You probably don’t think about what happens to a car when it dies. Not the glorious part where it smashes through its last MOT with a puff of blue smoke, but the afterlife. Most end-of-life vehicles get the same treatment: a date with a giant shredder that turns decades of German engineering into something resembling metallic muesli. The leftovers — a gory cocktail of foams, plastics, films, paint flakes and all the other bits too ugly to recycle — usually end up incinerated. Job done. Smoke in the sky. Circle of life, Simba.
But Porsche, BASF, and a bio-tech partner with a name only an engineer’s mother could love (BEST Bioenergy and Sustainable Technologies GmbH), have decided that simply burning the leftovers isn’t very 21st century. Instead, they’ve taken this Frankenstein’s porridge of car junk and found a way to recycle it into something useful. And not just any something — but steering wheels. Yes, that plastic you once spilt your McDonald’s Coke on could end up guiding a 911 around the Nürburgring.
The trick? Gasification. Imagine cooking rubbish at temperatures hotter than a Nürburgring brake disc, until it turns into a pristine synthesis gas. That gas then goes back into BASF’s industrial network, gets turned into fresh polyurethane, and—voilà!—new steering wheels. No fossil fuels involved. Instead, the process is powered by automotive waste and bio-based raw materials like wood chips. Think of it as fine dining for car parts.
What makes this clever isn’t just that it works — but that it works on stuff too awkward to recycle the normal way. Chemical recycling can handle the messy, mixed plastics that mechanical recycling just waves a white flag at. According to Porsche’s Head of Sustainability, Dr. Robert Kallenberg, projects like this aren’t just about ticking the ESG box. It’s about future-proofing performance cars in a world that increasingly hates anything with a tailpipe. “We’re testing new technologies to tap into recyclate sources we couldn’t use before,” he says. Translation: Porsche wants your future Taycan steering wheel to be part tree bark, part old Cayenne bumper.
BASF, meanwhile, calls it part of the bigger puzzle. As Martin Jung, their Performance Materials boss, puts it: mechanical recycling is the bread and butter, but chemical recycling is the fancy cheese on top — crucial if we ever want to stop burning mountains of plastic waste like it’s the 1990s.
And here’s the kicker: the raw materials this process spits out are apparently as good as the real thing. High-performance plastics that meet all safety standards. Which means Porsche could, in theory, start fitting recycled components into safety-critical bits of the car without any compromise.
So next time you see a Porsche steering wheel, remember: it might have lived a previous life as a headliner, a seat foam, or a dash trim in some poor Boxster that got punted off a Bavarian B-road. Recycling, but make it Stuttgart.
Source: Porsche
