After paper and plastic, it is the turn of car parts to be recycled
the European Commission (ec) hopes that soon most cars meant for scrapyards will be reused. Car owners could soon be taking their old cars for recycling with the same ease and community spirit as they take newspapers, bottles and cans. New proposals are expected from Brussels during the next three months asking vehicle manufacturers to collect cars and vans that have reached the end of the road -- usually after 12 to 15 years -- and recycle their components.
The ec will give manufacturers and importers five years to set up the necessary systems so that by 2002 some 85 per cent of the redundant cars in the European Union (eu) will be recovered and reused. By 2015, the ec wants 95 per cent of every vehicle to be recycled. Manufacturers will be forced to comply, and encouraged to alter design and production to make materials easier to reprocess.
An ec source said that car recycling was currently the subject of heated debate, with 10 directorates of the ec involved in discussions over the forthcoming proposals and with the environmental and industrial lobbies at loggerheads. The commission does acknowledge that recycling anything other than vehicle metal is complex and costly.
One of the main obstacles to cost-effective recycling of non-metallic materials was the variety and complexity of plastics and synthetics. A single car can contain plastics from 20 different chemical 'families' in up to 200 different grades. Taking whole parts out of cars for reuse, such as bumpers, dashboards and air bags, also needs to be closely monitored as they are crucial to safety.
eu governments see it as an industry problem but others say it is a problem to be jointly solved by manufacturers, material suppliers, dismantlers and the departments of environment and transport.
The eu estimates that the uk ranks high in the Union for car recycling. Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are efficient, but the southern European states lag far behind in most areas of recycling, especially cars.
At the moment, an average 75 per cent of disused cars in the uk are recovered. The valuable steel and aluminium parts are plundered enthusiastically by the break-up industry, but the plastic, glass and fabric that remains is dumped in landfill sites. Around a million tonnes (t) of metal is recovered in the uk each year from end-of-life cars; 90,000 t of steel and iron, 100,000 t of aluminium, copper, zinc and other metals. Around 175,000 t of plastic and 46,000 t of glass are crushed and dumped, with barely 10,000 t recycled. Besides, poor quality break-up yards do not deal with hazardous waste properly, allowing brake fluid, oil and petrol to leak unchecked into the soil.
A waste-to-electricity facility in Wolverhampton (Elm Energy & Recycling Ltd) takes in up to a quarter of the 45 million tyres scrapped every year in the uk and incinerates them, filtering out harmful gases and generating steam. The steam is converted into electricity via a turbo-generator at a rate of 25 mws an hour. Once the company has fulfilled its internal energy needs, it sells the rest of the power to the grid, sufficient for 20,000 local homes.
Zinc and steel byproducts are also extracted from the disused tyres, together with a lime-based soil supplement for agricultural use. The ec plans to give owners who take their vehicles to a car recycling facility, a certificate granting them exemption from future road tax payments.
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