European Auto Group Finds Fault with EU ELV Directive

The European Council for Automotive R&D, has completed a study on light and recyclable cars.

The study was co-funded by European Commission's research program for competitive and sustainable growth. Its aim was to identify the environmental impacts and effectiveness of combinations of recycling/recovery and lightweight vehicle design options over the whole lifecycle of a vehicle, including the manufacturing, use and recycling/recovery phases.

The LIRECAR study involved all stakeholders of the vehicle lifecycle. It compared three sets of vehicle weight scenarios – a 1,000kg weight reference, and alternative weight reductions of 100kg and 250kg. The study considered three different end-of-life scenarios:

Compliance with current EU ELV directive, and two theoretical scenarios – 100 percent recycling, and 100 percent energy recovery from shredder residue fractions). Only environmental considerations, and neither economic nor technical feasibility, figured in the study's analysis.

The results of the study were measured against the EU ELV directive's approach to improving environmental performance focused on recycling/recovery quotas and reducing waste from ELVs by addressing ‘mainly bureaucratic quotas' for the end-of-life phase of the vehicle life cycle.

The LIRECAR study's main conclusions are:

The EOL technologies studied, including the recycling of automotive shredder residue, do not significantly improve other environmental impacts besides total waste – but ASR represents no more than 1 percent of the total waste in the EU.

Lightweight vehicle design options could contribute to the diminution of environmental impacts over the whole life cycle of a vehicle, including hazardous waste, resource depletion, and global warming – but the weight reduction impact is not as high as often suggested;

Any design solution should strive for the optimum of overall environmental improvements by balancing parameters such as vehicle weight, recycling and other requirements;

At present, the narrow focus and inflexibility of the ELV directive hinders this optimization process. An overall life cycle improvement, rather than a focus on generic targets such as weight and recycling targets, would be achieve better environmental performance.