMW is patenting these ideas and at the same time, passing them on to the waste disposal plants. Other examples include a device for extracting used oil from shock absorbers through a hollow mandrel or a car lift tilt mechanism, developed in-house. This lifts and lowers the vehicle, so that all the petrol is safely drained from the recesses of the tank. Anything of any value is gradually removed. The catalysers contain valuable precious metals, undamaged components such as side panels, wheel rims or radios, can be sold as used spare parts, and some of the engines are reconditioned. The bodywork material is much in demand as a secondary raw material and right at the end, is turned into a compact cube by a vast crusher.
This is where BMW reutilization ends and the work of the shredder begins. This shreds the cubes into individual pieces the size of a fist. After shredding, magnets, eddy currents or screening are used for sorting, until only correctly separated and classified metals and plastics remain. This is a requirement for their reuse as a secondary raw material. BMW engineers use the experience gained by the recycling experts in the development of new vehicles. The easy and ecofriendly reutilisation of end-of-life vehicles is taken into consideration as early as the design stage. Which is why in the future, Torsten Winter will still be dicing up vehicles that are seemingly as good as new.
This WAS a BMW 7-series.
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