OSLO (Reuters) - At least 25 percent of the plastics used in new Volvo car models from 2025 will be from recycled materials, the Chinese-owned company said on Monday in an anti-pollution plan praised by the United Nations.
Recycled plastics - such as from fishing nets or old bottles in car dashboards or carpets, would not affect safety or quality, Stuart Templar, director for sustainability at Volvo Cars, told Reuters.
We think this makes business sense, he said.
Many big companies are designing products that can be recycled after use to limit pollution. Volvos plan goes a step further by building ever more recycled materials into its production lines.
Volvo Cars is committed to minimising its global environmental footprint, Hkan Samuelsson, president and CEO of Volvo Cars, which is owned by Chinas Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co Ltd, said in a statement.
Volvo said it was in talks with plastics producers to achieve its ambition that from 2025, at least 25 percent of the plastics used in every newly launched Volvo car will be made from recycled material.
Volvo sold 570,000 cars last year, with about five percent of plastics in its cars currently made from recycled materials.
Volvo unveiled a test model of its XC60 T8 plug-in hybrid SUV in Gothenburg, Sweden, that it said looks identical to the existing car except that some of its plastic parts were made from recycled materials.
The carpet, for instance, had fibres made from PET plastic bottles, old Volvo car seats were used in sound-absorbing material under the bonnet and fishing nets and ropes were used in the tunnel console - between the passenger and driver seats.
The United Nations welcomed Volvos plan. More than eight million tonnes of plastics end up in the oceans every year, threatening marine life from fish stocks to coral reefs.
As far as we are aware this is a first an attempt to source waste as a raw material for a new vehicle, Erik Solheim, head of the U.N. Environment Programme in Nairobi, told Reuters.
We need to see a situation in which plastic waste begins to have more value and the processes to transform it into something new will also advance, he said.
In 2017, Volvo said that it would electrify all new cars launched after 2019. Last month it said its aim was that fully electric cars would make up half of its global sales by 2025.

By JOHN HOLUSHAAUG. 28, 1991 This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to . As complex plastics increasingly replace metals in cars and appliances, recycling these products becomes a larger problem. Attention is now turning to a high-temperature process called pyrolysis that breaks down plastics into burnable oil and gas.Auto makers and plastic suppliers hope to demonstrate within a few years that this technique has great commercial potential. Environmental advocates question whether pyrolysis is truly recycling, but backers of the technique say it is far better than throwing the plastic away.Pyrolysis breaks materials down by heating them at high temperatures in the absence of air. Because no oxygen is present, plastics and rubber left over from cars do not burn, as they would in an incinerator. Instead, the heat, about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, breaks the complex hydrocarbons down into simpler molecules, producing a liquid resembling heating oil and a combustible gas, along with some ash. Potential for PollutionBecause nothing except the fuel for the pyrolysis reactor is burned, the technique may cause less air pollution than incinerators. But if the gas produced by pyrolysis is used to heat the reactor once it reaches operating temperature, as most plans envision, pollution will result from plastic and rubber that contain chlorine or sulfur, said Raymond Machacek, of A. D. Little, a consulting firm.AdvertisementVinyl plastics contain chlorine, and sulfur is used in the vulcanization of rubber. The chlorine and sulfur atoms tend to form hydrochloric and sulfuric acids, which are toxic pollutants, Mr. Machacek said.AdvertisementThe growing amount of plastic in automobiles causes grumbling among metal recyclers, because it results in more worthless material that must be disposed of in landfills, at additional cost. Unlike plastic soda bottles, which can easily be reprocessed, most of the plastics left after cars are shredded and the metals extracted are composites of materials that have been further contaminated by paint and adhesives."Very often you will have incompatible plastics glued together," said Richard L. Klimisch, an environmental specialist at the General Motors Corporation's Technical Center here. In addition, many of the plastics are a type known as thermosets, which cannot be melted down and used again, like the material in soda bottles.A car on exhibit at the technical center, cut away to display new sound-deadening insulation materials, also inadvertently illustrates how difficult these new materials might be to recycle. Several of the insulating materials are simply labeled, "Complex blend of various stuff."Researchers at the G.M. Technical Center are running perhaps the largest pyrolysis trials, but an association that includes several major plastic and rubber makers, including Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Dow Chemical, Eagle-Picher, Allied-Signal and Owens-Corning Fiberglas, is also experimenting with the technique.Industry trends make it clear that metal recyclers are going to have to find ways to cope with more plastic. "Cost is driving the industry to greater use of plastic," said Irvin E. Poston, a plastics specialist at G.M.He notes that plastic body parts are lighter than steel, requiring less costly tooling to shape and improving fuel economy. The entire outer body of G.M.'s new line of mini-vans, like the Chevrolet Lumina APV, is made of composite plastic. Pyrolysis recovers the energy content of plastic after its useful life is finished, he said.Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box.Invalid email address. Please re-enter.You must select a newsletter to subscribe to.View all New York Times newsletters.Plastics suppliers say they may be able to use the ash produced in pyrolysis as well, particularly if the feedstock is uncontaminated scrap from the production process. Since some of the composites used in auto body panels consist of 50 percent inert filler, clean ash might be substituted for the limestone used now. But it is less likely that ash from shredder residue contaminated with other substances could be used.Industry officials have been quick to label pyrolysis a form of recycling, but some environmentalists say it is similar to incineration, because the material is destroyed and some energy is used. "We do not consider incineration as recycling on this side of the environmental fence, and a lot of people put pyrolysis in the same category," said Lisa Collaton, a solid-waste specialist at the Environmental Action Foundation in Washington.AdvertisementAdded John Ruston of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York, "Pyrolysis is not recycling; it is pyrolysis."Mr. Poston said G.M. and some plastic suppliers had run pyrolysis tests on shredder residue at two operations for processing old tires. He said that once the material reached operating temperature, it gave off enough gas to be self-sustaining without external fuel. The recovered oil is available for sale.He said the company and its suppliers planned larger-scale tests to see if the approach was technically and economically feasible in commercial quantities. "We have done 5,000 pounds; now we are going to do a run of 50,000 pounds so we can see the true economics," Mr. Poston said. More Plastic in CarsA group of plastic parts suppliers predicts that the amount of thermoset materials going into cars will almost double by 1995, to 423 million pounds, from 242 million pounds in 1990. That is in addition to thermoplastic materials, which can be melted and used again.Officials involved in recycling say pyrolysis may have a place in materials disposal, after more valuable plastic parts of old cars and appliances have been pulled out for recycling. "Pyrolysis can be part of the waste-management approach, but we should not give up on recovering various plastic streams for re-use," said Michael Fisher, a technical director at the Council for Solid Waste Solutions, a plastics industry group.Noting that it took metal recyclers several decades to refine techniques for separating different metals and alloys, he said that the plastics industry was just beginning the process. "There are 20 different types of plastic on an automobile," he said. "Some will be recycled, and some will go for pyrolysis."Herschel Cutler, executive director of the Institute for Scrap Recycling Industries, said the institute was interested in pyrolysis, despite economic, technical and pollution problems with some other experiments. "There have been some plants in the past that were dismal failures," he said.Nevertheless, he said, with the amount of plastic in cars rising, "we are still looking at it." He added, "We may see a new generation of pyrolytic activity that really can convert materials to oil, gas and carbon black."A version of this article appears in print on August 28, 1991, on Page D00009 of the National edition with the headline: . Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

CNC machines offer precision machining to all. No matter what type of CNC machine it is that is being used, you can pretty much guarantee that it will offer precision machining that is absolutely unbelievable.
The machine itself is responsible for a lot of the precision; however, the operator and the programmers play a big role as well as the facility itself. Proper temperature control and good conditions allow for accuracy as much as 20 millionths in some instances.
Tolerances of CNC machines completely depend upon the type of CNC machine that is being used to complete the project. Each machine offers different tolerances. Of course a machine that operates off of several different axes will allow for closer, more specific tolerances. The four and five axes machines can produce specifically design parts that need precise measurements in order to work. Very tight tolerances are possible.
Exacting tolerances of 0.00004" to 0.004" is possible. (Otherwise, one to one hundred microns) Because these machines are computer numerical controlled (CNC) the possibility that production can be this precise is easy. No more do operators have to make sure that the placement of the material is precise and so on in order to achieve these standards. The computer technology can grind, cut, sand, etc to the dimensions specified by the program. They will be extremely close if not all the way there.
One of the great benefits of CNC machining is the ability of high tolerances on a repetitive basis. Because the machines are computer operated, repetitive work is easy to perform. The machine keeps running to the programs specifications until the work is complete. Another job that comes months down the road that has the same specifications can be performed easy. It just takes the downloading of the original program and the exact same specifications and tolerances will be repeated with this batch of work as well. Repetitive, high tolerance machining is one of the added benefits of CNC machining.
Tolerances are directly related to the quality of the CNC machines. This is why you will find that different companies who offer CNC machining services can offer different tolerances. Some may offer 0.001" tolerances and others will offer a variety of different tolerances. The higher the quality of the CNC machine and the programs that operate it, the better tolerance that you will be able to get.
Programmers, machinists, operators and the machines, have to work in direct relationship to one another. If all aspects are all the same page, the better the performance. If you have quality programmers and machinists, you will be able to get better performance out of your machines. It takes individuals who are skilled and knowledgeable in the area of CNC machining to perform to the best of the machines ability.
If you have any questions about ask your dealer of the CNC machines. They should be able to answer any questions that you may have and can explain the whole process better to you.