An Article from the August 2004 JOM: A Hypertext-Enhanced Article
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Adam Gesing was the director of R&D at Huron Valley Steel Corporation in Belleville, Michigan and is now the president of Gesing Consultants in Windsor, Ontario. |
Exploring traditional, innovative, and revolutionary issues in the minerals,
metals, and materials fields.
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Assuring the Continued Recycling of Light Metals in End-of-Life Vehicles: A Global Perspective |
This article reviews issues and technologies in recycling, both current and future, with a focus on end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) and their increasing light material content. Discussion includes the issues involved in designing for recycling, the existing global scrap recycling system, and interactions between different types of recyclables and different sections of the global market. A review follows of current scrap recycling technologies and compares the vehicle recycling regulations in the United States, European Union, and Japan. Finally, opinions are presented on useful, and some not so useful, global and local recycling regulations and initiatives.
We all know the three Rs—reduce, reuse, recycle—yet are we as a society giving them any attention? The three Rs are ordered according to their priority. The list starts with reduce, but our affluent society’s love affair with pick-up trucks, SUVs, and monster homes demonstrates that the North American consumer is not ready to reduce—and over 2.5 billion Asians are in the process of joining the consumption rat race. This has enormous impact on the world economy, the need for fuels and commodities, and on the global demand for recyclables.
VEHICLE DESIGN AND THE THREE RS |
Giving manufacturers the responsibility for recycling of their own products is a mixed blessing. It encourages consideration of recycling during design and manufacturing cycles, but it also encourages setting up of inefficient parallel recycling systems by manufacturers with little interest or understanding of the scrap business. • Eliminate the toxins. These include chromium 6+, mercury, lead, halogenated polymers—polyvinyl chlorides, polychlorinated biphenyl, etc. Heavy/toxic metals on shredding get distributed throughout the shredder residue and thus make it more difficult to use as a daily landfill cover or a source of heat. During combustion, chlorinated and fluorinated polymers can lead to emissions of some of the most toxic and ozone-layer-destroying air pollutants. There is no need to include recycled content in every vehicle component. This closed-loop recycling is the highest-cost option and is not necessary for an efficient recycling system. It is most effective to have few large-volume components suited to accept high recycled content and to allow free flow of scrap and recyclables from one product to any other. |
 A(a)  A(b)  A(c)  A(d)  A(e) |
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Reuse extends the lifetime of components and hence decreases the market for new products, which does not particularly interest most original equipment manufacturers. Reuse has a potential to recover the full value of the item or its components. (A new car sells for less than its cost in replacement parts, and antique dealers often sell items at premium to their original value.) One example of successful reuse is multi-modal shipping containers. These have slashed global transportation costs for manufactured goods and enabled global shipping of low-value scrap. As a result, Asian hand sorting is competing successfully against the technologically advanced sorting of the North American and European recycling industries. There is no competition between reuse and recycling—anything reused will still need to be eventually recycled to recover the value of the materials of construction.
In spite of the fact that reduction is more effective in mitigating humanity’s impact on the environment than recycling, and reuse recovers more of the value, it is recycling that globally is the cause celebre of environmentalists and regulatory agencies. But what is recycling? Recyclability, recycled content, recycling rate, and recycling all come into play, but these are not synonyms. Recyclability refers to the potential market for the scrap of a given composition— the purer the scrap, the more market options there are. Consequently, pure metal from primary smelters can be considered the most recyclable metal composition.
Recycled content depends on the compositions of the desired alloy and of the scrap. Higher element concentrations in the alloy permit use of more scrap. If the scrap is purer than the alloy, then it can be batched from 100% scrap. Some alloys are specifically designed to be batched with high recycled contents. For aluminum alloys the three most common examples are:
Recycling rate and fraction recycled are ill-defined, nebulous concepts when applied to a class of long-lifetime post consumer products like vehicles. While there are statistics on the number of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) processed, the vehicle lifetime is uncertain. Many no-longer-registered vehicles are not immediately scrapped and spend years in backyards and farm fields, and later in dismantling yards. These are not disposed of, they are just retired and join the growing pool of reusable and recyclable materials in consumers’ hands. The number of vehicles available for recycling is unknown, and thus the fraction of the number of available ELVs actually recycled—the recycling rate—cannot be determined.
Fraction recycled is the weight
fraction of the recycled ELVs that ends
up in recycled products. This can be
determined during a recycling process
test by a material mass balance. Unfortunately,
it is impractical to operate the
entire recycling system in a mass balance
test mode at all times. An occasional test
will demonstrate the recyclability
potential of the best recycling process in
the high-recovery test mode. This will
have little relation to the material losses
from the small shredders or scrap
processors who optimize their processes
for high throughput and high product
grade to maximize profits. A better
measure of fraction recycled would be
(weight recycled)/(weight recycled +loss to the landfill). The weight recycled
is known from the recycling plant output,
and the loss to the landfill can, and
should, be statistically monitored for all
landfills by sampling the residue.
Recycling—the act of material
recovery from scrap—depends on the
existence of a complete recycling
system. This includes legislation,
regulation, education, collection, technology,
and, finally, a market for all
types of recovered scrap. All these
components need to be present for an
efficient recycling system.
To be sustainable, a recycling system needs a sufficient market for the scrap derived product to consume all the manufacturing and post-consumer scrap. It also needs appropriate technologies to manage the alloying elements (impurities) so that the scrap products can access this scrap market. A low-cost, sustainable metal recycling system requires:
The current metal recycling system already satisfies these requirements. Additional regulations need to take care not to require high-cost recyclability that does not necessarily increase recycling. Regulators need to facilitate a level playing field for all the recycling and scrap-market participants. The system should not be locally skewed through lack of, or non-enforcement of, health and safety or environmental regulations; nor through excessive duty barriers, tax incentives, or skewed currency exchange rates; nor through corrupt accounting and financial practices.
The adoption of English as a global
language of business, the rise of global
multinational corporations, instant
global electronic transfer of information
and funds, computers sharing common
software, and multi-modal shipping
containers have all contributed to
changing the world of the 21st century
into a global village.
For recycling, the shipping container
is especially important. This versatile,
reusable packaging globalizes world
economies and manufacturing as well
as the scrap market by slashing the
cost of transportation of manufactured
goods. Since the container is reusable,
it needs to be returned to the point
of origin to continue its cycle. Ships,
trains, and trucks that transport these
containers also make the round trip.
This enables virtually free transport
of recyclables and scrap on a global
scale as the cost of the round trip is
already pre-paid by the importer of the
manufactured goods.
It is interesting to follow the evolution
of global markets over the centuries
while concentrating on the importance
of transportation costs. [as depicted in Figure A, which did not appear in the print version of this article--ed.] In the Euro-Centric world of the 16–19th centuries,
sea transport was very expensive, which
resulted in Europe importing mainly
treasures such as gold, spices, silk, and
cotton. Europeans were net exporters of
people and manufactured goods.
In the second part of the 20th
century, multi-modal shipping containers
slashed the shipping costs for
manufactured goods, enabling globalization
of manufacturing and its transfer
to Asia; containers on the return trip
often carry raw materials and scrap. The
United States changed in the second
part of the 20th century from being a net
exporter to net importer of manufactured
goods and fuel (and a net exporter of
recyclables and scrap).
The 21st century is showing another
major shift. Asia already holds the
world’s largest producers of steel,
copper, zinc, aluminum, and magnesium,
as well as metallurgical engineers. Asian
cheap labor has attracted a majority
of the world’s manufacturing plants
for consumer items manufactured from
these raw materials. Further, as this
manufacturing activity is generating real
wealth, Asians are quickly becoming
the largest consumers of manufactured
goods, raw materials, and fuel. Most
of the major multinational companies
are competing for this rapidly growing
market, investing and building manufacturing
plants. The result is a staggering
growth rate: in 2003, the automobile
production rate in China grew by 87%
from 2 million to nearly 4 million
vehicles.
Low wages in Asia permit manual
scrap processing. High custom duties on
prime metals raise the domestic metal
prices, and since this tends to set the value for the sorted scrap products, it
allows scrap importers to pay higher
prices for mixed scrap in Europe and
North America than the local value of
the sorted scrap products.
In China, government-licensed recyclers
receive refunds from a 15% value
added tax (VAT). This, in the Chinese
market, gives them significant advantage
over any potential non-government sanctioned
competition. Also, since the
Chinese market sets the world price of
scrap, the VAT refund gives the licensed
recyclers an advantage in purchasing
scrap from North America and Europe.
The tax also encourages further profits
from creative reporting of the scrap
values for VAT refunds, additionally
offsetting already low processing costs.
Lax or non-enforced occupational health
and environmental regulations in Asia
further drive down scrap processing and
residue disposal costs in comparison
to North American and European
markets.
Another factor is the exchange rate
between the dollar or euro and the
Chinese yuan being fixed at an artificially
low level (by up to 40% according to the
U.S. National Association of Manufacturers).
This eliminates the automatic
wage rate correction mechanism that
operates when the free market sets the
exchange rates.
This results in Asian importers being
able to pay higher prices for mixed
scrap in the United States and European
Union than the value of the sorted
nonferrous (NF) metal components
of that scrap on the U.S. and E.U.
markets. The ever-growing exports of
U.S. aluminum scrap shred to Asia
driven by the previously described
factors are causing metal scrap shortage
in the European Union and the United
States. Historically, because of the
shortage of scrap for batching aluminum
foundry alloys, secondary remelt
foundry ingot has in the last three years
frequently sold at a premium to prime.
Under these conditions of foundry scrap
shortage, there exists very little financial
incentive to sort out wrought alloys
from the foundry mix and to sell these
separately.
The next decade is likely to see a
change in these skewed economics.
As Asian economic growth continues,
Japan’s history of the post-World War II
economic boom is likely to be mirrored
on the mainland. As wages rise and
the expectation of the population for
good life, health, and clean environment
increase, the playing field is likely to
level out for both the manufacturers and
the recyclers. Serious questions remain,
answers to which are far beyond the
scope of this paper: Will there be any
North American and European players
left to enjoy this level field? Where will
the raw materials and resources come
from to satisfy the Asian hunger for
western-style wealth?
Lightweighting is increasingly shifting
the vehicle composition from steel
to light metals and plastics. This is
already affecting the value of the ELV.
For example, in a 2000 automobile,
nonferrous metals comprise ~10% of
the vehicle weight, but account for more
than half of the scrap material value.1 The nonmetallic components still have
a small negative value reflecting the
cost of disposal charged by the landfills
for use of the residue as the daily
landfill cover. [as depicted in Figure B, which did not appear in the print version of this article--ed.]
The relative abundance of the metals recovered from scrap shredder nonmagnetic
metal concentrate has steadily
evolved over the years. In the 1980s
it was dominated by zinc, copper, and
brass, which combined to make up
over 70% of the total. Today aluminum
dominates. Even after many shredders
remove an aluminum fraction for direct
sale to secondary smelters, the remaining
metal concentrate still averages over
70% aluminum. The stainless-steel fraction
is also growing, while the remaining
sink metals continue to lose their share
of the shredded scrap market.
In the recycling of both aluminum
and magnesium, recycling processing
costs are a small fraction of the prime
reduction costs. The energy consumption
per tonne of recycled aluminum
ingot is ~2 kWh/kg—about 5% of the
cost of mining, alumina refining, and
aluminum reduction. The capital costs
of a secondary smelter and upstream
scrap processing are ~$500 per annual
tonne of aluminum—again, about 5%
of the costs of a prime smelter, power
plant, and alumina refinery.
The cost of remelting scrap aluminum
or magnesium is lower than that of
electric-arc-furnace production of steel
from scrap. This is mainly due to the
lower melting temperatures of the light
metals than steel. This comparison is
especially attractive for light metals on
a per-volume basis. In lightweighting,
material substitution is never done on
kg/kg basis; it is more often closer to
a cc/cc basis. In this way, recycling
significantly favors the substitution of
light metals for steel in lightweighting
applications.
There is, however, a widely held
misconception concerning the value of
scrap and secondary metal. Hopeful
buyers figure that since the light metal
recycling costs are low, the recycled
metal should be sold at significant
discount to prime. This has not been
the case in the past several years of
scrap shortages. For any particular
application, the value of scrap is set
by the component it replaces in the
furnace batch. Typically, this is the
most expensive component, which for
any alloy with less than 100% recycled
content is prime. Therefore, as long as
prime is displaced by scrap, the value of
that scrap to the secondary smelter is set
by the price of the prime, adjusted for
the processing costs during recycling.
Since these recycling costs are a small fraction of the prime price, the value of the light metal scrap is also high and close to prime. Collection and dismantling costs in Europe and Japan are paid for by deposit programs and by additional end-of-life treatment charges paid by the manufacturer/customer at the time of purchase or registration. The residue disposal costs in Europe and Japan are excessive due to abnormally high landfill dumping fees; these at times threaten to make the ELV hulk worthless. In North America, the free market value of the parts for reuse and materials in the hulk was sufficient to fund required depollution, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approval of the use of treated shredder residue (ASR) as landfill cover made the ASR a product with value to the landfill operator, reducing ASR tipping fees.
All potential recycling routes must compete economically with the lowest cost option of directing the mixed residue scrap to the alloy having the widest composition limits. The large volume products listed in Table I have the least demanding specifications and thus set the lower limit on the value of the scrap and the residue.
The EPA requires a landfill cover of six inches of sandy soil daily or an alternate daily landfill cover (ADLC). Since landfills are sited in clay, sandy soil is not usually available locally, resulting in significant costs to the landfill operator to purchase and truck in the sandy soil. This soil also takes up valuable volume of the landfill. Consequently, landfill operators are happy to offer discounts on dumping fees to the suppliers of the materials that can be used as ADLC.
The following items are approved for use as a municipal daily landfill cover throughout the United States, including California: treated autoshredder residue, shredded demolition residue, shredded tires, de-watered water treatment sludge, mulch, foam, and tarps. Since there is a significant environmental benefit in controlling disease vectors (i.e., rats and gulls) and windblown garbage, ADLC can be considered as a legitimate albeit low-value use of shredder residue’s nonmetallic fraction.
The costs and value of recovering
plastics and combustibles from shredder
residue need to be compared to the
benefit of their use as ADLC. Table
II shows an example comparing the
combustion of the nonmetallic portion
of the shredder residue with energy
recovery against its use as ADLC.
Without considerable additional treatment,
a shredder residue’s nonmetallic
portion combusts, leaving ~30% ash
in which residual heavy metal ions are
in toxic leachable form. Current U.S.
regulations require that such ash be
disposed as hazardous waste at costs in
a range of $300–500/t. The value of any
energy recovered does not compensate
additional landfilling costs, and this does
not even take into account greenhouse
gas emissions and the costs of air
pollution controls. Use of shredder
residue as fuel for cement kilns and/or
iron smelting has also been proposed. In
these processes, the ash becomes part of
the cement product or the steelmaking
slag. However, copper and/or iron
oxide are undesirable impurities in iron
and cement, respectively. The cost of
ridding the shredder residue fuel of these
difficult-to-separate impurities must
be weighed against the fuel value.
In the United States, ADLC is the
preferred use. In Europe, however,
where regulations are increasingly banning
shredder residue from municipal
landfills, there are some cement kilns
burning shredder-residue-derived fuel
and claiming this as satisfying the E.U.
requirements for car recyclability.
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After being de-polluted and stripped of spare parts by a dismantler in a junkyard, the ELV joins an integrated global material recycling and production system. Figure 1 attempts to summarize the major recycling loops in present aluminum production, use, and recycling. The aluminum portion of the global material manufacturing/recycling system needs to consider more than just post-consumer aluminum.
In-house prompt and manufacturing scrap streams combine to be nearly as large as the post-consumer scrap flow. These prompt scrap recycling loops have a significant impact on the relative economics of the materials competing for the various applications. For example, near-net-shape casting gives foundry alloys a significant advantage over stamped sheet alloy components, which generate scrap at direct chill ingot casting, hot and cold rolling, blanking, and stamping stages. During production and component manufacture, the alloys are known, and it is usually feasible to maintain source segregation of the scrap by alloy. Source segregation is always less expensive than subsequent sorting of the combined scrap mix.
The aluminum components are usually
a minor fraction of the final assembled
vehicle, building, machine, or packaged
product. Just as assembly and construction
has to deal with all the component
materials, so does post-consumer disassembly
and recycling. Whereas the
recycling of production and manufacturing
scrap can concentrate on a few known
aluminum alloys, the post-consumer
recycling system must, as it is already
set up to do, process and recycle all the
material components of the end-of-life
items, vehicles, and buildings.
Aluminum is still a minor player in
this system. When steel scrap prices
tumbled from $100/t down to $50/t,
shredders quit shredding cars and
building demolition residue. With no
steel scrap being generated, there was
also no recovery of nonmagnetic metals
and other recyclables. Any recycling
system has to account for this essential
commingling of materials in the post consumer
recyclables. There are virtually
no aluminum or steel recycling
yards—only junkyards and scrap yards.
The car shredders shred much more than
cars; they shred any metal-containing
item or debris. A recycler must market all
product streams to remain profitable.
As depicted in Figure 2, the North American post-consumer metal recycling industry consists of less than 6,000 scrap collection and dismantling yards, about 200 scrap shredders, close to 10 sink-float plants, and one metal sorter (Huron Valley Steel Corporation). Why this inverted pyramid structure? Collection needs to be widely distributed in individual localities. This layer is controlled by small, usually family-run, enterprises.
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These figures reflect the sequential removal of the recycled materials from the shrinking mixed recyclable stream and the highly mechanized, productive material separation and scrap-sorting plants. In Europe there is a similar structure with the addition of a more vertically integrated ownership structure. A recent attempt to gain control of the scrap collection system by the Ford Motor Company was quickly abandoned due to the complexity and manual labor intensity of the junk collection, dismantling, and baling business. The material volume is steadily decreased as the stripped vehicle hulks are flattened, transported to shredders, and converted to fist-sized pieces.
Shredders recover steel and may skim off a portion of aluminum with an eddy current separator. They in turn sell the nonmagnetic metal concentrate to sink-float plants to separate float aluminum and sink metals from nonmetallic particles. Huron Valley Steel Corporation has a nonmagnetic metal sorter to separate Al, Mg, Cu, Zn, brass, stainless steel, and lead—a highly mechanized and highly productive system. However, it is currently more profitable to sell the mixed sink metals to Asia for hand sorting there than to sort the sink metals and market the products in North America and Europe.
| Separation |
Process |
| Steel separation2
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Magnetic
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| Non-magnetic metal-nonmetal separation2
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| Al-other metal separation
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Sink-float and ECS |
| Al-Mg separation
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| Chemical-composition-based Al alloy batching
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Dismantling and Shredding
End-of-life vehicles or other items are dismantled for parts re-build and re-use or removal of dangerous/toxic substances such as liquids (e.g., gasoline, oil, coolants, and refrigerants), air bag propellants, and lead batteries. Stripped hulks are shredded for material recovery. Shredding is essential for efficient scrap sorting. The process liberates mono-material pieces enabling material separations, densifies the shredded product enabling cost-efficient transport of the relatively low-value residue, and generates a predictable size and shape of particles enabling mechanical handling and sorting. Dismantling and shredding are complimentary; dismantled parts need to be shredded for cost-efficient handling, storage, transport, and material recovery.
Upgrading Light Metal Scrap
There are many processes practiced commercially in Europe and North America to upgrade light metal scrap—all of which are characterized by high productivity, low processing costs, and negligible energy requirements (as shown in Table III). Huron Valley Steel Corporation publications,2,5,6,7,9,10,11 and those by authors from Delft University of Technology3,4 have described nonproprietary aspects of these technologies. An inspector can manually perform all but the last separation (chemical composition- based alloy batching).
As customers use products containing light metal components, they are adding to a growing pool of light metals (see Table IV)—a veritable above-ground mine of end-of-life items. The change in metal reserves in this mine is best estimated by the difference between the source (global primary production) and losses (global losses to the permanent metal sinks). These losses include:
| Al prime adding to the pool | |||
| Losses (destructive, melt & landfill) | |||
| Net Al pool growth | |||
| Total Al pool | |||
| Vehicle pool | |||
| Net increase in Al in in-use vehicles | |||
| Pool of Al in vehicles | |||
The accumulation of aluminum in the pool of in-use products began in earnest in the 1940s with World War II. Integrating the net annual additions over time gives a current estimate of the aluminum reserves in this mine at ~0.5 billion t. Coincidentally, 0.5 billion is also the number of vehicles driving around the globe. These vehicles already store ~40 million t of aluminum— approximately two years of production of the entire world’s primary smelters.
Magnesium will soon add significantly to this mine. While the aluminum industry is mature, magnesium is at the beginning of an explosive growth curve. On a percentage basis, magnesium is the fastest-growing metal market. Figure 3 illustrates the growing importance of recycled metal in satisfying the global demand for aluminum metal. Figure 4 illustrates that although aluminum used in transportation is the fastest-growing market segment, it still represents a minor portion of the aboveground mine. The recycled metal average composition reflects the metal recovered from this mine and not the current input to the in-use pool. This is a major consideration in determining the average composition of recycled metal and underlines the importance of the free flow of recycled metal from the above-ground mine to any current market. Figure 5 illustrates that transportation drives the growth of aluminum consumption, but Figure 6 shows that the ELVs are an even larger fraction of the metal recovered for recycling.
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For over a decade various publications have warned of potential problems in maintaining complete recycling of aluminum scrap due to composition incompatibilities of the alloys used in various markets (e.g., see References 1, 14, 15, and 16). For example, wrought alloys tend to have high magnesium content while cast alloys are usually high in silicon. As the formability and property requirements of new applications become more stringent, alloy designers tend to tighten the alloying element and impurity concentration limits, while the melt composition of the mixed alloy scrap is suitable only for the least-demanding secondary foundry alloy applications.
Table V quantifies this warning in the transportation sector. In 1999 metal from recycled cars could not satisfy the secondary cast demand of the rapidly expanding aluminum engine block and transmission case market; 500,000 t needed to be sourced from non-ELV aluminum scrap sources. This table also shows current predictions for 2009 accounting for the rapidly growing Asian car production and domestic car market and faster-than-expected market penetration by aluminum cast components. Wrought aluminum has penetrated the luxury car market with Jaguar, Audi, and Honda leading in the use of wrought aluminum components.
The penetration of the mass-production
car market by aluminum sheet components
awaits optimization of continuously
cast sheet and a related drop
in the sheet price. At the same time,
penetration of aluminum foundry alloys
into drive-train components continues
unabated. Even with these adjustments,
the total scrap recovered in 2009 is
likely to exceed the market for Al38X
engine blocks and transmission cases.
About 1,500,000 t of metal may become
available for other applications and
there will be a demand for ~5,900,000
t of higher-purity aluminum-alloy
applications in the transportation sector.
Clearly, a means of upgrading aluminum
scrap metal will be useful.
However, let us consider what would
happen if there were no means of
upgrading the aluminum scrap mix.
Would that make aluminum nonrecyclable?
Of course not. For the first
time we would be in the position where
the supply of aluminum scrap exceeded
the demand for the particular scrap
category. Economics would dictate that
the price drop to a point where demand
would match supply. An increase of
aluminum 38X foundry alloy consumption
of only 20 kg/new car would be
necessary to consume the available
1,500,000 t of scrap. This could be easily
achieved by substitution of aluminum
block engines and/or transmission cases
in a few of the mass-market car models
still using iron power trains. A price
drop in aluminum foundry alloy is
the most likely change to induce car
manufacturers to adopt now well-proven
aluminum engine technology.
Further, technology already exists for upgrading light-metals scrap. Since the integrity of the metal scrap recycling system in the next decade does not depend on scrap upgrading, the degree to which these techniques are adopted will be strictly driven by economics and the market demand for alloys with recycled scrap content.
The European Union, Japan, and Korea are moving forward with a wide-ranging set of regulations for recycling of ELVs. In the United States, the EPA regulates air and water pollution, affecting how end-of-life products are recycled and disposed of, but recycling decisions are left to the free-market economics of the recycling industry. In this section we compare these approaches. They all share the same goal: prevention of waste and encouragement of reuse, recycling, and other forms of recovery. They differ in what they regulate and how they implement these regulations.
The U.S. EPA requires de-pollution of the ELV before shredding by removal of all liquids (refrigerant, coolant, gasoline, and oil), removal of the lead acid battery, and deployment of air bags. The EPA also requires that the ASR be stabilized prior to landfilling to pass metal-leachability tests. Stabilized ASR is approved as an alternate daily landfill cover. Japan’s Automotive Recycling Law sets up a separate vehicle recycling system. It separates the recycling of valuable metals from items costly to recycle: ASR, airbags, and refrigerant liquids. The customer pays a recycling fee in advance to cover the costs of recycling these three items. This subsidy reduces the de-pollution costs, thus increasing the value of the ELV. There are ASR recycling targets requiring a 30%, 50%, and 70% decrease in ASR landfill by 2005, 2010, and 2015, respectively.
The E.U. Directive on ELVs requires for new car designs no toxics (Pb, Hg, Cd, or Cr6+ with some exceptions); design for dismantling, reuse, and recovery of components and materials; increase recycled content of vehicles to provide a market for recycled materials; de-pollution in licensed facilities; and specific reuse and recovery targets (85% of the ELV weight by 2006, 95% of the ELV weight by 2015).
How are these regulations implemented? The U.S. system works with minimum government interference, driven by the inherent economic value of the spare parts and recycled materials. De-pollution is usually done by the dismantler and the cost is calculated into the value of the ELV hulk.
Japan’s Automotive Recycling Law registers and licenses recycling business operators, sets up an electronic manifest system, and collects recycling fees from owners and distributes them to the recycling business operators recycling ASR, airbags, and chlorofluorocarbons. The E.U. Directive on ELVs requires: free take-back from the last owner; a certificate-of-destruction as a condition of de-registration; licensed collection and treatment operators; producer be responsible for design that will allow achievement of reuse/recovery targets; producer/manufacturer be responsible for recycling of the ELVs; and that producers bear the costs of ELV collection and dismantling of hazardous components.
The European and Japanese regulations are being used to construct dedicated local car recycling systems. This conflicts with the interdependent, global nature of existing vehicle manufacturing and scrap recovery systems. Metal scrap, other material production, and parts manufacturing are all quickly being exported from Japan, European Union, and the United States to mainland Asia. The European Union and the United States are thus left with the low-value ASR. Manual dismantling for material recovery is not economical in Japan, the European Union, or the United States; however, low transportation costs to China and India make it economical there. One possible solution would be to sell to Asia de-polluted, un-flattened ELV hulks, stripped of all re-usable/re-manufacturable parts.
| Transportation Al market | 6,600,000 |
t | |
| Number of new vehicles | |||
| Number of ELVs | |||
| Recycled Al from ELVs | kg/ELV | ||
| t | |||
| Secondary cast Al market | kg/new car | ||
| t | |||
| Needed from non-auto scrap | t | ||
| Auto scrap available for sorting | t | ||
| Wrought and prime cast transportation Al | t | ||
Manual dismantling of plastics, glass,
interior liners, etc. would be economical
there due to low labor costs.
The European and Japanese regulations
imply setting up a recycling system
dedicated to ELVs. These are currently
handled by multipurpose junkyards
that handle all other types of scrap
from demolition residue, furnishings,
appliances, machinery, etc. There are
common techniques for recycling all
these items. Segregating the potentially
most profitable and largest volume
stream from the rest is likely to make it
less economical to recycle the smaller,
less profitable streams. Unless care is
taken, an increase in the car-recycling
rate might result in an overall decrease
in recycling of other items.
In the present integrated, globalized
car-recycling system, specific recycling
and recovery targets for ELVs are
impossible to quantify and are hence
unenforceable. They are almost always
translated to recyclability, which is
not the same. Building a new, separate
recycling system to be able to monitor
these targets is counterproductive.
Achievement of reuse/recovery targets depends on further development of non-automotive uses of non-metallic ELV scrap, but car manufacturers usually lack expertise and interest in non-automotive products. The specific recycling targets both in Japan and the European Union could be met by limiting the concentration of high-value metal recyclables in the ADLC and recognizing ADLC as a low-value “recovered product,” as it is already done in the United States. Development of higher-value recovered products to be used outside of the landfill for selected groups from the non-metallic portion of the ASR should be encouraged.
Car manufacturer expertise is better
utilized in optimizing vehicle safety
and fuel efficiency by maximizing
the performance-to-weight ratio. Over
the vehicle life, this reduces the
environmental impact of the vehicle by
more than the energy cost to produce its
materials of construction. Cars should be
constructed from recyclable materials,
but the responsibility for recycling
is already well taken care of by the
existing recycling industry.
In Europe, automakers are made
responsible for recycling, plus collection
and de-pollution costs. Manufacturers
control only a portion of the recycling
system. Scrap recycling rates are
determined by a combination of system
constraints that are not under the control
of vehicle manufacturers. These include
environmental regulations and their
enforcement; import duties, taxes, and exchange rates; transportation costs;
lack of education on possibilities and
inertia of potential scrap users; existing
standards, existing system infrastructure,
and high cost of change; and also
political patronage in landfill, recycling,
construction, and paving contracts.
European Union regulations impose
excessive part marking and uneconomic
dismantling requirements where shred
sorting does the separation more
economically.
The imposition of unnecessary,
expensive bureaucratic regimes of
regulations, fees, and subsidies does not
necessarily improve the recycling
system. On the contrary, they simply
add cost without necessarily improving
on the existing global system.
Some aspects of the Japanese and E.U. regulations are beneficial to the recycling system. For example, they encourage prompt ELV disposal by continuing vehicle registration fees until transfer of responsibility by sale or issue of “certificate-of-destruction.” This could be further improved by paying the fair market value of the ELV to the last owner during the cost-free ELV disposal at a de-pollution facility. Other regulatory initiatives that would be beneficial include:
Finally, to optimize the global recycling system, the field needs to be leveled for all players by taking the following steps:
Unless the European Union and United States succeed in addressing these issues, the flow of scrap raw materials, manufacturing plants, and jobs from the European Union and the United States to Asia will continue and local recycling initiatives and recycling industries will continue to suffer. A breakdown of any part of the global recycling system reduces the efficiency of the whole recycling effort.
There is not, nor should there be, a
specific mandated ELV recycling
system. There is an existing scrap
recycling system that draws scrap from
all scrap supply markets and sells to all
scrap-consuming markets. This is
already a globally integrated system with
scrap flowing freely from the developed
countries to the third world. Trying to set
up a system that monitors closed-loop
recycling within any portion of the
system is not likely to add value or result
in any more recycling. Adding closed loop
constraints is sure to add costs and
increase recycled material prices. A more
fruitful approach is to monitor and set
metal, rubber, and plastic maximum
content limits on any residue streams
from the recycling system. Moreover,
we should continue and expand monitoring
and control of the other effluents of
the recycling facilities. Air should be
monitored for both toxins (dioxins,
furans, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon)
and for green gas emissions.
Water should be checked for contamination
from liquid residue streams and by
leachate from solid residue.
Doing that, one might easily find that
it may be more environmentally friendly
to use the PVC-contaminated mixed
plastics as daily cover to the municipal
waste landfills than to generate airborne
toxins, greenhouse gases, and hazardous
ash in attempts at pyrolysis or incineration
with energy recovery. Laws and
regulations for doing this are already in
place in some jurisdictions. The challenge
facing the worldwide system is to
level the playing field by uniformly
applying these regulations.
1. Report on Aluminum Content in 1999 North American
Passenger Cars and Light Trucks, Report ALW001
(Bloomfield Hills, MI: Ducker Research Company, 1999).
2. A.J. Gesing et al., Recycling of Metals & Engineered
Materials, ed. D.L. Stewart, Jr., J.C. Daley, and R.L.
Stephens (Warrendale, PA: TMS, 2000), pp. 1233–1249.
3. T.P.R. de Jong, H.U.R. Kattentidt, and W. Dalmijn,
Recycling of Metals and Engineered Materials, ed. D.
Stewart, R. Stephens, and J.C. Daley (Warrendale, PA:
TMS, 2000), pp. 1263–1275.
4. T.P.R. de Jong et al., (Warrendale, PA: TMS, 2001) pp.
453-462.
5. A.J. Gesing and R. Wolanski, JOM, 53 (11) (2001), pp.
21–23.
6. A.J. Gesing et al., Aluminum 2001, ed. G. Kaufman, J.
Green, and S. Das (Warrendale, PA: TMS, 2001), pp.
31–42.
7. A.J. Gesing et al. Aluminum 2003, ed. S.K. Das
(Warrendale, PA: TMS, 2003), pp. 15–24.
8. H.-P. Sattler and T. Yoshida, Processing Materials for
Properties, ed. H. Henein and T. Oki (Warrendale, PA:
TMS, 1993), pp. 861–864.
9. A.J. Gesing et al., Aluminum 2003, ed. S.K. Das
(Warrendale, PA: TMS, 2003), pp. 3–14.
10. A.J. Gesing et al., Aluminum 2002, ed. M.H.
Skillenberg and S. Das (Warrendale, PA: TMS, 2002),
pp. 3–17.
11. Project Fact Sheet (Washington, D.C.: Office of
Industrial Technologies, Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy, Department of Energy, July 2001).
12. M. Sabsabi and P. Ceilo, Applied Spectroscopy, 49
(4) (1995), pp. 449-507.
13. H.-P. Sattler, Recycling of Metals and Engineered
Materials, ed. J.H.L. van Linden, D.L. Stewart, and Y.
Sahai (Warrendale, PA: TMS, 1990), pp. 333–341.
14. L.E. D’Astolfo, Jr. and P.R. Bruggink, Light Metals
1994, ed. A.T. Tabereaux (Warrendale, PA: TMS, 1994),
pp. 1121–1127.
15. L.T. Borban, G.K. Ng, and M.B. Tessieri, (Technical
paper 940156 presented at the SAE International
Congress, Detroit, MI, 1994).
16. Aluminum Industry Roadmap for the Automotive
Market: Enabling Technologies and Challenges for Body
Structures and Closures (Washington, D.C.: The
Aluminum Association, Inc., May 1999).
For more information, contact Adam Gesing, Gesing Consultants, (519) 254-5015; e-mail Adam.Gesing@GesingConsultants.com.
Direct questions about this or any other JOM page to jom@tms.org.
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