SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007
Automakers’ attempts to make lighter, cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars are creating new hurdles for dismantlers, who face parts that are harder to remove and materials that are harder to recycle.
BY THEODORE FISHER
Automobile manufacturers are constantly adjusting their vehicle designs to optimize performance and safety and minimize costs. Such changes in vehicle design can be frustrating to auto dismantlers, though, who say their job has become almost as complex as the vehicles they disassemble. If you ask them what manufacturers are doing to make it easier, faster, and safer to remove car parts and environmental hazards and increase the recyclability of cars, their response is, “not enough.”
“It’s two different worlds,” says Bill Goodale, general manager of Millis Industries, a dismantler in Millis, Mass. “They’re only interested in production and how they can cut production costs.”
Carmakers are taking steps to improve their vehicles’ dismantling and recycling, but dismantlers wonder whether they will ever give adequate attention to automotive end-of-life issues.
Material Concerns
One bone of contention between manufacturers and dismantlers involves the stuff that cars are made of: materials that are hard to cut, recycle,
or even identify.
Carmakers are “using more and more extremely high-strength steels,” like boron, transformation-induced plasticity (TRIP), and dual-phase steels, says George Eliades, former CEO of the Automotive Recyclers Association (Fairfax, Va.). “A lot of people think the automakers are moving to all aluminum, which is lighter and does help them with fuel efficiency,” he adds, “but it’s expensive, so all-aluminum, if it happens, will probably be limited to very expensive luxury models.”
In the 30-year period from 1975 to 2005, the proportion of iron in light vehicles fell by about half, from 15 percent to 7.3 percent, according to data presented at a recent American Iron and Steel Institute seminar (Washington, D.C.). The proportion of mild steel dropped from about 56 percent to 44 percent, while the use of medium, conventional, and advanced high-strength steels rose from about 4 percent to about 11 percent. (Aluminum in light vehicles grew from 2.2 percent to 7.7 percent in that period.)
High-strength steel weighs less and withstands collisions better, but it requires the use of plasma cutters for disassembly. “Plasma cutters are machines; they’re not like torches,” Eliades says. “Because they are dangerous to use, technicians must go through special training to know how to use them. … If you just lay [a plasma cutter] down, it will burn and/or melt whatever is around it.”
Composite plastics can generate further recycling problems. When manufacturers mix plastics like ABS, PVC, PET, polymethyl methacrylate, polypropylene, and methyl methacrylate, the materials become much harder to recycle. “Some would have to be separated to avoid losing the advantage of recyclability,” Eliades says. “The truth is, it’s not worth trying to separate polymers that are not compatible.” He suggests that carmakers consider using combinations of plastics, such as ABS and polymethyl methacrylate, that work well together and are easier to recycle when combined. Eliades also says that automakers could replace rubber, which he feels has limited recycling potential, with “intensely recyclable” thermoplastic elastomers.
Also frustrating to dismantlers is automakers’ practice of bonding materials that are recyclable separately but not together. “If they bond a bumper cover that is a recyclable composite material to a metal bracket, that makes it almost unprofitable to recycle” the bracket, says Herb Lieberman, an industry liaison for LKQ Corp. (Chicago), which sells both new and used auto parts. “If those brackets were made with a material compatible with the plastic or composite fascia, it would be truly economical to recycle [them].”
At a very basic level, dismantlers sometimes just don’t know what materials they’re facing, Lieberman says. “If we’re looking at a door where the outside of the door shell is a composite or aluminum, and the door shell itself is steel, there should be some way of receiving information so we can identify those metals,” he explains.
Reducing and Removing Hazmats
For some automotive materials, the issue is not recyclability but safe removal and disposal. Much to dismantlers’ dismay, auto manufacturers have a record of using hazardous materials such as sodium azide, a chemical used to detonate car airbags that becomes toxic under certain conditions. Cars manufactured from the late 1980s until as recently as 2005 could contain azide canisters. “Those are items that, frankly, we don’t want to deal with,” Lieberman says. “At the end of the lifecycle, this product has to be processed— and somebody is going to have to pay for [these materials’] disposal.”
Automotive fluids can be problematic as well. It’s tricky to remove all the oil, transmission fluids, and other liquids from automobiles, and it’s especially difficult to extract coolants from cold engines, Eliades says. “Because they don’t turn into completely flowing fluids until they’re hot, dismantlers may not be able to get all of the [coolant] out of a cold engine and cold radiator.”
For one hazard—mercury switches—automakers, dismantlers, and recyclers have agreed upon a voluntary program for removal and disposal. Carmakers use mercury in several applications, including antilock brake systems, GPS systems, dashboard displays, and video screens, but until recently they had used nearly a gram of mercury in each switch for the “convenience lights” that automatically turn on when the car door, hood, or trunk opens. That mercury can enter the environment when end-of-life vehicles containing mercury are shredded and melted to make new steel. Foreign carmakers stopped using the switches in the early 1990s, and U.S. manufacturers did the same in the 2002 model year. An estimated 67.5 million switches remain in older vehicles, however.
In 2006, a two-year collaborative effort involving the U.S. EPA, ISRI, ARA, environmental groups, and the automakers and steelmakers culminated in the formation of the National Vehicle Mercury Switch Recovery Program. A memorandum of understanding outlines the responsibilities of each NVMSRP participant in switch removal and disposal, education and outreach, and recordkeeping. The participating automakers and steelmakers established a $4 million fund to pay dismantlers and recyclers in participating states $1 per mercury convenience-light switch removed and returned to the designated disposal facility over the next 10 years. “A dollar a switch doesn’t sound like much, but one of my members on the West Coast has already collected over $28,000 in this program,” Eliades says. “These switches will be around for another 10 or 12 years, and for as long it goes, the program will more than pay our members’ [ARA] dues each year—and enable them to purchase a few cars as well.”
A side benefit of the program is that once it launched, the EPA changed mercury switches’ classification from hazardous to universal waste, Eliades says, “saving everyone a lot of labor, paperwork, and inventory and storage costs.”
Improving Content Knowledge
What bothers dismantlers the most, perhaps, is that automakers historically have ignored them. “They make changes in design and don’t give us consideration,” Eliades says. “We’re not told when new metals or materials are incorporated into vehicles, so we don’t know … and it does affect our ability to reclaim quality OEM parts and avoid damage to adjacent quality components, parts, panels, or attachments.”
The automakers, for their part, say they don’t always have all the answers. General Motors Corp. now requires all its suppliers to provide a material breakdown of the parts they supply, both to eliminate substances of concern like mercury and hexavalent chromium and to improve their knowledge of what’s in their vehicles.
“When we first did it, we found there were substances in parts that we weren’t even aware of because some tier-six supplier somewhere put a coating on a bolt, which then got incorporated into something else, which we had no idea was buried inside,” says Candace Wheeler, a staff research scientist in GM’s research and development group (Warren, Mich.) and GM’s representative to the Vehicle Recycling Partnership, a branch of the U.S. Council for Automotive Research that conducts collaborative research and runs pilot programs on vehicle recycling.
That knowledge feeds into the Global Automotive Declarable Substance List (www.gadsl.org), an effort of the automotive, automotive parts supplier, and chemical/plastics industries to identify substances of concern throughout the automotive supply chain. The GADSL currently lists 94 substances, from acetaldehyde to vinyl chloride, that are prohibited or declarable in certain applications or above certain limits, along with an explanation of each one. “It used to be that GM had a list and Ford had a list and DaimlerChrysler had a list—and it drove suppliers absolutely nuts,” Wheeler says. “What GADSL does is set up a list of materials that worldwide automakers want to design out of their vehicles.”
That and other forms of information-sharing are becoming more common, spurred by European Union mandates that require manufacturers to provide dismantlers with detailed information—such as weight, composition, and estimated time for dismantling—on all removable plastic components.
In the United States, GM has begun posting dismantling manuals on its Web site, www.gm.com/ company/gmability/environment/recycling/veh_end_life. GM’s ELV manuals give the composition and weight or volume of components in seven “activity areas” of each car or truck—doors and glazing, exterior trim, instrument panel, seating, interior trim, engine trim, and load space. The site contains downloadable manuals for more than 60 models manufactured between 2000 and 2007 along with pretreatment manuals that address fluid removal and the location of mercury-containing LCD screens, headlights, and other components for most vehicles in the 2003-2007 model years.
U.S. automakers also contribute to the International Dismantling Information System (www.idis2.com), a consortium of 58 carmakers that includes all major producers in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Dismantlers and recyclers can download the IDIS software, which contains a database of more than 84,000 parts in 1,200 vehicles. The software identifies each part’s location on a diagram of the vehicle and identifies its composition, how it’s fastened, and what tools are required to remove it.
Research and Design for Dismantling
The big-three U.S. automakers invest in dismantling and recycling research through the VRP, which created a recycling infrastructure that outlines a role for every player: manufacturers, suppliers, dismantlers, shredders—even consumers, the ones who usually arrange the car’s final disposal. “Ford believes in the infrastructure,” says Claudia Duranceau, a senior research recycling engineer with the Dearborn, Mich.-based company and its representative to the VRP. “We believe in working collaboratively because after a vehicle goes through a shredder, you can’t tell whose car it was.” Current VRP research projects include removing substances of concern from the polymeric portion of shredder fluff and recycling hybrid car batteries (see “How About Hybrids?” at left).
Foreign carmakers, facing tough European and Japanese ELV mandates, are researching dismantling and recycling issues as well. In the United States, Honda Motor Co. has collaborated with major dismantlers to research achieving greater fluid recovery and finding ways to make dismantling their cars easier and more profitable.
“We’re working with dismantlers to identify what [parts] are difficult to remove and what parts are inaccessible for removal,” says Richard Paul, an independent consultant to Honda on recycling and environmental management. “If there’s a high-demand part—a transmission or a condenser, for example—that’s behind a low-demand part that the dismantler’s unlikely to want to remove for resale, then it becomes a challenge to justify the work required to get to that high-demand part.”
After conducting similar research, Toyota Motor Corp. developed special tools for extracting recyclable copper from wire harnesses and motors. To reduce the dismantling time of the Raum, a five-seat minivan sold only in Japan, Toyota created bonded areas that can come apart with a hard tug, replaced screws with clips wherever feasible, minimized the use of composite materials, inscribed an “Easy to Dismantle” mark on areas where large resin parts easily separate, and indicated where dismantlers can drill holes for removing fuel. In the same vein, Volvo facilitates dismantling by marking all polymer components weighing more than 100 grams (3.5 ounces) with material codes and sorting fractions. And Hyundai Motor Co.’s Environmental Technology Research and Development Center in Seoul has an on-site automated vehicle dismantling plant, operated by two employees, that can dismantle some 2,300 vehicles a year.
Carmakers say there’s a good reason why they don’t put dismantling higher on their design agenda. “We have to design for ‘serviceability’ since our cars have warrantees for up to 10 years or more,” Ford’s Duranceau says. “You don’t want them to dismantle easily because you want them to be able to last, with no leaks or things like that.” And, she adds, “design for dismantling may not be the best way to design for recycling parts because we do not dismantle cars the same way we assemble them.”
There’s another reason automakers don’t design for easier dismantling, Paul says: They believe replacement part sales compete with original equipment manufacturer part sales. In reality, he says, “they’re different markets. We sell OEM parts to customers with newer cars who want to pay the higher amount for a parts warranty, versus somebody with an older vehicle who can’t really justify the cost of a new OEM part and should be buying used parts.” In fact, Eliades says, dismantlers “would like to see … dealerships offer their customers an alternative—quality OEM recycled parts—if the price of a brand-new part is too high compared with the value of the vehicle.”
But end-of-life issues are becoming at least part of the design picture. GM offers its design engineers a short course on designing for dismantling and recyclability. “We teach them how to communize materials—not use multiple materials—and we talk about recycling misconceptions, the ELV recycling process, global requirements, and recyclable design using recyclable materials,” says Jerry King, a manager in GM’s design for the environment group. “Just like we teach design for serviceability or manufacturing and assembly, this class teaches engineers who are designing the cars of the future to design for recyclability.”
A different perspective
Though dismantlers don’t always see eye to eye with manufacturers, they understand that automakers must make a lot of tough choices—“like whether to put in a plastic fuel tank or a metal fuel tank,” Eliades says. A plastic tank is lighter, which might improve the car’s fuel efficiency, he says. That makes the car cheaper and better for the environment while it’s on the road. But the two materials look different from an end-of-life perspective. A plastic gas tank is “not recyclable because the gas eventually permeates the plastic,” Eliades explains, thus it will most likely go through a shredder and into a landfill. A metal tank is not porous and can be recycled—making it better for the environment in the long term. “I’m not defending them,” he says, “but those are decisions that the automakers are confronted with.”
As Lieberman puts it, “Manufacturers today have a charge of making vehicles lighter with better fuel economy—and we understand that.
We just wish that when they design a vehicle and manufacture a product that they keep in mind that someday that product is going to have to be [handled] in an economical and environmentally responsible manner.”
How About Hybrids?
Hybrid vehicles have been available in the United States for less than a decade, and sales are still a miniscule part (about 2.4 percent) of the U.S. automotive market, so dismantlers have yet to face them in large numbers. The biggest challenge—or opportunity—hybrids will pose, they say, is their nickel-metal hydride batteries.
“The thing that’s hard about [hybrid batteries] is that they can retain a charge, so the high voltage will have to be dissipated before they can be handled,” says Ford Motor Corp. researcher Claudia Duranceau. Toyota Motor Corp. reports that its hybrid car batteries range from 208 to 275 volts, and the dismantling instructions for the Prius note that power remains in the high-voltage electrical system for five minutes after the battery is shut off.
Hybrid batteries also are heavier than most lead-acid batteries. Early Toyota Prius models have NiMH battery packs weighing 86 pounds, the company says. GM reports its hybrid vehicle batteries weigh between 50 and 150 pounds. And removing them does require some caution: Toyota dismantling instructions warn that the battery packs contain a caustic, alkaline electrolyte solution that could be damaging to human tissue, though the sealed packs should leak only when the battery is damaged in a catastrophic crash, the company says.
A typical first-generation Prius battery contains 32 pounds of nickel, 4 pounds of cobalt, 5 pounds of alloy steels, and 11 pounds of polypropylene in its case, plus chemicals and absorbent materials. To ensure that its hybrid batteries get recycled, Toyota prints a toll-free number on each one that dismantlers can call for shipping information. The company pays a $200 “bounty” on each battery recycled through its program, which in the United States is run by Kinsbursky Brothers (Anaheim, Calif.). So far Kinsbursky Brothers estimates it has recycled a few hundred electric and hybrid car batteries, both Toyota and other brands.
“Due to the increase in the value of nickel”—nearly 1,000 percent since the first hybrid vehicles hit the U.S. market—“we have noticed greater interest in recovering these batteries from various recyclers,” says Toyota spokesperson Nancy Hubbell. “Batteries from our vehicles can and do get into the battery recycling industry through a variety of methods—not just through the Toyota dealer recovery process [via] Kinsbursky.”
Ford’s Duranceau believes the current infrastructure for recycling lead-acid batteries could handle hybrid battery recycling as well. The big-three automakers’ Vehicle Recycling Partnership “is doing research to see if we can retain some of the high value in the hybrid battery materials—to retain the high quality of some of the alloys—as opposed to just downcycling into metals and things like that,” she says. •
Theodore Fischer is a writer based in Silver Spring, Md.
Automakers’ attempts to make lighter, cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars are creating new hurdles for dismantlers, who face parts that are harder to remove and materials that are harder to recycle.