The BMW Group Recycling and Dismantling Centre acquires new recycling-knowledge while taking apart pre-series vehicles to achieve maximum efficiency.
The end of a vehicle’s life is not a sight for car lovers, especially if they have weak nerves: metal groans, glass shatters. An excavator goes into action, its steel grapple grabbing at the engine block. A jerk, a few flying parts, and what was once the heart of a BMW vehicle hangs in the air.
But it doesn’t stop there. The excavator changes tools. It rips the roof of the car open and tears out the leather seats, the upholstery, the instrument panel. Then, with almost surgical precision, the excavator seizes the front of the wiring harness and rolls up the multicolor tangle of cables until the bundle dangles beneath the excavator arm.
In this nondescript industrial estate in the Munich suburb of Unterschleißheim several thousand cars undergo this treatment every year. The BMW Group Recycling and Dismantling Centre (RDC) has been here since 1994, mainly dismantling pre-series vehicles, one-offs from testing and development that are not authorized for sale, tearing them to pieces and recycling them in the brightly lit workshops.