Kautex Textron composite battery enclosure made with recycled polyamide
To demonstrate its focus on designing for circularity within the automotive market, Kautex Textron has developed prototype composite battery enclosures made from glass fiber and polyamide (PA) that is 100% sourced from recycled fishing nets. Source | Kautex Textron
“We expect in the next few years that sustainability will be a must in the automotive industry. But by offering sustainability solutions now, we can learn the best ways to do it, and also differentiate ourselves from others in the current market,” says Sophie Louis, global director of energy and sustainability at automotive Tier 1 supplier Kautex Textron (Bonn, Germany).
Founded in 1935, Kautex Textron designs and manufactures a variety of solutions for use in the automotive industry — blow-molded plastic tanks and related solutions for fuel systems, sensor cleaning solutions, camshafts, industrial packaging and, most recently, thermoplastic composite and composite-metal hybrid battery enclosures and underbody protection. Today, the company operates more than 30 plants in 13 countries, and continues to expand its offerings to meet market trends toward autonomous, smart, electric and hybrid vehicles.
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Alongside goals toward innovation, digitalization and elevating company culture, one of the core pillars in Kautex Textron’s mission is “executing sustainable business models,” explains Louis.
plastic automotive fuel tank from Kautex Textron
Kautex Textron got its start as a specialist in plastic blow molding processes, which the company still uses today to produce a variety of plastic fuel tank systems for the automotive industry. Source | Kautex Textron
hybrid plastic automotive tank from Kautex Textron
“We always talk about sustainability in three dimensions — people, profit and planet. You have to find a balance between those three things,” she says. She adds that sustainability tends to branch out into other pillars in the company’s vision as well. For example, digitalization and data are key to reducing emissions, and a priority on sustainability tends to positively affect a company’s culture.
She explains that Kautex’s current sustainability focus “is on decarbonization and circularity.” Regarding the former, in 2022 Kautex Textron pledged to be carbon neutral by 2050, with intermediate goals by 2030 to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 80% and Scope 3 emissions by 30%. The company’s roadmap was validated in 2024 by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi, London, U.K.), a climate action organization that develops standards, tools and guidance for companies to set greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.
In addition to this validation, Kautex Textron is also committed to the Sustainability Development Goals outlined by the United Nations Global Compact. In 2024 the company achieved the highest rating, Platinum, by business sustainability ratings provider EcoVadis (Paris, France). It has also achieved an A- rating from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP, London, U.K.), an organization that helps companies measure and report environmental data.
Regarding circularity, the company has built a framework for designing its products for sustainability and circularity. This has led to a new materials solutions initiative called Green+ (more on this below).
What led the company to take all of these steps? “First, due to our own strategic direction as a company to lower our CO2 footprint. But we also have increasing demand from the OEM, who is our customer. They are asking for more and more sustainable options, with a lot of variability depending on the customer and the region they’re from. But it’s clear that sustainability requests are increasing,” Louis says.
“Another reason is that regulation is coming in Europe within the next few years, and this will likely have impacts for the entire automotive industry, not just in Europe. The legal framework is changing and becoming much more constrained.” For example, the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), which went into effect in 2023, requires a larger number of companies to report sustainability data. “Companies will have to be very transparent in reporting sustainability performance the same way that they report finance data,” Louis says. “It will put it in the same level of scrutiny and in the future audited the same way finance data is. That is a big change, because it puts a lot of emphasis on the data.”
In addition, the EU’s proposed Directive on End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV Directive) sets forth guidelines for improving the circularity of automotive vehicles, including a directive that 25% of plastic within a vehicle should come from recycled sources.
Reducing Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions
Practically, what does it look like to achieve the company’s emissions goals?
What are Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions?
Measurement and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions such as CO2 are generally classified into three “scopes”:
Scope 1 emissions are direct emissions produced by a company.
Examples: On-site gas heat or power generation, certain manufacturing processes that emit greenhouse gases
Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions such as energy purchased by a company but not produced on-site directly.
Examples: Purchased electricity, heat, steam
Scope 3 emissions are indirect emissions produced through the supply chain.
Example: Emissions produced through manufacturing raw materials
To reduce Scope 1 emissions, which are direct emissions owned by a company, and Scope 2 emissions, indirect emissions from purchased electricity, heat or similar energy sources, Louis says the company is working toward energy efficiency and use of renewable energy.
“Energy efficiency isn’t anything new — we’ve been working on this for years. But now we have new technology like energy monitoring that we can do as a company, and we can use AI, so we have better tools to further increase the efficiency of our machines. That in turn affects Scope 2 emissions, because if you need less energy in the first place, you’re buying less electricity,” Louis says.
She explains that the company has installed energy monitoring systems in some of its production lines, which grants visibility into the live energy use at the plant and allow for comparison between different machines.
In addition, Kautex Textron has worked toward installing solar panels on the roofs of some of its plants, or establishing purchasing agreements with utility companies to purchase all renewable energy. “We’re aiming to have all green energy by 2040 at the latest,” she says.
Scope 3 emissions, which include indirect emissions from upstream and downstream supply chain activities, are the hardest for any company to control. “For Scope 1 and 2, we can create a clear roadmap controlled by ourselves, but Scope 3 involves our suppliers, and therefore it becomes a bigger challenge,” Louis says.
In the case of plastics, emissions from raw materials production constitute the largest emissions in the supply chain. Louis says, “What can we do? We work with the suppliers to be sure that they are working toward the same goals that we are, and that we’re sourcing sustainable materials, and Green+ really came out of that.”
Data-based design for sustainability
On the product level, Kautex Textron has created its own process for “sustainable engineering” — sometimes referred to as design for sustainability or design for circularity — in the development of new parts.
The key, Louis says, is materials selection for all components of a part, and the key to sustainable materials selection is knowing the CO2footprint — also commonly called the carbon footprint — of all available raw materials.
About three years ago, Kautex Textron internally developed a tool that calculates the carbon footprint for products during the engineering phase, based on raw material data from the product’s bill of material.
“At that time, we did not find an easy tool that could be implemented, and we needed a tool for our designers to calculate the carbon footprint of a product they’re designing, in the same way that they can simulate mechanical constraints and other things. So we developed an app which is now linked to our engineering system,” Louis says.
The app, called D2CO2, uses data — which can include, for example, energy or water consumption during the materials’ manufacture, transportation emissions and other information — is either input manually if material suppliers provide this information, or can come from a database like Ecoinvent. In either case, the app calculates carbon emissions for all materials used within the design of a particular part.
Kautex Textron's sustainability design process
The company uses an internally developed app and database for evaluating the CO2footprint of all materials within a part design. These results can then be presented to the customer to help inform final material decisions. Source | Kautex Textron
Since its development, D2CO2 has been validated by certification body Dekra (Stuttgart, Germany), ensuring that its methodology and data follow ISO 14040 standards.
“This has been good for us in several ways,” Louis notes. “First, it got us started measuring things. I strongly believe that what is not measured cannot be progressed and worked on. Second, this has been good because it allows us to show our customers what we can bring to them in terms of improvement of CO2 footprint, and make it clear that we are being transparent and can also offer different options based on the footprint of different materials, as well as other standard things like cost and properties.”
As useful as this tool is though, she adds that materials emissions information is only one part of sustainable engineering and choosing a sustainable raw material. Of equal importance for achieving circularity: Recyclability and recoverability.
What’s the difference? Both terms express the ability of a material to be reused at the part’s end of life. “Recyclability” calculates the percentage of a part that can be physically separated and recycled for another use. “Recoverability” is a broader term encompassing both recycling and any energy that can be recovered through incineration.
“Based on ISO methodology, we’ve integrated recyclability, recoverability and CO2 footprint calculations into our design phase. It shows where we stand, and possible improvements. The tool makes it very transparent and is a good supporting document for use with customers,” Louis explains.
Beyond reporting, she says these metrics also enable the design team to make choices that eliminate unnecessary components or materials, consider both repair within a part’s lifetime and end-of-life (EOL) scenarios, and that enable easy disassembly to aid recycling. Kautex Textron can also provide customers with a disassembly manual.
After setting up this process, the company realized that it needed a more visible way to communicate its sustainability work with customers. This led to the launch in 2024 of its Green+ initiative.
Green+: Recycled and biomass-based feedstocks
The Green+ label goes on any automotive product Kautex Textron develops that incorporates at least 25% recycled or 20% biomass-based plastic materials.
Perhaps the biggest challenge at the moment is sourcing these materials from a supply chain that isn’t quite mature yet. Louis says, “The market is changing a lot. You have newcomers — the companies working only with recycled or biomass-based materials — and then you have legacy suppliers of virgin materials who are now introducing newer recycled or biomass-based materials. We’ve been screening the market, not only in Europe but everywhere, since our products are global.”
These efforts have led the company to branch out and work with an increasing and changing number of materials suppliers than ever before.
PA 6 life cycle assessment data from Kautex Textron
An example CO2footprint comparison between biomass-based and virgin plastics, steel or aluminum for the same part. Louis notes the importance of comparing materials from specific regions or companies when possible, because differences in manufacturing production can affect emissions data. Source | Kautex Textron
“We’ve been doing benchmarking with data sheet comparisons, and looking into the best candidates, which materials have the best characteristics on the technical side, and then we start sampling and doing tests and validation comparing different materials. It’s an ongoing process,” Louis says.
“Biomass-based” plastics generally serve as a simple drop-in replacement for the original, typically petroleum-based counterparts, and show the same mechanical properties. The only difference is that the feedstock for a biomass-based material is typically some sort of carbon-based biomass — “ideally waste biomass, such as residue plant-based cooking oil, for example, rather than from plants grown in competition with food agriculture,” Louis emphasizes — versus a carbon-based fossil fuel feedstock.
process for developing bio based plastics kautex textron
The production of bio-based plastics (in this case high-density polyethylene, HDPE) starts from a bio-based source such as waste biomass versus a fossil fuel-based precursor material, but much of the process and resulting product remains the same. Source | Kautex Textron
Recycled plastics, in this case, refers to those that are manufactured from feedstock that is reclaimed from plastic products collected at their EOL. For this type of recycling, these products are typically broken down chemically into their original components that can be reinserted into the manufacturing process.
In both cases, companies supplying plastics with a percentage of biomass-based or recycled content tend to do so using a mass balance approach. “For us, it operates a bit like buying green electricity,” Louis says. “It’s the same product, but you’re doing the work to make sure it’s coming from a sustainable source as much as possible.”
What is mass balance?
Many plastic/resin manufacturers are beginning to offer or transition to biomass-based or recycled materials.
However, it is often not possible at the outset to manufacture greener materials on separate production lines than conventional fossil fuel-based products.
“Mass balance” has become a common approach for tracking the amount of bio-based or recycled material that is input into the process versus fossil fuel-based material.
Companies using this approach mix a certain percentage of bio/recycled material into their conventional process. The result is that the company’s products as a whole contain a certain amount of sustainable material, but any individual product may contain a larger or small mix of this material.
How to choose between recycled or biomass-based products? Louis explains that there are pros and cons to each, which can make either more suitable for a particular product or customer: “Biomass-based comes at a higher price point [than virgin or recycled plastic] but it is the easiest sustainable solution, because it’s exactly the same as the original. Recycled material is cheaper, but because it is coming from a product that has been used already, it may deviate in some properties [compared to] virgin material. All recycled material has to be tested and validated first.”
She cites an example of a crush test that the company performed to evaluate a vehicle battery enclosure made from 25% recycled polyamide (PA). Compared to an enclosure with all virgin PA, the recycled version showed a slight deterioration, “but within the margin of what customers find acceptable,” Louis says. “The results were actually much better than we were expecting. And this is all still a work in progress, as we continue to validate all of our materials.”
Pentatonic Green+ battery enclosures
In 2024, the company launched Green+ at the European and North American versions of the Battery Show with a display of demonstrator vehicle battery enclosures made from PA that is 100% recycled from fishing nets discarded in the ocean.
kautex textron green+ battery enclosures on display at Battery Show 2024
Kautex Textron first displayed its Green+ Pentatonic battery enclosures at the 2024 Battery Shows in Europe and North America (pictured). Source | CW
Part of the company’s Pentatonic battery enclosure platform — which also includes demonstrators made from virgin PA or polypropylene (PP) — the displayed Green+ battery enclosures are manufactured via injection molded glass fiber-reinforced composites with 25% recycled polymer.
Louis says she is unable to disclose the supplier partner that they worked with on these demonstrators, but that they continue working with the supply chain to source and test the properties of recycled PA.
The use of recycled PP from fishnets is also under investigation. Why the choice to demonstrate use of both PA and PP? Louis explains that when it comes to use of recycled materials, availability is still quite a challenge, and the company needs to be able to adapt its products to what material is most available. “Our partners are working with two different types of fishing nets — in the U.S. fishing nets are typically made from a PA base, and in Europe it’s typically PP,” she says.
A recycling partner cleans, sorts and shreds the collected nets, processing them into pellets of material that can be used in injection molding.
Just the beginning
“Sustainability within the automotive industry is a differentiating factor for us,” Louis emphasizes. “With coming regulations and also with customer demand, there’s increasing opportunity for the automotive and packaging industries to be more sustainable and to find these innovative solutions, and so we’ve set up a platform to help us do that for our customers.”
plastic industrial packaging and bottles
The company plans to extend its Green+ efforts to additional products coming soon. Source | Kautex Textron
Beyond its current Green+ Pentatonic demonstrators, Kautex Textron is actively pursuing use of recycled or bio-based materials in additional products. For example, the company already produces plastic blow-molded washer fluid tanks with high amounts of recycled material, and plans to launch in 2025 a Green+ version that contains 100% recycled content, with additional products to follow.
“What we’re doing is just the beginning,” Louis notes. “Ultimately we’re trying to attain a more systematic inclusion of recycled material into all of our products, and we’re taking big steps in that direction.”