Faster, Smarter, Greener: The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility (The MIT Press)

by Venkat Sumantran

In 2000, the European Parliament issued a directive that the rate of reuse and recovery was to reach 95 percent (measured by weight of scrappage) by 2015. Ensuring the effectiveness of such a policy required a range of actions that were not easy to implement. To start with, some accountability had to be established to be sure that cars to be scrapped got to designated processing centers. Auto design and manufacture had to be conducive to recovery of materials for secondary use. For example, if metal parts are bonded with adhesives to plastic parts, it is not easy to separate them so that the metal and the plastic can be separately processed for recycling. Cars may employ exotic materials, and this means that the recycling center must have adequate information on the inventory of materials in each car so that they may be meaningfully extracted. This has required extensive documentation and follow-up, both for the automaker and for the recycler.