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RECYCLABILITY INDEX FOR AUTOMOBILES
Description:
The project's purpose is to create a rating system for the ecological impacts of vehicles at the end of their life based on recyclability, toxic material content, and ultimate disposal. Each year, 10-11 million vehicles are retired from service in the United States. The vehicle material not recycled is called Automotive Shredder Residue (ASR). About 4.5 to 5 million tons of ASR are disposed in solid waste landfills. This residue will increase as vehicle manufacturers continue to use more plastics and composites in their designs to reduce weight and increase fuel efficiency. The proposed grading system will help educate consumers about environmental performance and allow them to factor this performance into their choice of automobiles. This, in turn, is expected to influence the vehicle producer's choice of manufacturing methods in the same way as the Toxic Release Inventory helped reduce the amount of hazardous waste produced in the mid-1980s. The rating system will be modeled after life cycle assessment with weighted criteria for the recycling ability of vehicle components. The rating system will be tested on two 2005 model vehicles including a sensitivity analysis to see the effect, for example, of replacing a hazardous component of the car (mercury switch) with a non-hazardous one (mercury-free switch). The rating system will be developed with guidance from a team of professors with broad engineering backgrounds as well as industry professionals. A large part of the project's budget covers travel expenses for networking with the United States, European industrial professionals and EPA personnel. This project will be included into a second year college level eco-product/life-cycle-assessment class in the Materials Engineering Department and in a senior level pollution prevention class in the Environmental Engineering Department.