Enhancing liberation of end-of-life products for materials recovery

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Increasing regulatory, public, and eco-efficiency pressures are forcing industries to maximize the amount of materials that can be recovered and recycled from their products. One current example is the EU directive requiring 95% of all discarded automobiles to meet specific recyclable content criteria through to the year 2015. Such regulatory pressures, due to the global market of the automotive industry, also affect Canadian produced automobiles. Presently, about 75% of an automobile is recycled but the bulk of this are metals. Plastics, however, have proven problematic to isolate from one another and to recover efficiently on a mass scale from complex consumer products such as automobiles. To date, only a few commercial operations claim to successfully separate plastics from other plastics, and there can be significant impacts from the process itself. In the case of vehicle recovery, the challenge is to attain the additional 20% of recyclability through cost-effective, yet environmentally acceptable means: much of this 20% are plastics from discarded cars, disposed of as shredder residue (SR). This wastes re-usable materials and decreases landfill space. Furthermore, end-of-life recovery processes do not usually pretreat items to improve the efficiency of materials recovery and instead depend on extensive post-processing after shredding to isolate desired materials.