Sustainable material development for the industrial and automotive sectors

Con­ti­nen­tal is break­ing new ground in the devel­op­ment of sus­tain­able mate­r­i­al solu­tions: For the sec­ond time this year, the Hanover-based tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny has joined forces with the Berlin-based Inno­va­tion Net­work for Advanced Mate­ri­als (INAM) to launch the Con­ti­nen­tal Chal­lenge for start-ups and uni­ver­si­ty insti­tutes. The plas­tics experts from Ham­burg hope to gen­er­ate new ideas for the pro­duc­tion and recy­cling of plas­tic and rub­ber prod­ucts. The Con­ti­nen­tal Chal­lenge is one of the numer­ous ini­tia­tives launched by the com­pa­ny as part of its com­pre­hen­sive sus­tain­abil­i­ty roadmap in its anniver­sary year 2021. 

Material development an integral part of the sustainability roadmap

Con­ti­nen­tal has decid­ed to imple­ment one of the most com­pre­hen­sive sus­tain­abil­i­ty roadmaps in the auto­mo­tive sup­ply sec­tor, paving the way for a new glob­al indus­try bench­mark with com­plete cli­mate neu­tral­i­ty along the val­ue chain. On the way to a sus­tain­able econ­o­my with 100 per­cent cli­mate neu­tral­i­ty, 100 per­cent emis­sion-free mobil­i­ty and indus­tries, 100 per­cent cir­cu­lar econ­o­my and 100 per­cent respon­si­ble val­ue chain by the end of 2050 at the lat­est, the pro­gram not only includes the com­pa­ny’s own pro­duc­tion, but also delib­er­ate­ly focus­es on the upstream stages and end-of-life recy­cling of prod­ucts. For this rea­son, the com­pa­ny was already rely­ing on plas­tics exper­tise with­in its own ranks at the end of 2020 and expand­ed devel­op­ment activ­i­ties relat­ing to high-per­for­mance plas­tics in lab­o­ra­to­ries, where experts in plas­tics extru­sion are work­ing on new solu­tions for indus­try, among others. 

Recycling challenge for start-ups

The Chal­lenge is now break­ing new ground in mate­ri­als and process devel­op­ment for indus­try. “By col­lab­o­rat­ing with young start-ups and uni­ver­si­ty insti­tutes, we hope to give a boost to the world of mate­ri­als, both for the pro­duc­tion and recy­cling of our prod­ucts,” describes Ran Esch­er, respon­si­ble for part­ner man­age­ment in the indus­tri­al division. 

“The start-up scene world­wide is cre­ative, inno­v­a­tive and agile, and uni­ver­si­ties often pro­duce excit­ing ideas from basic research,” adds Dr. Daniel Biens­feld, who super­vis­es the com­pe­ti­tion par­tic­i­pants from Con­ti­nen­tal’s side. “But what they often lack is the process know-how and tech­ni­cal equip­ment to trans­late their good ideas into a pro­duc­tion envi­ron­ment and devel­op them into a mar­ketable prod­uct.” The com­pa­ny offers this oppor­tu­ni­ty to Chal­lenge winners. 

An impor­tant part­ner in this is INAM, whose net­work includes numer­ous inno­v­a­tive play­ers from the field of mate­ri­als development.

“We are very pleased to imple­ment this sec­ond Inno­va­tion Chal­lenge togeth­er with Con­ti­nen­tal and to sup­port them in mak­ing their prod­ucts future-proof. In this con­text, advanced and inno­v­a­tive mate­ri­als offer ground­break­ing solu­tions for the cur­rent chal­lenges in terms of sus­tain­abil­i­ty — but are cur­rent­ly often only con­sid­ered sec­ondary to dig­i­tal innovations.”

- Oliv­er Has­se, Man­ag­ing Director

This coop­er­a­tion start­ed back in spring 2021 with the first Chal­lenge, which looked for solu­tions for flu­id man­age­ment in vehi­cles, includ­ing for cool­ing and air-con­di­tion­ing lines in elec­tric cars. The experts are now con­tin­u­ing to work with the four select­ed final­ists on con­cepts for zero-emis­sion mobil­i­ty. The sec­ond chal­lenge, launched in mid-Octo­ber, is now focus­ing on new ener­gy-effi­cient recy­cling process­es that break down poly­mer plas­tic com­pos­ites back into their indi­vid­ual com­po­nents, such as monomers. The goal is to be able to ful­ly reuse these recy­cled raw mate­ri­als. “We are very excit­ed to see what solu­tions the par­tic­i­pat­ing teams come up with in the com­ing weeks,” says Escher.