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End of Life Vehicles (ELV)

Scrap CarsWhat is an End-of-Life Vehicle (ELV)?

An ELV is basically any vehicle that has come to the end of its useful life.

ELV’s can be divided into two categories:

1. NATURAL ELV’s:

This refers to a vehicle that has come to the end of its life due to natural wear and tear (usually vehicles over ten years old). This type of ELV will simply be de-polluted and then recycled for scrap metal.

2. PREMATURE ELV’s:

This type of ELV refers to those vehicles that have come to the end of their life for unnatural reasons such as accident, fire, flood or vandalism damage. However, rather than be scrapped, the insurance companies will categorise and approve for these vehicles to be either dismantled for spare parts only or sold complete as damaged-repairable salvage.

End-of-Life Vehicle Directive

The EU End-of-Life Vehicle Directive (The ELV Directive) is legislation enacted by the European Commission to address pollution resulting from vehicles that have reached the end of their useful life, also known as End of Life Vehicles (ELV). It is aimed at decreasing more than 8 million tonnes of waste generated by about 12 million cars that become ELVs each year. The legislation sets forth requirements for 15 Member States to set legislation to encourage re-use, recycling and other forms of recovery of ELVs and their components and ban certain hazardous substances.

For more information visit the Environment Agency.

Old Vehicle Parts

What is vehicle de-pollution?

Vehicle de-pollution is the newly developed treatment process that all end-of-life vehicles must undertake if they are to achieve the required levels of materials recycling and recovery stipulated by the ELV Directive.

The process basically involves two main functions:

  1. The recovery of all positive components and fluids that may be recycled and re-used (e.g. fuels, oils, coolants, ferrous and non-ferrous metal components, etc), and also
  2. The removal of all those negative elements of a vehicle that are potentially harmful to the environment (e.g. tyres, mercury switches, airbags, etc).