Toronto, Ontario — When the Takata airbag crisis first gripped the globe in 2018, Keshav Kochhar and his team saw an opportunity and took to the drawing board to create an innovative solution for safely destroying and recycling end-of-life and defective/recalled airbags.
Since then, their company Lacero Solutions has received and deployed 275,000 airbags and seatbelt-pretensioners—recovering approximately 305,000 kgs. (671,000 lbs.) of recyclable material.
Established in 2018 and headquartered in Toronto, Lacero Solutions provides airbag and seatbelt pretensioner recycling solutions to automakers and small distributors, assisting in complete airbag/seatbelt destruction and recycling. The company’s facilities are set up to deploy any kinds of airbags and seat belt pretensioners and recover all types of metals for recycling purposes.
Lacero Solutions has two goals, Kochhar told Canadian Auto Recyclers: to be an industry leader in recycling airbags and to educate industries on the recyclability of airbags.
“The company may have sprung out of the Takata recall, but we soon realized there were many varieties of airbags being sent to landfills or scrapyards at end-of-life instead of being destroyed and recycled properly,” said Kochhar, who serves as CEO and co-founder. “We saw airbags being treated as waste instead of something valuable we can recover materials out of.”
The company has joined two Canadian recycling organizations thus far to further its mission: the Ontario Automotive Recyclers Association (OARA) and the Recycling Council of Ontario (RCO)
Currently, Lacero Solutions is actively involved with a number of OEMs on their airbags and seat-belt waste management projects
For more information on Lacero Solutions and its airbag recycling technology, visit lacerosolutions.com.
