From the perspective of environmental engineering, the high-value recovery and closed-loop recycling of plastics from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) represent an important pathway for reducing solid-waste generation, resource consumption, and life-cycle carbon emissions in the automotive sector. In response to domestic and international requirements for circular-economy development and recycled-content management, this study selects automotive headlamp plastics as a representative waste-plastic stream and constructs a full-chain closed-loop recycling pathway covering ELV dismantling, plastic recovery and pelletizing, material modification, and re-application in new vehicles. An LCC-LCA coupling framework is used to evaluate both the economic feasibility and life-cycle environmental performance of the pathway. The results provide environmental-engineering evidence and practical demonstration support for improving automotive waste-plastic resource recovery, reducing carbon emissions, and promoting high-value material circulation in China's automotive industry.
Meng et al. (Tue,) studied this question.