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Mercedes-Benz Explores Making Car Parts From UBQ’s Recycled Household Garbage

It sounds like an unlikely team-up: Leading car luxury brand Mercedes-Benz, and Israeli household garbage recycler UBQ.

But it’s happening, in large part because UBQ is no ordinary recycler. As we wrote in an earlier post, the company has cracked the hardest part of household garbage disposal: How to recycle the unrecyclable stuff like food waste, contaminated paper, used diapers. UBQ’s proprietary process is able to recycle 100% of household garbage, converting it into injection-moldable, plastic-like nurdles.

Since we last looked in on them, the products made from UBQ’s eponymous material has grown:

And their lineup is apparently set to grow again–this time into cars. Following an exploration with Mercedes-Benz that began in February, and which yielded unspecified “advanced developments,” M-B parent company Daimler has paired UBQ up with an automotive supplier of theirs, Motherson. “Motherson is currently testing and evaluating the incorporation of UBQ™ in the production of a range of interior and exterior automobile parts,” UBQ writes.

Here’s a video covering the team-up, which is part of an innovation incubator called Startup Autobahn: