Circular Economy Hub
In Mirafiori the car gets a second life
Everyone talks about sustainability, Stellantis shows what lies behind it. Our exclusive tour through the Circular Economy Hub in Turin reveals the importance the topic has here.
By the end of May, Turin is already in the middle of high summer. 34 degrees in the shade, the air hangs over the asphalt. Quite apart from the climatic conditions, on the drive from the airport to the Lingotto district it quickly becomes apparent how deeply Fiat remains rooted here to this day. The 500 is omnipresent in the street scene. Small, agile, familiar. In Mirafiori, as a pure BEV and in future once again as a hybrid, it is currently the only model built at the Stellantis plant. But the history of the site can no longer be told through new cars alone.
This is also because the market has changed. Vehicles are becoming more expensive; electric small cars in particular are hardly available to many customers for less than 20,000 euros. Anyone who wants to keep mobility affordable must be able to keep existing vehicles in service for longer. In Mirafiori, this becomes an industrial business model: the Circular Economy Hub of the Stellantis business unit Sustainera.
The site covers 2.06 million square metres and seems more like an industrial district of its own than like a single plant. Development, design, software, logistics, battery technology, gearbox production and administration are located here. Stanislao Monfreda, plant manager of the Circular Economy Hub, takes visitors through his halls. “Mirafiori is a large site in Turin,” he emphasises right at the start.
Through Gate 16, the route does not lead to a new building on the edge of the city, but deep into the old Fiat world. That is precisely why the Circular Economy Hub fits here. It does not stand outside this history, but continues to make use of it.
A factory that was itself reused
A considerable proportion of the machinery and equipment was taken over from other factories. Stellantis puts the saving from reused machines and equipment at 55 per cent. Monfreda describes this point almost in passing, but it gets to the heart of the project: “This site covers 70,000 square metres. What is important is that 55,000 square metres were recovered from an area that was not being used. So the history of the building also contains the reuse of the space.”
In Mirafiori, the circular economy does not begin only with the individual component. Areas, facilities and industrial infrastructure also receive a second use. In the halls, engines, gearboxes and batteries are reconditioned, but the idea behind it goes further. The site itself shows how industrial substance can be used anew.
After the first few metres in the halls of the reconditioning hub, a completely run-down Fiat Panda directly crosses our path. In general, the atmosphere in the halls differs significantly from classic vehicle production. Anyone expecting fixed cycle times, uniform movements and a strictly timed line will find a different picture here. The work is more detailed, more variable and more dependent on the condition of the delivered parts. An engine is not simply an engine, a gearbox is not simply a gearbox. Every part has a history. Some components come back from workshops, others from accident vehicles, still others from end-of-life vehicles. What happens to them is only decided after inspection and according to their condition.
The hub bundles several activities for this purpose. These include the remanufacturing of engines, transmissions and high-voltage batteries, a sorting centre for so-called cores, vehicle reconditioning, vehicle dismantling, as well as the collection of materials and components for recycling. Stellantis classifies these activities under the 4R strategy: remanufacturing, repair, reuse and recycling.
Remanufacturing as the industrial core
At the centre at present is remanufacturing. Used, worn or defective parts are recovered, dismantled, cleaned and restored according to OEM specifications. Stellantis promises the same performance and the same warranty for these parts as for original parts. At the same time, they are intended to be cheaper than new original spare parts. For remanufactured parts, the group advertises a price advantage of around 35 per cent.
What initially sounds like aftersales requires industrial stability in Mirafiori. Parts must return in sufficient numbers, be assessed and then remanufactured in such a way that they can go back onto the market. Monfreda refers to the quantities that have already passed through the hub since the activities began: “We have recycled 40,000 tonnes of material. We have remanufactured 90,000 engines, transmissions and batteries. 2,000 vehicles were dismantled. And four million cores were sorted.”
This makes it clear how broad the approach has now become. It is not about a small sustainability workshop on the edge of a large plant, but about industrial flows: material, assemblies, vehicles, old parts. What is decisive is that these flows do not break off. Used parts from repair businesses must be returned to the Stellantis Core Center in order to secure the raw material flow for remanufacturing and market demand. Without this return flow, the system would lack its foundation.
This is precisely where Sustainera comes in with remanufactured, repaired or reused parts. They are intended to be cheaper than new components, while still offering quality and a warranty. For customers, this can determine whether a repair remains economically viable. For Stellantis, this creates a business that is not aimed at the first sale of a vehicle, but at its further service life.
Dismantling without a classic cycle
The different logic of the site becomes particularly visible in dismantling. In a vehicle factory, the process is designed for repetition. In Mirafiori, by contrast, each vehicle determines anew which work is sensible. Condition, demand for parts and market demand determine what is removed. When asked about the dismantling capacity, Monfreda therefore does not answer with a maximum number of units per day. He says: “The capacity of dismantling is linked to the ability to sell and store the parts.”
Removed parts in Mirafiori are not automatically marketable again. They must be inspected, documented, stored and prepared for sale. It becomes clear here that the bottleneck does not lie in the hall alone. More circular economy needs not only additional dismantling stations, but also storage space, digital systems, sales channels and market data. Which parts are removed is therefore also decided by whether they actually find their way back into the cycle afterwards.
In Mirafiori, this connection between industry and trade is shown very concretely. Components are assessed, cleaned, photographed and marketed via channels such as B-Parts, eBay or Ovoko. The hub is thus at once a plant, sorting centre, logistics hub and digital spare parts platform. This is precisely where an essential difference from classic production lies. The value creation does not end with the physical process in the hall. It depends on whether a part once again finds a buyer and a technical use.
Why automation is more difficult here
It is also striking how much manual work is involved in the Circular Economy Hub. This has little to do with backwardness. It is due to the variety of tasks. Even if initially mainly vehicles from the Stellantis environment are processed, the range is broad: Fiat, Peugeot, Citroën, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and other brands bring different platforms, model years, equipment specifications and damage patterns.
Automation works best where variance is low. Monfreda explains this using the example of automated dismantling systems: "In general, such systems are used when it is the same model and the same brand. Then the process can be set, and the sequence is fairly similar for every vehicle." In Mirafiori, that is exactly rarely the case. An end-of-life vehicle is not a standardised new product. It is used, damaged, repaired, modified or incomplete. The condition also helps determine what can sensibly be removed. That does not mean that automation plays no role. But it has a different status than in vehicle assembly.
Instead of dominating the entire sequence, it can support individual processes: inspection, handling, cleaning, data capture, sorting or parts identification. The actual industrial progress here lies less in the complete robot cell than in the ability to systematically master many different components and conditions.
A similar picture emerges with high-voltage batteries. The market is growing because more electric vehicles are ageing and the first larger returns are emerging. At the same time, batteries differ greatly according to design, cell chemistry, software and diagnostic requirements. Anyone investing here in test benches, tools and software must deal with high technical dynamism. The Circular Economy Hub is therefore working in a field that is likely to become significantly more important in future, but has not yet reached the industrial standardisation of conventional assemblies.
Quality determines trust
For remanufactured and reused parts to be accepted in the market, a reference to sustainability alone is not enough. The parts must work, be available and be convincing in terms of price. Stellantis therefore explicitly positions Sustainera not as a compromise offer, but as an alternative to new original parts. For remanufactured components, the group promises the same performance, the same warranty and no compromises on quality. For reused parts, Stellantis refers to a two-year warranty and price advantages of up to 70 per cent compared with new original spare parts. The range is now broad. In Europe, Stellantis speaks of more than 12,000 remanufactured spare parts. Via the partner B-Parts, the reuse offering comprises more than twelve million original parts from various brands. Repair offers for electronics and automatic transmissions are said, depending on the case, to be more than 50 per cent cheaper than new original parts.
In Mirafiori, this becomes an industrial real-world test. A used part only becomes valuable again once its condition is known, its quality has been assured and it finds its way back into the right channel. For the multi-brand group, that could be precisely where a growing importance lies. Regulatory requirements, raw material issues and an ageing vehicle fleet increase the pressure to master circular processes industrially.
If a vehicle can be used for longer because the engine, transmission, electronics or battery are not replaced, but repaired or remanufactured, this creates a different understanding of value creation. Mirafiori thus remains a place of automotive production, but no longer only in the classic sense. While the Fiat 500 continues to roll off the production line next door, the Circular Economy Hub is working on what comes after the first life of a vehicle. The industrial future of this site is decided not solely by how many new cars are built here. It is also decided by how well Stellantis learns to make a second business out of existing vehicles, parts and materials.
