Under the banner “Design the Future, Hack the Waste: The Full-Lifecycle Mobility Challenge,” the ZEvRA EU Project joined forces with key European mobility networks to address core bottlenecks in lightweight design, circular manufacturing, and cross-sector material adoption.
Held on 22 July, the hackathon was organised through the joint leadership of the European Lightweight Cluster Alliance (ELCA), the European Railway Clusters Initiative (ERCI), and innovation consultancy Bax & Company, with ZEvRA acting as the core project collaborator.
A hackathon (a blend of “hack” and “marathon”) is a fast-paced innovation sprint where interdisciplinary teams collaborate to solve real-world technical challenges and build functional prototypes in a short timeframe.
Grounded in Real Industrial Challenges from the ZEvRA Consortium
Rather than operating in abstract theory, the hackathon’s scope was deeply rooted in concrete industrial pain points directly put forward by members of the ZEvRA consortium:
Automotive Recycled Polymers (Farplas Otomotiv): As a key Tier-1 partner in ZEvRA, Farplas defined the industrial challenge of qualifying and tracking high-content post-consumer recycled plastics (PCR-PP) for high-performance vehicle interiors.
Low-Carbon Lightweight Foams (Stellantis): Leveraging its OEM role within ZEvRA, Stellantis presented the challenge of reducing energy intensity and cycle times in foaming aluminum for vehicle crash-energy absorption components.
Co-Created Solutions & Award Winners
Cross-border teams comprising SMEs, tech startups, and research institutes collaborated side-by-side with challenge providers to build scalable technical prototypes:
- The Winning Solution – The Scrap Digi-Pass (Farplas Otomotiv & Poly Process Bureau): Directly tackling Farplas’s ZEvRA challenge, this team developed a software-defined digital material passport and inline quality-control framework that cuts post-consumer resin re-qualification lead times from weeks down to under two hours.
- Coup de Cœur (Special Mention) – SMART-INJECT RAIL / FILIA (Aplex & VASI by Nature Inject): An AI-driven optimisation system for plastic injection moulding capable of reducing energy consumption by up to 22% and greenhouse gas emissions by up to 46%.
- Optimised Aluminium Foaming (Stellantis, Bay Zoltán & Havel Metal Foam): Addressed Stellantis’s challenge by innovating blowing-agent pre-treatment to drop processing temperatures to ~520°C, lowering production emissions.
- Bio-Based Waste Upcycling – TA&CoR / BIOTIP (RT-Plast, Bay Zoltán & MoldXpert): Formulated 100% home-compostable industrial materials derived from coffee and apple organic waste.
Cross-Sector Impact at InnoTrans
The initiative reached its pinnacle at the official Awarding Ceremony at InnoTrans in Berlin on 23 September, showcasing how ZEvRA’s consortium challenges and collaborative framework successfully bridged the gap between automotive lightweight expertise and the rail sector to fast-track circular mobility solutions across Europe.
