Hyundai-Kia gets through quite a few vehicles at its Namyang R&D facility. Dave Leggett visited a purpose-built vehicle recycling facility where old workhorses are pulled apart for ‘regeneration’.
It’s where Hyundai and Kia cars worked hard at the sprawling Namyang R&D facility go to die. The ‘Automobile Resource Regeneration Center’ is also a place where methods for vehicle disposal that raise the recycling percentage can be tested and executed.
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The Namyang R&D facility is hungry for cars and there’s generally a fleet of around 7,500 being subject to testing and experimentation. After three years or so, cars are ready for disposal. Over 3,000 a year are pulled apart in a disassembly process designed to recycle as much as 95% of the car’s material back into the vehicle production process.
In case you are wondering if the three-year-old cars can be sold on to the used car market, the answer is that due to a variety of rules and tax positions applying in South Korea, no they can’t. The cars allocated for use at Namyang’s R&D facility are destined for a short life.
In 2005, Kia Motors established the recycling facility on the Namyang site. It has an annual processing capacity of 4,000 units and provides technological support for designing recyclable vehicles and develops recycling technologies to reduce waste by improving the disposal process.
End-of-life vehicle processing system
The regeneration centre features a monitoring system that tracks the end-of-life vehicle processing sequence in real-time – from the number of units being processed to the amount of processed recyclable and waste materials. The center is also working on dismantling systems and devices for distribution in order to support small and medium enterprises that may have difficulties developing proprietary dismantling technologies.
Kia says the centre has built a cooperative network with the Korean vehicle disposal and dismantling industry and is providing technology and know-how for the establishment of processing standards for the disposal and dismantling of end-of-life vehicles.
Kia officials say it is researching diverse technologies for recycling the used parts of end-of-life vehicles and that it aims to raise the recycling rate of automobile shredder residue (ASR) from the current 85% to 95%. To this end, the facility is researching ASR resource regeneration technologies and parts remanufacturing technologies that would restore recyclable used parts to like-new condition. It is also researching technologies to safely retrieve and destroy air conditioner coolants and other harmful substances. Furthermore, the centre has been researching technologies to recycle PET bottles.
Recovered materials are used in the manufacturing of automotive electric motor housings as well as exterior automotive parts. Kia says the process not only reduces waste, but can also help with decreasing the weight of vehicles. The centre has also developed technology to recycle rubber scraps, of which more than 2,000 tons are produced every year. Recycled rubber scraps are used for muffler hangers, mats, and gaskets.
Kia’s efforts in this area are partly being driven by international regulatory standards that call for 95% recycling on vehicles by 2015. We saw a disassembly process in action that removes liquids and effectively separates materials. Airbags are blown (neat to watch; the deployed bag sheets then cut and removed), engines and transmissions are dropped out. The body-in-white, shell, at the end is put in a crusher and sent off to a steel mill, job done.
Polymers and metals are also easier to get at these days, plenty of thought given to component manufacturing, component fit and design to help with end-of-life disassembly. It raises a question though: what’s the tough stuff in that 5% that is difficult to get at. The answer is surprising. Besides some of the elements in the wiring and electronics, problems with things like seat foam, glazing, yes glass, is a sizeable problem. You may imagine it would be an obvious low-hanger, but glass is labour intensive to extract and the economics of the glass recycling business mean that there is not much return on the recycled glass. In short, glass is low value and uneconomic to recover. That means it accounts for a significant proportion of that difficult-to-get-at 5%. Something to reflect on when you are next doing your duty at the bottle bank.
