The component is a seat bench floor for a motorbike. The special feature of the award-winning seat bench is that thermoplastic PP-GF sandwiches are back-injected with glass fibre-reinforced, biomass-balanced PP using the cold-shot process. As a result, material can be saved for the production phase and construction space for the use phase, thus increasing the storage volume under the bench.
In terms of a sustainable end-of-life scenario, the selected material combination provides a good solution for closed-loop recycling. Although the fibre tapes used, which consist of load-path-oriented long fibres, are shredded during recycling, the fibres then serve as reinforcement for the short-fibre-reinforced injection moulding material used to produce the three-dimensional substructures. By feeding in fresh long fibres or long fibre tapes, multiple recycling of the seat base is possible, similar to paper recycling.
