Polestar’s Head of Sustainability Fredrika Klarén: “Our customers want to see sustainable and clean materials”
To gain a deeper understanding of the status in the automotive industry, we talked to Fredrika Klarén, Head of Sustainability at Polestar, an electric performance car brand with roots in Sweden. Through initiatives like the Polestar 0 project, Polestar aims to create a truly climate-neutral car by eliminating all supply chain and manufacturing emissions by 2030. The car brand also aims for a climate-neutral value chain by 2040.
Before joining Polestar, Fredrika worked at IKEA and Kappahl, giving her a broad-based background and expertise in circularity across industries. She has also been part of the Swedish Delegation of Circular Economy since 2023.
Looking at the automotive industry both today, and ahead, what is the current situation and what is needed for cars to be completely circular?
“When discussing circularity and what is required for cars to achieve complete circularity, the answer depends on the criteria being considered. For example, an electric vehicle battery can technically be more than 90% recycled. However, if other criteria are considered, such as recycled content, there is still a long way to go. Although the automotive industry faces roughly the same challenges as other industries in creating circularity, it has relatively strong requirements from policymakers. For example, the ELV (end-of-life vehicles) and the 3R directives (reusability, recyclability, and recoverability) stipulate that to place a car on the European market, you must ensure that over 80% of the car can be recycled.“
Is the automotive industry putting pressure on the textile sector to increase the use of circular materials? Is the emphasis shifting from basic recycling to a true closed-loop approach?
“The textiles in a car are a main part of what customers can choose for themselves, which gives us an opportunity to engage with them on more sustainable textiles. Our customers want to see sustainable and clean materials, rather than materials that emit chemicals, so this is very important for us. In line with this, our designers are motivated by these challenges and take them as an incentive to be creative, the design team are always looking for more circular materials, such as biobased or recycled options. They are ambitious and consistently develop creative and effective solutions that allow customers to see their contribution to sustainability when they buy one of our cars."
What part of the shift to circularity is the simplest, yet hardest to solve?
“I would say the batteries. Currently, more than 90% of a battery cell is recyclable, meaning we could technically recover the minerals and use them to make new batteries. We just need to close the loop. Another challenge is making better use of cars. We produce 80-100 million new cars every year, and 95% of the time, cars are parked – which is crazy given the number of resources and effort that go into them. To avoid producing as many cars as we do today, we need to increase the use of each existing vehicle. There are plenty of tools to achieve this, such as car sharing apps. While the concept is fairly simple, we need creativity to make it work. As car manufacturers, our role is to secure connectivity, among other things, while the apps fix the rest.”
As a member of the Swedish Delegation for Circular Economy, what is the outlook on the automotive industry like today?
“We really want to make sure all the fantastic solutions that are being developed and implemented within the Swedish business sector set things in motion, not only to strengthen Sweden’s economy, but to enable global progress on circularity. Our mission is to identify what the Swedish business sector needs to make this happen, so that we can communicate it clearly to the Swedish government and hopefully secure the support needed.”