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Ford Motor Company has established within its global Ford Product Development System (FPDS), a vehicle product system which strives to maximize recyclability and recoverability while minimizing the total environmental impact of vehicles. One aspect of how the automotive industry can move towards sustainability is to include sustainable materials like recycled and natural materials in its products as well as in its manufacturing process. Additional examples of using materials imparting low life cycle impact exist in both in the US and Europe. By introducing sustainable materials in mass production, huge figures for reducing environmental burdens result, for example, worldwide 140 million pounds of recycled non-metalic materials have been used just for Ford vehicles alone.

Recovery of metals from automobile shredder residue (ASR) is currently being applied to over 11 million end of life vehicles (ELV) in North America. However, most plastics from these vehicles become landfill. The Vehicle Recycling Partnership (VRP), an effort of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors, as part of the USCAR initiative, has been conducting research to recover plastics from this ASR feed stream. The VRP has been working with Recovery Plastics International (RPI), to investigate automated plastic separations. RPI has been developing processes that would allow for fully automated recovery of target engineering plastics. The portion of the process developed for separating the engineering plastics is called skin flotation. This technology can separate engineering plastics even if the materials have the exact same density. A pilot production line has been set up for processing a variety of commercial ASR materials at RPI in Salt Lake City, Utah (USA).

The goal of this paper is to define and quantify the contribution of used parts to vehicle recycling. In 1997, this research was stimulated when the Federal Trade Commission opened hearings on the definition of recycling. At this time, general facts about the automotive recycling industry and reuse of automotive parts were hard to find. This study's goal was to produce actual data on the contribution of reuse to vehicle recycling and to answer questions about the industry. Can accurate reuse measurements be calculated with data collected from recyclers? What should be the expected average performance of a company in the recycling industry? What effect can reuse have on landfill avoidance? The results of this study established that the sale and reuse of used parts played a significant role in vehicle recycling. The Automotive Recyclers Association, representing the existing industry, testified at the FTC hearings using preliminary results from this study.

With the presentation of this paper on the impact of reuse on recycling, the justifying groundwork will have been laid for the expanded definition of recycling to include reuse as a valid contribution to recyclability calculations. This proposed research will collect data from a statistical sampling from the membership of the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA). For the first time, statistical data will be available to scientifically determine the impact or effect of reuse on the current definition of recycling. This data is anticipated to establish an expanded view of the automotive recycling market and validate the inclusion of reuse into the currently accepted definition of recycling and recyclability (W. Lange; SAE 950205) and will be presented in a subsequent SAE paper in 1998.

EcoPlus™ Automotive Carpet Systems, are used in trunks, on floors, for throw in mats, and more and contain many different thermoplastics polymers in various forms. New technologies are being developed to recycle complex carpet systems. One system has been evaluated at the Vehicle Recycling Partnership using a “remelt’ recycling process which can be used on a wide variation of thermoplastic materials, or blends of thermoplastic materials. The remelt process takes normally incompatible thermoplastic polymers and makes them compatible in a homogenous mix. This proprietary process yields a useable plastic. Plastic made from automotive carpet systems can be used to manufacture new automotive parts or other plastic articles of commerce.