Bureau of InternationalRecycling

The world federation of recycling

BIR Autumn Round-Table Sessions,

Amsterdam, 26-27 October 2009

Presentationwithin Plastics Committee also of interest for Ferrous delegates: AutoRecycling Nederland

On Monday, 26 October 2009 at 14.30,attendees of the Plastics Round-Table will be listening to an interestingpresentation on ELV (including plastics) recycling. 

Auto Recycling Nederland (ARN) wasestablished by the Dutch automobile industry with the aim of bringing aboutdrastic reductions in the amount of waste generated by scrap cars (end-of-lifevehicles). ARN developed a concept which now enables large quantities ofmaterials to be recycled by ensuring that many extra materials are dismantledfrom scrap cars. They can then be re-used as raw materials for new products.

ARN was set up by the Dutch automobileindustry in 1995, started its operations in 1996 and has been active inimproving Dutch car recycling ever since. Already in 1998, the target ofrecycling 85% of End-of-Life Vehicle weight was reached.

A network of contracted car dismantlingcompanies is the basis of the ARN-system, which is completed by logisticalpartners en processing companies. ARN is successful because it very effectivelysubsidizes only the non-profitable operations in the existing recyclinginfrastructure that are necessary to reach car recycling goals.

ARN asplastics recycler ; trends in use of plastics in cars

Since the starts of its operations, ARN hasrecycled 18,000 tons of PP/PC bumpers; 2,200 tons of hub caps ; 1,300 tons ofgrilles and 20,000 tons of PU foam. Car producers tend to use more and moreplastics, to decrease vehicle weight and increase fuel efficiency. Because ofthe ever-increasing vehicle fleet, these plastics form a constantly growingpotential source of plastics.

Future plansof ARN, Post-Shredder Treatment, future of plastics recycling

European legislation requires that 95% ofthe weight of a car is recycled by 2015. Reaching this target by manualdismantling would not be effective. Not-dismantled parts of cars will be partof the residue stream of a shredder (metal recycler). Processing this residuewith Post-Shredder Treatment yields the non-dismantled materials, but without toomuch labor. To this effect, ARN will commission a Post-Shredder Treatment plantwith a design capacity of 100 ktons/year in 2010.

In the future, only hazardous materials andcomponents will be manually removed from end-of-life vehicles. All othermaterials, including plastics, will be recovered by industrial sortingtechniques. This will not only happen in the chain of car recycling, but alsoin that of, for instance, Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE).Together with future legislation requiring higher recycling percentages, thisdevelopment will cause large streams of plastics to become available on theresource market. Without new developments, much of these plastics will not beapplicable, because of high contents of interfering elements like chlorine andflame retardants. Design for Recycling or advanced plastic separationtechnologies will make these quantities available for high-level recycling. ARNis very active in both the fields of separation technologies and Design forRecycling.

Traditionally being metal-orientatedcompanies, shredding companies tend to install separation technologies forplastics and produce plastics mixes (pre-concentrates) from their residuestreams. Specialized plastics recyclers are able to refine these pre-concentratesto PP-, PE-,ABS-, PS-recyclates and other recyclates. In this way, shredding companiesreduce the amount of shredder residue leaving their premises, thus saving ontreatment/land filling cost, this besides the potential value of theseplastics.

Companies that are able to find the rightcustomer for a certain grade of plastic purity, without unnecessary materialprocessing, will improve their market share. They will be joined by companiesthat are able to find the right, cost-effective way to refine a plasticsmixture to a marketable purity.

Pieter Kuiper M.Sc., Project ManagerPost-Shredder Materials for Auto Recycling Nederland(ARN). Mr Kuiper has 10 years of recycling experience. Initially trained in mining,mineral processing, metallurgy and recycling at Delft University of Technology,Mr Kuiper gained practical training at the world’s largest bauxite mine,in Guinea,Western-Africa. He embarked upon a career in recycling in the world’slargest open-pit mine: the port of Rotterdam,identifying cooperation possibilities for companies with waste streams thatcould be jointly processed. An example of this ‘waste to wasteprocessing’ was the refining of off-spec ores with waste sulphuric acid.

From Rotterdam,Pieter Kuiper went to Amsterdam, a cityoperating one of the largest and most modern Municipal Solid Waste Incinerators(MSWI’s) in the world. Here, a 50 tph pilot plant was realized, which wasable to refine MSWI-bottom ash to clean sand and gravel, while recovering allresidual ferrous- and non-ferrous metals.