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Recycling has become, and will continue to be one of the key technical issues for the automotive industry's role in protection of the global environment. Continued increases in vehicle registrations and use of non-metallic automotive materials will present a increasing opportunity for the utilization of currently wasted resources. Toyota has set up a management body and continues efforts to establish the necessary technologies and strategies for reduction and recovery of these wasted materials as valuable resources. Automakers worldwide are currently investigating numerous technically feasible recycling methodologies. These technologies may be useful for post-use vehicle recycling, but will require further development. It is important to focus current efforts on investigation of as many of these as possible in cooperation with related organizations.

Approximately twenty-five percent of automotive shredder residue (ASR) consists of the many different types of plastics typically utilized in a vehicle. In order to recover and re-use this material from the ASR, certain separation techniques for each polymer are needed. This paper will discuss the feasibility of applying the selective dissolution method to the recycling of commingled automotive plastics. In the first stage, an instrument panel consisting of more than twelve different polymers from Toyota Motor Manufacturing U.S.A., Inc. (TMM) in Kentucky, was selected to study. These polymers are typical of materials used in automotive applications and represent the variety of polymers used widely in other automotive parts. Next, it was necessary to fully understand each virgin polymer's material composition and properties, so that precise analytical data and physical properties of the recovered polymers could be compared and discussed.