End-of-Life Vehicle Recycling and the ASR Problem It Creates
End-of-Life Vehicle Recycling
End-of-life vehicle recycling is one of the great success stories of the materials economy — most of a car’s steel, aluminium and other metals are recovered and returned to use. But that success has a remainder: the automotive shredder residue that is left once the metals are gone.
The economics of shredding are driven by metal prices. A shredder is sized and optimised to extract ferrous and non-ferrous metals as efficiently as possible, because that is where the immediate revenue is. The residue is a byproduct of that optimisation, not its target.
The Recycling Target and the Residue Gap
When a vehicle is recycled, the headline figure is how much of it is recovered — and the metals deliver most of that number. The residue is what explains the gap between a high metal recovery rate and true circularity. Reuse and recycling targets push the industry to recover more than just the easy metal; they push toward the mixed remainder too.
That is the strategic shift. A vehicle whose steel and copper are recycled but whose residue is landfilled is only partly recovered. Closing the loop means finding a commercial route for the residue itself.
Turning the Byproduct Into the Product
The route exists. Thermal treatment recovers the residue’s energy as power while separating the remaining metals and the mineral fraction back into saleable forms — so the same vehicle that supplied its metals at the shredder also supplies energy and materials from its residue.
Learn More About Closing the ELV Loop
- Automotive Shredder Residue Gasification Plant
- Solid Waste Recycling
- What Is Gasification?
- Feasibility Studies
Partner With The KleanTeam to Complete the Vehicle Loop
Safe. Clean. Profitable. One Proven Partner.
Klean Industries completes what the shredder starts, converting the automotive shredder residue that remains after metal recovery into power, recovered metals and aggregate — so end-of-life vehicles deliver more than their steel.
Klean’s Key Advantages:
- ✅ An operating ASR gasification reference plant treating up to 20 t/h of shredder residue.
- ✅ Thirty-plus years engineering commercial gasification and waste-to-energy plants.
- ✅ 3 recovered carbon black (rCB) plants built in India over the past 2 years.
- ✅ KleanLoop blockchain provides end-to-end feedstock traceability.
Ready to recover your vehicles’ residue, not just their metal?
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