PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
Scrapped vehicles generate close to 10 million tonnes of waste each year in the EU. At present, efforts to recover the raw materials inside them have focused on removing hazardous substances and recycling metals. Current waste management chains tend to release plastics in mixtures that are expensive to recycle and yield only low-quality materials. To alleviate the burden on natural resources and reduce the amount of waste shipped to landfills, Commission Directive 2000/53/EC on end-of-life vehicles has set ambitious targets on the amount of material recycled. Meeting them will require innovative solutions, such as dismantling and sorting vehicle parts before sending them to shredding plants, cutting the cost of recycling processes and increasing the value of recycled materials.
OBJECTIVES
The LIFE CIRC-ELV project aimed to boost plastic recycling rates in the automotive sector by recycling polypropylene and polyethylene in end-of-life cars and reusing it in new products. Economic methods to dismantle and sort plastic components, including bumpers and fuel deposits, were intended to help reduce recycling costs. Project partners would also test pre-treatments and compounding processes to improve the properties and market value of the materials recovered. They aimed to demonstrate the quality and performance of recycled plastics by replacing virgin materials in new products, including automotive parts. This field experience is expected to shed light on business opportunities for replicating plastic recycling process on a wider scale. Substituting virgin plastics with the recycled kind would contribute to the EU circular economy package. It would also support the Waste Framework Directive and Commission Directive 2000/53/EC on end-of-life vehicles by closing the manufacturing loop for plastics used in car manufacturing and tackle the depletion of fossil resources from which they are currently derived.
RESULTS
The project LIFE CIRC-ELV aimed to develop a circular economy for the automotive sector by enhancing the management of end-of-life-vehicles (ELV), increasing the recycling rates of plastic in a cost-effective way, producing end materials of sufficient quality for re-use in the market.
Under the project, more than 24 000 ELVs were treated at the authorised treatment facilities (ATFs) in France and Spain. The facilities collected more than 100 tonne of plastics from bumpers and fuel tanks, thus avoiding their disposal as waste. Project partner CORTES has been dismantling the bumpers and selling them to a recycling company since September 2021.
However, the plan to reach 5% of Europe’s ELVs is being hindered since the solution for bumpers is more economically attractive for large ATFs, although it is not especially profitable. Furthermore, the proposed system for the fuel tanks is not economically feasible.
Additionally, while lifecycle analysis shows that the project’s approach can reduce the carbon footprint of plastic production by 5%, the reduction is significantly below the target of 74%. The failure to reach this goal stems from the lower-than-expected amount of recycled plastics in the optimised formula for the HDPE (25%) and PP (30%). Increasing the amount of plastics collected from ELV in the formula of the recycled plastics would reduce the carbon footprint.
Finally, the project team conducted industrial trials to manufacture products with the recycled plastic. Project partner SIGIT manufactured around 7 000 wheel liners with the recycled PP produced by the project, but they did not meet all the technical requirements and the formulation requires further optimisation. Nevertheless, ARTEPLAS, an industrial subcontractor, produced 530 units of PP fitting pipes and 1 800 metres of corrugated HDPE that did meet the technical requirements.
Further information on the project can be found in the project's layman report (see "Read more" section).
