Examination of Witnesses (Questions 674-679)
Mr Steve Franklin, Mr Jerry Hardcastle and Mr Peter
Stokes
1 APRIL 2008
Q674 Chairman: Good morning, gentlemen.
Perhaps, Mr Franklin, you could introduce yourself and your colleagues
can do so along the line.
Mr Franklin: Yes, thank you very much, good
morning. My name is Steve Franklin and I head up the Environment
Department of the SMMT; I have been there for eight years, predominantly
taken on to look after the ELV legislation implementation in the
UK. I have had a total of 45 years in the motor industry, manufacturing
predominantly, but a little bit of product development.
Mr Hardcastle: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,
I am Jerry Hardcastle, I am the Vice-President for Vehicle Design
and Development at Nissan Technical Centre Europe, based in Cranfield,
UK. I have responsibility for other offices in Barcelona, Brussels,
Bonn and Moscow. From a business point of view I have a reporting
line to Nissan Europe and from a functional point of view I have
a reporting line to the global research and development function,
Nissan Technical Centre, in Japan.
Mr Stokes: Good morning. My official job title
is Vehicle Compliance Manager for Volkswagen Group in the United
Kingdom. My relevance to this Committee is that it was my job
to ensure that our group met the end-of-life vehicle responsibilities
and, as part of that, became chair of the Consortium for Automotive
Recycling which was formed in the mid-Nineties to tease out and
work with a lot of the issues that we have now put to bed enabling
the End-of-Life Vehicle Directive to function in the UK, so my
experience is more on the recycling end rather than my colleagues'
which is on the design.
Q675 Chairman: That is very helpful,
gentlemen, thank you. This morning we recognise that at least
two of you will be talking on behalf of your companies, and we
will see you about complaints we have about your vehicles later
on. As far as Mr Franklin is concerned, I imagine you will be
able to range over the subject as best you can.
Mr Franklin: I would like to think that we can
cover the whole remit if necessary, yes.
Q676 Chairman: Perhaps we could start
with you, Mr Hardcastle. To what extent can better design and
novel materials be used to reduce waste in the automotive industry?
Can we start with the design end as it were?
Mr Hardcastle: There are a number of ways that
we can reduce waste and they are quite often related to the reduction
of weight and also a reduction of cost as well. For example, we
would use a particularly high strength steel, sometimes up to
980 megapascals. If you use a steel like this it is actually difficult
to manufacture with, difficult to weld, difficult to form; however
it allows us to delete additional brackets and it allows us to
use thinner material, so therefore at the end of the vehicle's
life there is less material that needs to be recycled. We can
also use a ultra high modular plastic for the bumper; in that
case we could delete some of the bracket trays and the aluminium
supports that might be behind the bumper, and that would of course
reduce the weight and reduce the cost, but it also deletes some
metal parts that then do not have to be wasted or recycled. In
the area of the catalyst, for example, for emissions control,
those have precious metals on them which are necessary for the
function of the catalyst, but we would try and minimise the amount
of precious metal required in order to get the exact performance,
which of course stops you using the precious metals in the first
place and also makes it easier to recover them because there is
less of them at the end of the process. They are just a few of
the ideas; there are many more ideas if you would like to hear
more.
Mr Stokes: I would agree with my colleague.
One thing that is worth pointing out, and I am sure you are aware,
is that the design end of building a car is intrinsically tied
to the tail-end and the way the vehicle is actually treated. The
way that the vehicle is shredded at the end of its life has a
direct influence on how you build it at the beginning of its life.
To illustrate that, a couple of examples: in the mid-Nineties
one manufacturer was making plastic bumpers which were a plastic
skin which was filled with a liquid foam and there were metal
brackets set into that. Once the foam hardened it actually bonded
to the plastic skin and bonded to the metal brackets which, when
the vehicle was shredded, meant that you had a mix of materials
that was very difficult to separate, very difficult to recycle
and would more than likely end up in landfill. Moving away from
those techniques of using dissimilar materials for making a component
means that you end up with something which can fragmentise easily
and is subsequently easier to recycle.
Mr Franklin: There are many computer-aided techniques
now for designing components that are very materially efficient—Nastran
is an example of computer-aided technology where we can eliminate
material and get down to absolutely the minimum requirement of
material to be used and then get an efficient design. For instance,
if you were looking at crash performance, you could actually simulate
that very effectively and put in high-strength steels instead
of heavier mild steels in particular areas, so the design aspect
at that point becomes crucial.
Q677 Lord Methuen: May I ask a question
about the shredding process? Have you semi-dismantled the car
by this time, so you have taken the bumpers off and other plastic
components and you are shredding the individual components rather
than the whole thing?
Mr Stokes: No, it is economically impractical
to do that, so the bare minimum of hand dismantling actually takes
place, which would be the removal of fluids and the removal of
what the directive calls hazardous substances—batteries
and mercury components, those sorts of things. The vehicle is
then crushed and shredded and then the materials subsequently
extracted from that.
Mr Franklin: If I could just add something to
that, something like two million ELVs are disposed of in the UK
every year although at the moment the DVLA is only recognising
about a million. That is the equivalent of about seven Nissan
factories worth of production, but we have 1400 authorised treatment
facilities (ATFs) actually disposing of the vehicles, so the logistics
of moving the stock around are not quite so good. Although, yes,
you could take off plastic bumpers and plastic components, the
logistics of getting them all together at the dismantling stage
do not really tie up unless you have got a moulder right next
door to you, so we tend to look at it going to the shredders,
and there are only about 35 shredders in the UK so you get better
logistics of recovering material.
Q678 Lord Haskel: What happens to
the other million?
Mr Franklin: We would like to think that the
other million were correctly disposed of but there are some issues
that you may be aware of with the DVLA at the moment. Central
to the ELV legislation is a certificate of destruction; every
vehicle entering an ATF should be issued with a certificate of
destruction. The DVLA has not implemented that in quite the way
we would have liked it to have done in terms of there is an ability
to make some self-declaration of scrapping the vehicle on a V5,
therefore it does not end up logged with a Certificate of Destruction
(CoD). This is something on which we and DTI (now BERR) have made
continuous representations to them.
Q679 Baroness Sharp of Guildford:
How far is there recycling of parts as they go along? The modularisation
of motor cars in this way means that rather than dents being pushed
out there is a tendency to just take off the door and put a new
door on or take off the bumper and put a new bumper on. How far
is there any recycling of these parts as they go along?
Mr Franklin: There are some insurance schemes
that recognise the use of using recycled parts. They are in their
infancy but there is an opportunity; if you say "I do not
mind having recycled parts put on my vehicle if and when I damage
it" then you can have that done. The repairability is one
of the major things that we look at. As the vehicles become more
complex in their design the repairability issues do become quite
severe: we are using adhesives now, we are using different forms
of joining technology and there is so much integrity in the build
of a vehicle now—its crash protection et cetera—that
it has to be very carefully looked after when repairing crash
damage.
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