The concept of auto recycling is as old as the invention of car itself. Nowadays, surprisingly enough, cars feature amongst the top most recycled items. Statistically around 82% of a vehicles weight on an average gets recycled. More often than not, recycled materials are put into new vehicles by automakers. In some cases, this material is used in the process of production of new vehicles. Although 82% of a car is recycled by automakers, still the leftover 18% is a lot to be going waste. The struggle is always to increase the percentage of recycling in the process of the production cycle.
Usually when a vehicle has served its lifetime, the users drop it off at the junk yard or a dismantler. In Europe and United States, the network of shredders and auto dismantlers typically recycle up to almost 95 percent of vehicles that get dropped off so. The process is to strip off parts which are suitable for remanufacturing or reuse. This ensures a cost production of almost 50 percent less than a fully new part. These remanufactured parts are put into cars that are between 8 to 12 years old.
The valuable and usable parts once removed, the rest of the vehicle is then put through a shredder or a scrapper that breaks the vehicle's content into small pieces and separates them. Metal is separated out and consists of aluminums, steel and iron. This is pumped back into the metal supply chain. Scrap metal is mixed with virgin metal and manufacturers then press and stamp this into engines, chassis and other parts of a vehicle.
Whatever remains is termed as Automobile Shredder Residue (ASR) and this usually consists of rubber, glass and plastic which is not easy to recycle. As more and more plastic is replacing metal in new cars production, the challenge is to recycle this ASR material.
Used tires are also recyclable. New tires can be built with 10 percent recycled tire rubber material. Also it finds use in making of the mud flap and floor mats. Even with all these efforts, there are some materials which degrade with wear or get contaminated and cannot be used for what they were originally used for. For reducing this problem, the design phase should cut down upon the degradation.
With the advent of designing vehicles with recycling in mind, the solid waste stream is undergoing a much desirable reduction. Keeping recycling in mind from the beginning makes the dismantling of vehicles cheaper and easier.
All these processes are still evolving and the greatest challenge still remains to the automotive makers to further enhance the recycling process and use more and more recycled parts into new vehicles. The ASR percentage has to be increased worldwide and the demand of the automakers would be to use maximum of recycled parts in manufacturing. Recycling is to be kept in mind from the start of the vehicle manufacture as only then the recycling process can be cheaper and the percent going waste can be checked by the automotive makers.
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There are a number of articles on auto recycling in the auto recycling website . You can read these to have a good idea about auto recycling. Distributed by Content Crooner
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