Audi, together with its partners, is developing a recycling process for car windows. The pilot project, if successful, will see Audi adding another material into a closed material cycle on top of its use of recycled aluminium.

The pilot sees irreparable car windows being sent to the Reiling Glass Recycling facility in Germany where they are first broken up into small pieces and processed in order to remove any non-glass materials like plastic layers as well as metals and wires from heating filaments and antenna cables.

The resultant glass granulate is then segregated by type and colour, and is utilised by Saint-Gobain Glass, which mixes the recyclate with, among other things, quartz sand, sodium carbonate, and chalk to produce new sheets of glass. At the moment, the proportion of recyclate to other materials varies between 30% and 50%.

Audi states that recycling damaged glass means that less energy and raw material have to be used overall to produce windows, with the use of the recycled material reducing carbon emissions by up to 30% compared to manufacturing new glass alone. The use of processed recycled materials also makes it possible to reduce the demand for primary materials like quartz sand by retaining the high-grade car glass. Audi intends to use car windows produced this way in the Audi Q4 e-tron.