There is nothing new about the idea of assembly plants for car. But the BMW company in Germany now has what is. In effect, the opposite of an assembly plant. At the plant, old BMW cars are cut into pieces by worker who sort the material into steel , glass and plastic, some of which will be used to make new vehicles.
This type of plant is necessary because there are strict laws in Europe – especially in Germany – to promote recycling and to reduce the amount of material thrown away on rubbish dumps, which cause pollution and take up land that can be used for better purposes. Consequently , designers are having to think about not just how a car should be put together , but how it can be taken apart at the end of its useful life.
Parts will have fewer fasteners, so they can be taken out more easily, and will be marked to identify the material used. Hundreds of different materials are used to make a car, and they need to be identified for recycling. This is especially
vital in the case of plastics because, if different kinds of plastics are mixed during recycling the result is an unusable liquid mess. Lt will also be necessary to eliminate the use of toxic chemicals in new cars as these can be dangerous to recycle. Volvo has already stopped using cadmium, a metal used in paints, for this reason.
Tires presented special problems in the past as vulcanized rubber could not be reused. Every year, 200 million tires are thrown away in the US forming a fire and pollution hazard. However, a company in Indiana has developed a chemical process that enables the rubber from old tires to be reused.
Recycling not only saves natural resources but also provides new jobs.