Together, the two companies will allow The Future is NEUTRAL organization to accelerate its activities in order to help itself become one of the leading companies in the circular economy in the automotive industry.

"Our common investment will allow us to accelerate towards completing the goal of offering an open circular economy platform that can be used by the entire automotive sector. We will do this by leveraging the existing activities and by offering new solutions for closed-loop recycling, from car to car", said Luca de Meo, CEO of Renault Group.

"By investing in Future is NEUTRAL together with Renault Group, SUEZ strengthens its capacity to support automotive players in their transition towards a green economy. Our knowledge in the recycling and waste process will make it possible for us to help the industry become less dependent on virgin materials", Sabrina Soussan, President and CEO of SUEZ added.

The contribution of the two companies for circular economy in the automotive industry

Renault Group and SUEZ will reunite their technical knowledge and their industrial capacities for The Future is NEUTRAL to build a new circular economy value chain "car-to-car".

The objective is supporting all players in the automotive industry in their efforts to limit their negative environmental efforts, to foresee the evolutions in regulations and to allow them to consolidate their efforts for recycled materials and parts coming from the circular economy.

The contribution of Renault Group:

  • covering the entire value chain of the automotive industry and the entire life cycle of vehicles, from design to end of life, including their usage;
  • the know-how for developing ecological automobiles, as well as training employees to get them ready for the green transition;
  • the industrial capacities of Refactory Flins, located in France, the first European factory dedicated to circular economy in the automotive industry, with activities including vehicle retrofitting and modernization of industrial robots.

The contribution of SUEZ:

  • know-how for recycling upstream vehicles (carmakers and equipment operators) and downstream materials (steelmaking facilities);
  • know-how for managing automotive waste (collection, sorting and verification of the materials);
  • industrial-scale capacity to produce constant flows of recycled materials for its customers.

Together, the two companies will be developing the following key activities: designs for future recycling, reversed logistics, the management of automotive waste and closed-loop recycling for the materials designed for new vehicle production on a "car-to-car" basis.

A unified strategy for circular economy in the automotive industry

Created by Renault Group, The Future is NEUTRAL offers complete solutions in circular economy:

for all automotive players, from builders and equipment manufacturers, to dealers, insurers and individual customers;

adapted to all stages of a vehicle's lifecycle, such as recycled materials for manufacturing, repaired parts or remanufacturing and even collecting, managing and recovering services for end-of-life vehicles.

"Many of our activities that belong to a circular economy value chain are already operational and profitable. We collaborate to integrate battery recycling as soon as possible in closed-loop and to drive industrial-scale operations, with the end goal of supporting the European car making industry transform into a circular one", added Jean-Philippe Bahuaud, General Director for The Future is NEUTRAL.

Every year in Europe, around 11 million vehicles are being taken off the roads. By using this resource, we can recover usable parts and extracting the materials that are good for recycling to implement them in production in order to limit the use of natural resources.