Car Recycling Rates Lead the Industry
Written by Benjamin Hunting
Date : 03/11/2009
Date : 03/11/2009
Automakers are doing more than turn to alternative fuels when it comes to designing environmentally conscious vehicles. Improving production efficiency in assembly plants and creative use of materials also play a large role in determining the final carbon footprint of a brand new car.
It was with this in mind that Volkswagen turned an eye towards making its already fuel efficient entry-level compact car even more ecologically friendly. The newest edition of the Volkswagen Golf, which is on sale as a 2009 model in Europe and which will replace the Rabbit in North America later this year, derives close to half of all of its materials from recycled sources. Forty percent of the entire mass of the Golf has been recovered from previously scrapped vehicles, industrial waste and left over pieces rescued from production facilities. In some cases, the degree to which Volkswagen has gone in order to make the most out of their recycling program is fairly extreme – even the shavings from metal working and block casting are gathered up and re-used. In total, recovered steel comprises just over 1,000 lbs of the new vehicle, along with 32 lbs of recycled plastic, 20 lbs of glass and even 5 lbs of fluids.
Of course, Volkswagen is far from the only company to actively incorporate recycling into its bag of production tricks. In the United States, 95 percent of all scrapped vehicles are recycled – everything from the fuzzy dice hanging in the mirror to the crushed glass and crumpled fenders that get taken out by the crusher. Not all of this recycling takes the shape of melting down pieces into their component pieces, of course. A healthy parts businesses survives through cannibalizing the rare and still useful parts taken off of vehicles which have reached the end of the road in terms of their driving viability. What has been broken, worn down or damaged beyond repair is then crushed and taken to a more large scale recycler so that it can provide the basis for new automobiles and other consumer products.
When examining American industry as a whole, automotive recycling trumps even those manufacturers traditionally associated with the three R’s – paper (50 percent recycled), aluminum drink cans (45 percent recycled) and plastic bottles (34 percent recycled). Even so, domestic automakers are confident that they can raise their level of recycling to 100 percent, all without affecting the final cost of a vehicle or adding extra strain to the nation’s recycling infrastructure. Green boxes and can crushers at the local supermarket may get the lion’s share of street cred when it comes to recycling, but automotive production is the clear leader at creative resource use reduction.
It was with this in mind that Volkswagen turned an eye towards making its already fuel efficient entry-level compact car even more ecologically friendly. The newest edition of the Volkswagen Golf, which is on sale as a 2009 model in Europe and which will replace the Rabbit in North America later this year, derives close to half of all of its materials from recycled sources. Forty percent of the entire mass of the Golf has been recovered from previously scrapped vehicles, industrial waste and left over pieces rescued from production facilities. In some cases, the degree to which Volkswagen has gone in order to make the most out of their recycling program is fairly extreme – even the shavings from metal working and block casting are gathered up and re-used. In total, recovered steel comprises just over 1,000 lbs of the new vehicle, along with 32 lbs of recycled plastic, 20 lbs of glass and even 5 lbs of fluids.
Of course, Volkswagen is far from the only company to actively incorporate recycling into its bag of production tricks. In the United States, 95 percent of all scrapped vehicles are recycled – everything from the fuzzy dice hanging in the mirror to the crushed glass and crumpled fenders that get taken out by the crusher. Not all of this recycling takes the shape of melting down pieces into their component pieces, of course. A healthy parts businesses survives through cannibalizing the rare and still useful parts taken off of vehicles which have reached the end of the road in terms of their driving viability. What has been broken, worn down or damaged beyond repair is then crushed and taken to a more large scale recycler so that it can provide the basis for new automobiles and other consumer products.
When examining American industry as a whole, automotive recycling trumps even those manufacturers traditionally associated with the three R’s – paper (50 percent recycled), aluminum drink cans (45 percent recycled) and plastic bottles (34 percent recycled). Even so, domestic automakers are confident that they can raise their level of recycling to 100 percent, all without affecting the final cost of a vehicle or adding extra strain to the nation’s recycling infrastructure. Green boxes and can crushers at the local supermarket may get the lion’s share of street cred when it comes to recycling, but automotive production is the clear leader at creative resource use reduction.
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