Answers to ASR

When the European Union (EU) set a 95 percent recycling rate target for end-of-life vehicles (ELVs), operators of auto shredding plants could be forgiven for harboring varying levels of skepticism.

Recyclers would have been very pleased if they had the ability to recycle 95 percent of the average automobile, but they were all too familiar with the lack of an end market for mixed plastics blended further with glass, rubber and other odds and ends.

Nonmetallic auto shredder residue (ASR) has largely been an unrecyclable byproduct of the shredding process, or at least not recyclable at any cost that could be sustained.

The ELV recycling target, however, has provided an additional boost to the research and development of processes to divert ASR from the landfill.

MINING FIRST

The profit motive also has been a driving force in the way ASR is handled by recyclers, particularly as the value of nonferrous metals has soared in the past 10 years.

Shredder operators have deployed an increasingly diverse array of technologies (including magnetic, infrared, X-ray and density separation) to extract every last ounce of iron, aluminium, copper, stainless steel and any other type of metal fragment nestled within the ASR.

While this has helped raise the recycling rate of the average ELV, it has not been enough to offset the trend of auto manufacturers using larger percentages of plastic when making vehicles.

An article on the www.LiveScience.com website states, “whereas almost no plastic could be found on a car from the 1950s, today’s automobiles have more than 260 pounds of plastic on board, according to the Transportation Energy Data Book.”

The same article, citing the same Data Book as its source, notes that, “For domestic cars, the percentage of weight in steel and iron has dropped from 75 percent in 1977 to 63 percent in 2004.”

Some of that steel has been replaced by aluminum: The average percentage of a vehicle’s aluminum weight has grown from 2.6 percent in 1977 to 8.6 percent in 2004.

Plastic has similarly emerged as a material of choice, going from 4.6 to 7.6 percent in that same 27-year period. In Europe, plastic has made gains beyond that, with the average car now consisting of about 11 percent plastic, according to the LiveScience.com article.

Thus, even after mining out the metal, a shredder operator who runs 10 metric tons of 2004 vehicles through the plant is going to end up with at least 1 metric ton of mixed plastic ASR.

ON THE CLOCK

As the EU’s 95 percent ELV recycling target for 2015 has neared, economical methods of recycling nonmetallic ASR have become of greater interest.

Research effort and capital has flowed in several directions, with pilot plants increasingly scaling up to handle more than just test samples.

Belgium-based auto shredder operator the Galloo Group and its Halluin, France-based plastics recycling sister company Galloo Plastics, appear to be well-positioned for the 2015 deadline.

A write-up of Galloo’s ASR recycling process by Plastics Technology magazine (available at www.ptonline.com), describes how the company is manufacturing some 18,000 metric tons each year of polyolefin and polystyrene pellets derived from ASR.

While much of the other ASR research has focused on energy end markets, Galloo’s success at making pellets and black polypropylene compounds has spurred it to build a second ASR recycling plant to increase its throughput.

Its recycled-content polypropylene is used in applications ranging from automotive wheel wells, battery cases and auto window frames, while its recycled-content polystyrene is used to make CD cases, coat hangers and office furniture fasteners.

As described in the Plastics Technology article, Galloo’s process involves grinding ASR to a 25-millimeter size and a combination of steps involving wet density separation, size classification, air classification and eddy current separators to remove any remaining traces of metal.

The wet density system was developed in cooperation with American technology provider Engineering and Separation Technology LLC (www.esrla.com).

Marketing the metal recovered helps pay for the extensive process, as does producing a series of recycled-content plastic products that can be marketed to a variety of manufacturers.

In the United Kingdom, one of that country’s largest auto shredder operators, European Metal Recycling Ltd. (EMR), also has teamed up with an American technology provider.

In the fall of 2010, EMR and its ally MBA Polymers Inc., Richmond, Calif., held an open house at a facility in Worksop, England, designed to process the considerable amount of ASR produced at EMR’s shredding plants.

MBA and EMR have formed a joint venture (JV) that was announced in 2007. “The joint venture plans to begin operation of a 60,000-tons-per-year processing plant,” the two companies announced in a news release at that time.

The plant “will recover plastics from upgraded shredder residue,” the news release continues. “EMR will concentrate the plastics fraction of the shredder residue produced from its large-scale metal recycling operations and ship this material to the JV. The JV will receive concentrated plastics-rich material from EMR’s facilities and will clean, sort and upgrade the plastics and will then sell the high quality plastics to MBA’s customers.”

MBA Polymers founder and president Michael Biddle says, “This plant will allow us to continue to expand our product offerings to our customers around the world who are responding to growing internal and external pressures to manufacture more sustainable products and who are increasing their use of recycled plastics.”

On EMR’s behalf, Director of Technical Services David Ireland has said, “Not only will this divert materials from landfill and generate significant CO2 (carbon dioxide) savings, it will also put EMR at the forefront in meeting the very demanding recycling targets set under producer responsibility regimes in vehicle and electronics recycling. These targets are very exacting and can only be met by applying new technologies to the recovery of plastics.”

MANY METHODS

While large recycles such as EMR and Galloo Group have been making their own arrangements, several other partnerships and collaborative arrangements have advanced ASR diversion.

In Ypres, Belgium, Salyp NV has developed and made available for licensing its sorting and separating system designed to extract the remaining metal and also to separate polyurethane foam and a mixed plastics fraction from the ASR.

Much like EMR and Galloo Group, Salyp also forged a trans-Atlantic technology ally, cooperating on much of its early research with the Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Ill.

Another trans-Atlantic partnership has involved Germany’s SiCon GmbH (www.sicontechnology.com) and allies it has forged in the United States, including equipment maker American Pulverizer Co., St. Louis, and Green EnviroTech Corp., Riverbank, Calif., a plastics recovery, separation, cleaning and recycling company focusing on ASR.

In August 2010, Green EnviroTech announced plans to open a recycling plant in the western United States. The 50,000-square-foot facility is scheduled to open by the first quarter of 2011.

“We are extremely pleased to bring patented technology to our first plant in Riverbank, Calif.,” announced Gary DeLaurentiis, CEO of Green EnviroTech.

The company also announced that it is planning to break ground on a facility in Fond du Lac, Wis., in 2011.

Green EnviroTech describes its ASR sorting and recycling process as involving “sink float” technology from Germany’s SiCon GmbH and methods from other partners that combine to create recyclable streams of polypropylene/polyethylene (PP/PE); acrylonitrile butadiene styrene/high-impact polystyrene (ABS/HIPS); and mixed plastics and rubber.

At the 2010 BIR (Bureau of International Recycling) World Congress, Michael Dines, director of operations of Cranford, N.J.-based Chinook Sciences, gave a presentation about that company’s gasification technology and its application in the ASR arena.

According to Dines, Chinook Sciences (www.chinooksciences.com) and its sister company Chinook Energy are undertaking “a fully funded project under construction in the United Kingdom that will process ASR, recover metal and glass and generate 32 megawatts per hour of electricity. The gasification portion of this project will be complete later in 2010.”

Dines said Chinook also has two projects underway in the United States—one that will take in ASR and generate 41 megawatts per hour of electricity and another that will take in municipal solid waste, generating 25 megawatts per hour.

The company’s patented gasification technology, known as RODECS, “has a 10-year commercial operating history and is in its eighth design generation,” said Dines.

“The primary objective of the RODECS system is to recycle the valuables in the feedstock by gasifying the organics; heat and electricity are produced as a byproduct. The metal and glass is recovered in a segregated way without generating low-value molten slag.”

The good news for auto shredder operators seems to be that the 95 percent rate that once seemed quite out of reach has moved much nearer thanks to competing technologies developed well before the 2015 deadline.

The author is editor-in-chief of Recycling Today and can be contacted at btaylor@gie.net. This feature first ran in the Sept./Oct. edition of Recycling Today Global Edition, a sister publication of Recycling Today.