What comes around goes around. That statement will be especially true for the car of the future. As we move
forward in the 21st century, any vehicle not designed to be recyclable will never roll off the assembly line. Regulations are helping steer auto makers toward a world where recyclability will be part of a car’s original design plan, just the way air flow and styling are part of today’s plans. DaimlerChrysler, for example, did an auto design project called CARE: Concepts for Advanced Recycling and Environment. Susan Yester, senior manager of vehicle recycling programs, says the reason the company undertook the CARE project was they understand there is an opportunity to design for the environment. "That includes design for disassembly," she says. The idea of designing for the environment will go beyond recycling. "Disassembly, gas mileage and emissions control are critical components," she continues. She notes that the design criteria today depend on the market – things are different in North America than they are in Europe or Asia. Yet, she sees a general globalization of the market. ISO standards are active the in the life cycle area and a standard may be developed for auto life cycles. In Europe, the cradle-to-grave philosophy has already taken hold. Manufacturers are responsible for recovering or taking back most or all of any product manufactured, including cars. Manufacturers will now find it in their best interest to favor vehicles that have the maximum number of components that can be recovered at a recycling operation. No Ford dealer wants some environmental activist to dump an assortment of non-recyclable parts on the showroom floor in front of a TV news crew. This bodes well for the recycling industry. However, a recycler has to be prepared for a somewhat different mix of products to enter the scrap stream after a vehicle has served its useful life. Face it: every industry – steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, and some others – feel that their product will be a mainstay of the car of the future. But changes are occurring now in vehicle makeup as manufacturers break new ground. The Audi A-8 has a remarkably large aluminum component. The Ferrari 360 uses an unheard-of amount of aluminum in the chassis and underbody. Perhaps most surprising is the use of plastic in cars. The Lotus Ellise actually has a plastic frame. On the other hand, people were surprised when the Corvette came out in fiberglass. In recent years, the 2,712-pound DeLorean probably did more to push the design and materials envelope than any other production vehicle. Stephen Wynne, owner of DMC Houston, is possibly the world’s foremost DeLorean expert. DMC bought out the old DeLorean factory, including parts, equipment, and documentation and brought it to Houston, Texas. DeLorean was a rebel in the auto industry. And, Wynne maintains, most future innovation will come from outside the orbit of the Big-3 or the Japanese spheres of influence. "It’s the smaller companies like Ferrari that are pushing the envelope," Wynne says. "The big manufacturers sit back until the new ideas are proved out." Indeed, the typical family buggy does not sport a Lotus or a Ferrari logo. Still, when the big boys move they throw around a lot of weight. In the case of aluminum use, they seem to be throwing out a lot of weight. As car makers move to aluminum, the way scrap recyclers handle obsolete autos changes.
forward in the 21st century, any vehicle not designed to be recyclable will never roll off the assembly line. Regulations are helping steer auto makers toward a world where recyclability will be part of a car’s original design plan, just the way air flow and styling are part of today’s plans. DaimlerChrysler, for example, did an auto design project called CARE: Concepts for Advanced Recycling and Environment. Susan Yester, senior manager of vehicle recycling programs, says the reason the company undertook the CARE project was they understand there is an opportunity to design for the environment. "That includes design for disassembly," she says. The idea of designing for the environment will go beyond recycling. "Disassembly, gas mileage and emissions control are critical components," she continues. She notes that the design criteria today depend on the market – things are different in North America than they are in Europe or Asia. Yet, she sees a general globalization of the market. ISO standards are active the in the life cycle area and a standard may be developed for auto life cycles. In Europe, the cradle-to-grave philosophy has already taken hold. Manufacturers are responsible for recovering or taking back most or all of any product manufactured, including cars. Manufacturers will now find it in their best interest to favor vehicles that have the maximum number of components that can be recovered at a recycling operation. No Ford dealer wants some environmental activist to dump an assortment of non-recyclable parts on the showroom floor in front of a TV news crew. This bodes well for the recycling industry. However, a recycler has to be prepared for a somewhat different mix of products to enter the scrap stream after a vehicle has served its useful life. Face it: every industry – steel, aluminum, plastics, glass, and some others – feel that their product will be a mainstay of the car of the future. But changes are occurring now in vehicle makeup as manufacturers break new ground. The Audi A-8 has a remarkably large aluminum component. The Ferrari 360 uses an unheard-of amount of aluminum in the chassis and underbody. Perhaps most surprising is the use of plastic in cars. The Lotus Ellise actually has a plastic frame. On the other hand, people were surprised when the Corvette came out in fiberglass. In recent years, the 2,712-pound DeLorean probably did more to push the design and materials envelope than any other production vehicle. Stephen Wynne, owner of DMC Houston, is possibly the world’s foremost DeLorean expert. DMC bought out the old DeLorean factory, including parts, equipment, and documentation and brought it to Houston, Texas. DeLorean was a rebel in the auto industry. And, Wynne maintains, most future innovation will come from outside the orbit of the Big-3 or the Japanese spheres of influence. "It’s the smaller companies like Ferrari that are pushing the envelope," Wynne says. "The big manufacturers sit back until the new ideas are proved out." Indeed, the typical family buggy does not sport a Lotus or a Ferrari logo. Still, when the big boys move they throw around a lot of weight. In the case of aluminum use, they seem to be throwing out a lot of weight. As car makers move to aluminum, the way scrap recyclers handle obsolete autos changes.
ADDING ALUMINUM
"I see a lot more aluminum in vehicles. The amount of aluminum used in cars has doubled in the past 10 years and that trend will continue," says Dick Klimisch, vice president of The Aluminum Association, Washington. Working out of an office in Detroit, Klimisch is in charge of the Association’s auto/light truck operations. Of all the materials gaining ground on the traditional steel and iron market share of vehicles, aluminum has made the most progress. The new Audi A-8 has more aluminum than any previous vehicle, with about 38% of the car made of aluminum. Across the market, Klimisch notes that aluminum castings, used in the transmission housing and engine, already are a major part of most autos. "We’re seeing growth in closure panels (doors, trunks, hoods). Next is the structural parts – the body or the frame," he says. Down the road, he hopes to see aluminum become a major component of exterior panels. Use of aluminum has increased six to seven percent per year, and the typical 1999 car has about 280 pounds of aluminum in its construction. Some cars, like the Lincoln LS with its V-8 engine, have as much as 450 pounds of aluminum. Klimisch says that a move to lightweighting and the necessity to recycle components will be drivers for the use of aluminum. "Manufacturers will have to find a way to get weight down due to fuel economy. Pressure will continue due to global warming. The only reasonable way to meet fuel requirements is to take off weight," he says. "With aluminum you can keep the size and lose the weight." DaimlerChrysler’s Yester agrees. "We see a general lightweighting of the vehicle." While she sees a vehicle with steel, aluminum and plastics in the near-term future, she adds, "It is not completely clear to me what the best solution will be." Audi has marketed its aluminum A-8 as allowing buyers to get "class without mass." The message is the same: aluminum is strong, yet light. From a recycler’s point of view, although aluminum on average makes up far less of today’s car than does steel, its higher per-pound value makes the aluminum component of some cars worth more than the steel fraction. Klimisch predicts "a brisk business" in recycling aluminum from cars. Steel, however, retains the inside track in the auto industry and likely will for the near future. About 55% of the typical car today is made of steel.STEEL CLAIMS INSIDE TRACK
William Heenan, president of the Steel Recycling Institute, Pittsburgh, maintains that steel will dominate auto construction for many years, mainly because of its lower cost. "If a material can not be as safe as steel and as cost-effective as steel, it won’t even make it into the ballpark with auto makers," Heenan says. "You’ll hear about other materials like aluminum," says Darryl Martin, senior director, automotive applications for the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), "but most of that goes into castings like the engine block. Sheet aluminum is no more than 2% of total use." He notes that recycling mixed aluminum stock is a problem that steel does not have. "The iron atom has Alzheimer’s – it doesn’t know where it’s been, it just knows what it’s doing now," Martin says. "Iron does not degrade by recycling." Does this mean an uphill battle for non-metallics like plastic? Rest assured that recycling old vehicles is becoming a major cost factor in auto manufacturers’ budgets. Until the plastics industry gets its own recycling issues ironed out, it won’t be a severe threat to iron and steel or aluminum. The Lotus aside, it will be a long time before any sizable percentage of the typical American car is made of plastics. Setting aside the image problem of driving a plastic car, the issue of recycling such a vehicle’s components will make it tough for plastics to make big inroads on steel in Detroit. Several different types of plastics, often from dozens of producers, go into a typical car. Pulling the plastic cladding off of the outside of cars is tough to begin with. Sorting creates more work. It is a real challenge to keep those plastics separated when the auto manufacturer has to take back the car at the end of its life cycle and de-construct it. A first step here is the work being done on labeling the kinds of plastic used for plastic parts in cars. Heenan adds that the existing infrastructure of auto shops, with trained workers who know how to repair steel and bend steel back and replace it economically if it is damaged, bodes well for steel’s long-term viability with auto makers. "Ultra-lightweight steel is a very viable candidate," Yester says, adding that each material has positive aspects. She notes that component type is not the only consideration. Honeycombs and exotic combinations of materials may be in the offing. "But in the next two or three years, I see no major divergence in the components used," she adds. This is because assembly-line manufacturers turning out 50,000 to 100,000 vehicles have different considerations than those building boutique cars. Yester also sees the trend to modularization increasing. The American Iron and Steel Institute’s Southfield, Mich., office is running a pair of projects called ULSAB-AVC and ULSAC. In plain English, AISI’s projects promote steel-intensive design concepts. They are funded by GM, Ford, Chrysler and 12 steel companies. AVC is the Advanced Vehicle Concepts consortium that is offering ideas for low-cost, very lightweight vehicles that still meet 2004 standards for crashworthiness. The ULSAC is the UltraLight Steel Auto Closures project that aims to keep steel an integral part of doors, trunk lids and the like. "Does it stick to a magnet?" asks Darryl Martin of AISI. He credits the continued use and recyclability of steel in autos partly to cars being so big that they can’t be thrown out and to the ease of removing steel and iron from the waste stream. Steel is about 66% of the curb weight of today’s car. Martin says that the industry should continue to vigorously promote the recyclability of steel.HIDDEN COSTS
In Europe, it already is law in many countries that products have to be managed for recovery at the ends of their lives. Once the product is used up or worn out, the manufacturer will have to take back any non-salvageable parts. For automobiles, body shops and parts dealers will reclaim as much as they can from vehicles, before scrap yards recycle most of the rest. But eventually in North America, it is possible that GM, Ford, Chrysler and others doing business here will have to provide a way to dispose of the rest. A vehicle with a wide range of components has two related disadvantages: it will be tougher to recycle, since many parts will have to be removed and sorted, and the value of each component will be relatively less per car, making it more expensive to recover. "A key area is how to calculate the re-usability of a product and incorporate those figures into an overall recyclability target," Yester notes. If a vehicle has an 85% recovery target, part of that will be reuse and part recyclability. Calculating reusability is tough but vital, since it is a major component of a vehicle’s type approval rating. When the Automotive Recyclers Association did a study of recyclability, they ran into this issue. The Hollander dismantling system is unique to the way companies pull together their part numbers. This makes it difficult to get accurate figures on disassembly. "From a practical standpoint, it is difficult to design a unique vehicle for every market. So there will be an emphasis on common elements," Yester says.OTHER MATERIALS
Magnesium and stainless steel are the dark horses in the metals race. Both are real contenders to become an increasingly large part of vehicle makeup. "Magnesium will remain part of the competition for wheels and some castings," Klimisch concedes. Engineers will work out the viability of magnesium based on its performance and cost. It’s in the cost area that magnesium has its biggest problem today. However, that could change as economics change. DaimlerChrysler’s Yester also predicts an increase in the use of magnesium, but notes that any material – including magnesium – will have to be suitable for mass manufacturing. Stainless steel is another popular material. Use of stainless is not a new idea. The DeLorean body is stainless steel, rather than ordinary steel. Not many DeLoreans have made it into the recycling loop – first, not many DeLoreans were sold; second, those that are on the market are treasured by their owners. Stainless has some advantages as a material. "As for corrosion resistance, the stainless does not have any problems," Wynne says. "And it is recyclable." Yet he concedes that aluminum is gaining momentum. "It’s (light) weight and the new bonding methods make it as integrally strong as steel cars," he adds. Since stainless is a high-value metal for recycling, it sees periodic revivals in the auto market and these revivals likely will continue, even though there are doubters. "Stainless is too expensive to be the dominant metal," Klimisch maintains. "You’ll see these things come and go. The revival of interest is usually due to designers who are looking for a way to achieve styling differences."LOOKING AT RECYCLABILITY
Styling gradually will lose ground to environmental concerns as the 21st century wears on, some industry observers predict. Overall, today’s automobile gets high marks on recyclability. All but about 600 pounds of the typical car gets recycled. Plastic, glass and rubber remain the bugaboos in the recycling area. The U.S. Council for Automotive Research, Detroit, spends a lot of time on the recyclability of vehicles. USCAR’s Vehicle Recycling Partnership is trying to figure out which plastic and rubber vehicle parts that currently go to landfills could become economically feasible for dismantlers to recycle. This could lead to 50 additional vehicle pounds being recovered, which would decrease vehicle waste by about seven percent. Presently, USCAR figures about 2,250 pounds per vehicle are recovered, but that’s mostly metal. Only a very small amount of plastics and rubber from vehicles are currently recycled, although those materials make up more than 10% of a vehicle. "If it’s cheaper for [scrap processors] to send the material to landfills rather than recycle it, that’s what they’ll do," says Richard Paul, manager of the pilot project on USCAR’s recycling partnership. "Our goal is to find recycling processes for materials such as plastics and rubber that are cost-effective." This project, reported by USCAR, is just one of the group’s more recent efforts to help recycle auto parts. This field trial seeks to determine the best way to remove and recycle different parts, the cost of recycling certain parts, and how those parts should be transported. The study targets plastic parts such as interior trim and engine components. During the pilot study, Gary’s U-Pull-It, a dismantler in New York, first disassembled the vehicles and sorted the plastics and rubbers into 95%-pure streams. The plastic material was shipped to Recycling Separation Technologies, Boston, where the streams were made more pure by means of a patented cleaning process. Next, Destiny Plastics of Port Sanilac, Mich., evaluated material to determine if it needs to be combined with virgin material, and what would be the best use for the material. All of this information went to USCAR’s Vehicle Recycling Partnership, which pulled together the economics of the plastic recycling infrastructure and fed the information back to dismantlers. USCAR hopes to show dismantlers that plastics recycling can be a profitable business. Just getting the infrastructure in place (look at the geography involved in this project, alone) will take some time. Any shortfall in the economics may eventually be helped by regulatory fiat. The results of the study will be distributed to dismantlers, with the hope that they will be economically motivated to use the methods to recycle even more of the typical vehicle that is currently recycled. USCAR says about three-fourths of a typical car is recycled.Recycling glass is also a problem.
While the technology exists to recycle automotive windshields successfully, the cost penalty to vehicle dismantlers is currently too great to make it feasible, according to USCAR research. It currently costs more to collect and transport windshields to the recycling infrastructure than it does to send them to landfills. That was the conclusion of a separate study by USCAR in coordination with the Recycling Materials Center, a program of the Center for Environmental Policy, Economics and Science (CEPES) in Ann Arbor, Mich.; Henderson Glass of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Waste Management of Michigan, Inc. of Livonia, Mich.; and Strategic Materials of Houston, Texas. Other materials fare better. Klimisch maintains that it is possible to recycle all of aluminum’s various alloys. He maintains that one-third of the aluminum in today’s car is recycled material. Since it is in the primary production of aluminum that most CO2 is released, he feels the environment and business communities win twice with recycled aluminum. So the battle will continue with recyclability at the heart of the auto design conflict. Several things are certain: more obsolete cars tomorrow will be designed to be taken apart; there will be mandated record keeping on recovery in Europe, and North America may follow suit; and the mix of materials recovered will be different with each passing model year. Martin notes that, in addition to end-of-life recyclability, manufacturers will require more recycled content in components used to build the car of the future. "In steel, we are way ahead of the curve and always have been," he says. "We need to tell that story better." Whatever the component mix in the car of the future, however, the good news for the scrap industry is that the need for a professional recycler will remain the same. RTThe author is an environmental writer and Recycling Today contributing editor based in Strongsville, Ohio.
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