F2008-10-019
Recycling of End-of-Life-Vehicles - Current Status and Future Perspectives
The challenges for the automotive industry with regard to their products, design and production processes and recycling arise - amongst others - from the recycling requirements in the European Directive on End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV). This directive defines also legal standards for recycling quotas of ELVs. In order to fulfil these quotas a manual dismantling of plastic parts has been the strategy which was followed in the past. Component-specific requirements have been defined for the vehicle design in order to get a recycling optimized product. However, manual dismantling offers no economical and ecological benefits in comparison to large scale sorting technologies which have been developed very intensively. Since these technologies are applied after the shreddering process they are summarised under the term "post shredder technology". These technologies have reached a high sophisticated level which allows a reorientation in the design for recycling of a car not considering any more a manual dismantling of plastic components.
Are these technologies also suitable for current vehicles which will reach their end of life after 15 to 20 years? To respond to this question, the BMW Group has undertaken a large-scale recycling trial with 502 BMW prototypes. The complete recycling process beginning from the vehicle assessment up to the material recycling and recovery was investigated. Therefore, an existing post shredder facility of the Scholz AG representing the latest state-of-the-art was used for this trial. The plastics resulting from this process were separated by the Galloo Plastic SA technologies. The plastics passed different modified dense-media separators to obtain reusable plastic fractions. The results of the large-scale BMW trial have proven the suitability of the post shredder technology as well as the plastic separation process with regard to compliance with the European legal obligations in the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive. It is possible to separate nearly completely metals directly and/or after further processing of metal containing components. The plastics from the plastic-rubber composite fractions were separated in an industrial scale to produce PP, PE, PS, ABS and talc filled concentrates as secondary raw materials. High heat value fractions were recovered usable for energy recovery operations e.g. in the cement industry.
Therefore, the post shredder technologies establish the basis for future recycling processes of ELVs. This is of particular importance since nowadays ELVs are an important source of raw materials. This trend is predicted to continue due to the rising raw material prices.
Session: Lean Manufacturing