ROME – Every year, the automotive industry produces about 6 million end-of-life vehicles to manage and to help Italy reach the European recovery target set at 95 percent, the Foundation for Sustainable Development (Susdef) and the Association Industrial Auto Recyclers (AIRA) have developed a series of proposals to reuse materials from end-of-life automobiles.
According to the numbers of the analysis, Italy has 1.1 million machines annually that have reached the terminus of their primary function and if the percentage of reuse and recycling across the entire supply chain has reached 84.7 percent of the average weight of the vehicle (aligning therefore to the EU target set at 85 percent in 2015), the Italian share of the total recovery is always 85 percent, thus resulting ten percentage points away from the optimum.
The study by Susdef and AIRA, in fact, pointed out that the European average for the reuse and recycling of vehicles stood at 89.6% with an overall recovery rate of 95.1%. In analyzing the management framework for end-of-life vehicles in Italy and Europe, the research identified obstacles and formulated five proposals – which will also be sent to the European Commission – in order to align with the targets relating to recycling and recovery.
The first solution suggested by the two organizations resides “in the introduction of an extended producer responsibility regime that will have to respect the principles of responsibility of the directive on the waste framework, trace treatment performance, increase the number of end-of-life vehicles to be subjected to the regulations of the directive, and finally to combat the phenomenon of exports for evasive purposes “.
The second proposal drawn up in the press release, instead, aims to impose “recycling targets for individual fractions of materials (in particular glass, plastic and non-ferrous metals), while the third solution wants to implement a reward that takes into account both the content of recycled materials and of components reused in new vehicles. The fourth piece of advice for the automotive industry focuses on bridging the “plant engineering deficit, implementing the National Waste Management Program (PNGR)” and the last point concerns the need for greater support towards research and experimentation with new techniques, adhering to to good recycling particles.
Susdef and AIRA also asked the European Commission to extend the regulations on recycling, reuse and recovery to categories of vehicles excluded up to now, such as motorcycles and vehicles weighing more than 3.5 tons: “The regulation currently in force dates back to 2003 and is inadequate to the governance model of the end-of-life vehicle treatment chain – declared Aira President Stefano Leoni, AIRA president – for this reason we believe we need new incentives aimed at innovation, technological evolution and completion of plant requirements.
Edo Ronchi, the President of the Foundation for Sustainable Development, emphasizes the importance of a circular economy focused on reuse and recovery: “The recycling sector is strategic for a country like ours where every year, we import about 20 Mt of steel and where in the future, there will be many electric cars that require a greater amount of valuable materials, many of which are classified as critical. We hope that the contents of this study will help the sector to define a master course, which will allow Italy to achieve the European recovery objective ”.