Weee in the Auto Industry Recycling Processes

Recycling of electrical and electronic waste has received significant attention in recent decades to extract value-added materials for their recovery and reuse. Modernized recycling services integrated into smart manufacturing involve new component design processes using new materials that can be easily disassembled and recycled, thus encouraging the development of the smart car industry, especially in terms of design that will increasingly rely on the production of equipment that can ensure the 3 R's: Recovery, Reuse and Recycling. More than 50 different metals are needed in the design of a classic vehicle, along with other raw materials, so some of these metals, such as tantalum, indium, niobium, or rare earth elements, are considered critical by the European Commission. The transition to fully electric vehicles will result in the integration of more electrical and electronic devices, motors, and batteries, which will require an increasing number of critical metals such as Au and Ag. The recovery of these metals requires the development of recycling services specialized in their extraction. This transformation of smart manufacturing creates unprecedented challenges in the implementation of eco-design measures to increase the functional recyclability of these WEEEs, measures of connectivity, capacity, safety, and security of smart manufacturing processes to bring the next generation of cars to the market.