AT THE HEART OF THE ROAD TRANSPORT INDUSTRY.

Call our Sales Team on 0208 912 2120

CASE STUDY: VW

13th September 2007
Page 64
Page 65
Page 64, 13th September 2007 — CASE STUDY: VW
Close
Noticed an error?
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.

Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Like its competitors, Volkswagen contracts out vehicle disposals to accredited disposal sites. Group vehicle compliance manager Peter Stokes says: "Although some chassis-cabs may be bodied, potentially causing complexity when it comes to ultimate responsibility, realistically, we have to take that on the chin. It's our badge on the front. Rather than petty arguments. brand protection and perception are of paramount importance."

He dismisses any suggestion that contractors pay to have ELVs sent to their sites: "There's no fiscal relationship. We send them a stream of vehicles: they provide certificates of destruction to the DTI and some statistics for us.

'The contractors have the cost of a compliant site and the variations in scrap metal prices, currently very high, to deal with," Stokes adds. But if they are in this sector, they would anyway. If scrap prices reached the point of ELVs having a negative value we would have to think again, [about the basis of the relationship]."

VW is not comfortable with flying the environmental flag to gain public favour for its ELV policy, he says: "We were driven by legislation but would rather be recognised for having developed a shredder that already meets the 2015 statutory target of retrieving 95% of the material from an ELV, We used to have to subsidise the disposal of plastic but people now pay money for what is mainly polypropylene. \NV is using recycled material in its new vehicle manufacture though."

Stokes reports: "Plastics tend to have two or three life cycles before ending up as energy recovery: for example, being issued as a filter granulate to purify iron."

With regard to the politicians' part in the implementation of ELV, he says: The system we've ended up with politically has been a good solution-workable implementation. The areas the UK is weak in are the traditional ones of inspection and enforcement. Public awareness of the need to gain a certificate of destruction from an approved site is currently low.

We now know how many [ATF] operators there are and are on target for getting 85% material recovery. We did it in two years -quite a feat although one that would have been easier had the UK been on a par with Scandinavia and Germany, which had local regulations and systems in place well before ELV regulations were rolled out across all of the EU."

fluids, batteries and tyres; there are some costs offset by some gains.The scrap market is buoyant at present."

Steve Franklin,senior manager at the SMMrs environment group, adds:"None of the ELV rules applied to trucks so we were surprised when DEFRA said depollution rules would follow the same criteria. Effectively the rules state how to depollute and recycle on approved sites.

"There are currently 14,000 ATEs in the UK that recycle 85% of vehicles by weight," he reports.

"People will only separate and sell what scrap has value if the technology is there but it relies on there being a market.Total tonnage is very small compared with 2.3 million cars."

As to the RAMO question: will ELV regulations for LGVs eventually become part of British law? The response from the experts CM consulted is an unequivocal "no". •

Tags

Organisations: European Union

comments powered by Disqus