American Cars Are Back, The Recycling to Match Them Is Not

In July, President Trump returned to Michigan to tour the General Motors Proving Ground in Milford and highlight what the administration is calling an automotive renaissance - billions in new investment, expanded plants, new shifts, and thousands of jobs coming back to American soil.

That is the headline. Here is the story behind it that Washington is still missing.

A new report on plastics in automobiles lays out something every driver benefits from without ever thinking about it. Today's American cars are lighter and safer than they have ever been. And plastics are the reason. Advanced plastics and polymer composites now make up more than half the volume of a typical North American vehicle while accounting for less than 10 percent of its weight. Steel and aluminum out. Engineered plastics in. Lighter car. Safer car. Better mileage at the pump.

Look around the inside of a new vehicle and you can see it. Seat belts. Airbags. Sensors and cameras that stop the car before you can. Crash structures that absorb energy metal cannot. The touchscreen. The trim. The cushion you sit on. Every one of those gains is downstream of American chemistry and American manufacturing.

Now here is the problem.

When one of those vehicles reaches the end of its life, most of that plastic does not come back. It gets landfilled or shredded into low-value residue. Meanwhile, the European Union and Japan are moving fast on recycled-content requirements for new vehicles. What that means is simple. If we do not build the recycling capacity to recover those plastics here at home, American automakers get locked out of major export markets. Not because our cars are not the best but because Washington failed to build the back end of the supply chain.

The technology to recycle this plastic exists. Advanced recycling can process specialized automotive plastics such as seat cushions, bumpers, and battery housings that traditional mechanical recycling cannot touch. To achieve this, the US needs regulatory certainty for advanced recycling facilities, clear standards for recycled-content claims, and the will in Washington to treat automotive recycling as the strategic industry it obviously is.

This is what closing the loop looks like. American plastic in American cars, recovered by American workers, going back into American cars. More jobs in dismantling, sorting, and processing - the kind of blue-collar work that anchors communities. Fewer landfilled bumpers, seats, and battery housing. Export markets will be kept open in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, where cars get built with less foothold for foreign supply chains to exploit.

The auto renaissance is real. The vehicles rolling off American lines are lighter, safer, and smarter than anything the world has seen. The follow-through is the recycling infrastructure that keeps the whole industry competitive for the next decade.

American cars came back. The question left is whether Washington will build the recycling system that keeps them here.