98.7% per cent of end-of-life vehicles put to good use
The figure captures the imagination.
When an end-of-life vehicle is taken to a car-dismantling company, no less than 98.7%, by weight, will be reused, recycled or channelled to another useful application.
ARN and the 238 recycling partners are thereby leaders in Europe.
Reuse, recycling and useful applications
Some parts of an end-of-life vehicle, such as gearboxes or headlights, are suitable for reuse. Various links in the recycling chain process materials that are recovered from end-of-life vehicles into reusable basic materials, such as metals, fibres and plastics. The vast majority of end-of-life vehicles can be reused or recycled. In 2023 that amounted, all told, to 88.1% of the total weight of all end-of-life vehicles. A second category comprises materials that cannot be reused, but can be put to another good use. An example of this is energy recovery through combustion. In 2023, this came to a total of 10.6 per cent of the total weight of all end-of-life vehicles.
Reuse of materials
Recycled materials are channelled into a plethora of new applications. For example, GS-Recycling, a waste-fluids processor, makes new products from fluids, such as base oil for the production of lubricants.
Plastics separated in the PST (Post-Shredder Technology) factory are given a new lease of life, such as in the form of bumpers for new cars.
New batteries are made from the lead recovered from starter batteries, while granulate from car tyres is processed into, among other things, circular rubber drainage tiles.
More than 30 years of development and refinement
At ARN we look ahead, towards a society in which usable raw materials are recycled and reused at a high level of quality and for acceptable costs. Soon, it will no longer be a given that we will need brand new raw materials. In this way, ARN contributes to a circular economy.
Existing and new regulations are setting the framework for all this and everything that we do is directly related.