An overview of current processes for the thermochemical treatment of automobile shredder residue

The automobile is a metal-dominated complex product, comprising many different materials, and is therefore a good study case for the modeling of recycling streams based on the classical minerals processing approach. In Europe and in many industrial sectors of the world, end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) are collected and partly dismantled. The remaining wreck is shredded. During shredding, the wreck is broken into smaller particles, and so the materials it contains are liberated to some extent. After shredding, the particles are fed to a series of automatic physical separation processes. This results in several recovered material streams: ferrous materials, aluminium, copper, zinc, stainless steel and automotive shredder residue (ASR, which consists of mainly nonmetallic materials). Each stream suffers from some degree of contamination by foreign materials due to imperfect separation processes. It should be noted that thermochemical treatment (pyrolysis, gasification, etc.) of complex organic materials is one of the most promising methods of reducing the impact of solid, municipal and industrial wastes from environmental, storage and landfill perspectives, and it can also be used to produce energy. This review compares thermochemical processes for automobile shredder residues (ASR).