Jaguar Land Rover reached a recycling milestone, having reclaimed over 50,000 tonnes of aluminium scrap — equal to the weight of 200,000 Jaguar XE body shells — back into the production process during 2015/16. This prevented more than 500,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent from entering the atmosphere by not using primary aluminium material.
These figures are a result of the REALCAR (REcycled ALuminium CAR) project, which involves 11 UK stamping facilities implementing a closed-loop, segregating waste aluminium scrap so that it can be sent back into production to be re-melted into recycled aluminium sheet for use in Jaguar Land Rover vehicles. REALCAR is a multi-stakeholder initiative established to create a closed-loop vehicle production model that recycles automobiles at the end of their lifecycles and to create new materials and production systems to introduce closed-loop aluminium into Jaguar Land Rover cars. The collaborative project includes Jaguar Land Rover, Novelis, InnovateUK, and other industrial, academic, and funding partners.
REALCAR saw the development of RC5754, a recycled aluminium-based alloy that can accept a higher percentage of the recovered scrap. In 2014, the aluminum intensive Jaguar XE became the first car in the world to use this innovative high-strength aluminium alloy, developed by project partner Novelis. The XE has a body shell that weighs 251 kg and is comprised of 75% aluminum.
More than £7 million has been invested across Jaguar Land Rover’s Halewood, Castle Bromwich, and Solihull stamping facilities to install intricate segregation systems to capture and distribute the aluminium scrap for re-melting, reducing waste, retaining higher quality, and value in the material.
“Innovation is at the heart of everything we do at Jaguar Land Rover. We are driven by the desire to produce increasingly world-class, light-weight, vehicles, but we also want to be world leading in how we build them,” Nick Rogers, Jaguar Land Rover engineering director. “Innovative projects such as REALCAR demonstrate our commitment to meeting our sustainability challenges head-on. Its success so far marks a significant step towards our goal of having up to 75% recycled aluminium content in our vehicle body structures by 2020.”
The structural grade of recycled aluminium has now been tested and introduced in the lightweight aluminium bodies of the all-new Jaguar XF and F-PACE models.