Old cars, euphemistically known as “end-of-life vehicles” or ELVs are turning into a menace. It’s because of the increased used of new materials, also known as plastics. Whereas the scrap of older cars was welcome fodder for the furnaces of steel and cast iron makers around the world, the plastic piles up on landfills, or is burned. Mazda says it has “become the world’s first automaker to successfully recycle scrapped bumpers from end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) into raw material for new vehicle bumpers.”
The new technology was inaugurated on August 21, 2011 and is initially being used to make rear bumpers for the Mazda Biante minivan. Before, if ELV bumpers didn’t land on landfills, they were processed into automobile shredder residue (ASR) and incinerated to recover heat energy, a process equally euphemistically called “thermal recycling.”
Mazda got into the bumper recycling business when it began processing damaged bumpers collected from in-use vehicles through its dealer network in Japan. In the 1990s,Mazda began designing bumpers to be easily recyclable. Now finally, the cost of recycling is less than the cost of purchasing new plastic. Bumpers make the biggest part of the automobile shredder residue.
