Once again Germany has exceeded the targets set out in the EU Directive on end of life vehicles (ELV) in 2010. With a recycling backlog of vehicles turned in during the government-sponsored scrapping bonus scheme the year before, the recovery rate for ELV stood at over 100 per cent. Once the vehicles put into temporary storage had been processed, the recovery rates were expected to normalise.
For 2010, Germany achieved a recycling and re-use rate of 95.2 per cent (2009: 82.9 per cent). Including energy recovery, the total recovery rate for scrapped vehicles stood at 106.2 per cent (86.7 per cent). Both figures surpassed the targets of 80 and 85 per cent set out in EU legislation.
Compared with 2009, the number of German ELV scrapped plunged from 1.778 million to only 500,000. However, more than 200,000 of the vehicles from 2009 were not processed until 2010.