European Company Opening Auto Shredding Yard

Salyp N.V. of Belgium signed an Agreement of Intent with the Dutch company Randex B.V. to start up an industrial recovery center for automotive shredder residues and other mixed plastics waste streams.

The center will open by the middle of next year in The Netherlands, where plastics are currently landfilled, will be recycled and recovered. The ASR comes mainly from shredded scrap cars.

European legislation has indicated that 85 percent of End-of-Life Vehicles must be recycled, with this percentage having to increase to 95 percent by 2015. 

The Netherlands are playing a leading role in automotive recycling - the government department responsible, the VROM, aims to reach this 95 percent recycling level by 2007.

However, because of the ever increasing amounts of ASR in ELVs, coupled with the lack of suitable and economical recycling technology for treating ASR, it seems that neither the European nor the Dutch targets will be achieved, which is a major concern for the automotive and recycling industry.

Salyp N.V. has concentrated its efforts in developing equipment which can recover basic resources from ASR. 

At the present time, recycling levels of 30-40 percent are guaranteed; however, technical developments within Salyp will soon lead to recycling levels of more than 80 percent, which would mean that 95 percent of each scrap car could be recycled.

The ELV center will start up with a process capacity of 20,000 metric tons of ASR a year. After a short introduction phase, Randex will expand the initial plant in order to cover a substantial part of the Dutch market.