Project aims to develop recyclable gear oils and processes
29 May 2025 
Eight German industrial companies and research institutes are collaborating on a government-funded project aiming to develop techniques for recycling the high-performance oils used to lubricate industrial equipment such as gearboxes and bearings.
Every year, more than four million tonnes of lubricants are produced and consumed in the EU. Most of these lubricants are currently still made from fossil-based raw materials.
At present, around 40% of waste oil from industrial processes can be reprocessed into base oils. However, these processes are not sophisticated enough to reclaim the valuable base materials from the high-performance lubricants and use them to produce new long-life lubricants.
There is also enormous potential for avoiding CO2 emissions by recovering the high-quality base materials from the waste oil.
In the collaborative three-year project, called Gear Oil Loop, the consortium plans to develop a recycling process, and to produce a gear oil that is recyclable and contains at least 50% recycled base oil. The aim is to demonstrate how an industrially and economically feasible recycling process could work.
This goal is challenging, not least because the recyclable oil and the recycling process are being developed and tested simultaneously. This twin development approach requires intensive cooperation between all of the project partners.
The consortium’s members are:
- Klüber Lubrication – the only lubricant manufacturer in the project
- Schaeffler
- Starke & Sohn
- the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Heidelberg (ifeu)
- the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology (ICT)
- the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM)
In addition, there are two partners involved in the project which will not receive funding – SEW-Eurodrive and BASF.
The project is being funded by the German Federal Office of Economics and Climate Protection.
As well as developing the lubricant and the recycling processes, important phases include testing the application behaviour of the new lubricants in gearboxes and bearings, as well as fundamental studies of friction and wear behaviour to confirm that the developed lubricants can keep up with conventional (non-recycled) gear oils in terms of performance and durability.
The sustainability of the closed-loop concept will also be evaluated, taking into account raw materials, manufacturing and recycling processes and the performance of the lubricants.
The consortium aims to create a circular economy for gear oils in which the raw fossil materials used can be used for as long as possible and cause as little waste and CO2 emissions as possible. The project is opening up a new type of circular economy with recyclable higher-viscosity gear oils and the necessary recycling technologies.
