ReMaDe: Resourceful Manufacturing & Design

Clean Sheets: Material and Vehicle Design for High-Value Recycling of Aluminum and Steel Automotive Sheet

The Clean Sheet Project is dedicated to examining scalable strategies for increasing the end-of-life scrap recycled content of automotive aluminum and steel sheet.

Precompetitive research

Two-year, $2million project. 1:1 Cost Share with Federal Sponsor: DOE’S REMADE Institute

7 Team Members from industry, academia, national labs, & trade associations

Five project tasks examining actions across the life cycle for increasing recycled contents

Start date: May 2022

Clean Sheet Symposium:

Watch the morning session of the Clean Sheet Symposium (July 28th 2022) featuring talks from industry experts and academics on the opportunities and barriers to increasing high-quality recycling of automotive sheet metal

Published & Working Papers

Published

Tsai et al. 2026. Increasing post-consumer recycled content in steel automotive body sheet: examining scrap limits in the electric arc furnace using a linear optimization

Tsai et al. 2026. Cross life cycle opportunities for increasing the post-consumer recycled content of automotive aluminum body sheet in the United States. [Working paper]

Heidari et al. (2025) Circular economy pathways for decarbonizing aluminum and steel automotive body sheet components in the United States

Zhu, Y., Deng, S., Cooper, D. R., Tsai, A., Heidari, M., Liao, J. (2025). Dynamic Material Flow Analysis of Aluminum in the United States: Historical and Projected Data from 1967 to 2050 [Data set], University of Michigan - Deep BlueData.

Cooper et al. (2023) Preliminary Work Towards a Cross Lifecycle in Design Tool for Increased High-quality Metal Recycling. Proceedings of the 1st REMADE Manufacturing USA Institute Conference

Zhu et al. (2025) Analysis of scrap flows from recycling aluminum-intensive vehicles in the United States: Insights from a case study on the F-150

Tsai et al. (2025) Mechanical and Corrosion Testing of High Recycled Content Aluminum Automotive Body Sheet Alloys

Pending

Tsai et al. (2024) Development and mechanical testing of high-recycled content automotive sheet aluminum alloys

Tsai et al. (2024) Evaluating the technical potential of fractional crystallization to increase the recycled content of U.S. aluminum

Berman et al. (2024) Texture evolution during hot plane strain compression of 5xxx-series aluminum alloys with high recycled alloying elements

Please view this website on a desktop for full content.