Abstract
A rapid increase in the number of end-of-life (EoL) passenger vehicles has led to a large amount of waste plastics in China. However, the scale and efficiency of recycling resources from EoL vehicles still restricts the sustainable and healthy development of the automotive industry. The current behavior of automotive/recycling industry entities, as well as the strategy of waste management policymakers, may depend on the potential of total recyclable resources. To reveal such recycling potential of various plastic materials in EoL passenger vehicles, we predicted total EoL passenger vehicles in China from 2021 to 2030 (used the Weibull distribution) considering passenger vehicle ownership (estimated by the Gompertz model), quantified the demand for new passenger vehicles (estimated using its non-linear relationship with income level and passenger vehicle ownership), and assessed the recyclable plastics by categories and by provinces. The results show that (i) the annual average recycled plastic resources from EoL vehicles would exceed 2400 thousand t in 2030, more than 2.5 times in 2021, showing a great recycling potential; (ii) the differences among the three scenarios are relatively small, indicating that no matter the saturation level of passenger vehicles in China would be high or low, a rapid increase of recyclable plastic resources can be expected from 2021 to 2030; (iii) at the provincial level, a considerable gap between the potential of recycling plastic from EoL passenger vehicles and the regional processing capacity. Given such great potential and regional differences, the recycling policies should be applied in stages and consider the development level and recovery pressure in each region.
Highlights
Lightweight, strong, durable, and low-cost plastics are used in a wide range of manufactured products worldwide [1]
Promoting Recycling of Plastics from EoL Passenger Vehicles Based on extended producer responsibility (EPR)
[70],many aiming to build a more effective recyclingby system mance engineering plastics, metal parts on vehicles areresource being replaced plasticfor ELVs
Summary
Lightweight, strong, durable, and low-cost plastics are used in a wide range of manufactured products worldwide [1]. The increasing end-of-life (EoL) passenger vehicles have led to the production of a large amount of waste plastics. Determining how to manage these waste plastics more efficiently has become one of the most important problems worldwide [3]. Waste plastics require space for landfills, which has caused great economic loss due to increasingly scarce urban land resources. Many landfilled waste plastics cause severe damage to landforms, vegetation, and the natural landscape [4]. Some waste plastics can even release harmful and toxic gases, causing severe air pollution and health problems [5,6,7]. Waste plastics landfilled arbitrarily or without proper anti-leakage technology can severely pollute the soil at disposal sites [8,9] and disrupt the food chain [10]
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