What we do

ARN Recycling processes shredder waste into reusable materials. In this way, ARN Recycling offers an alternative to dumping the shredder waste from end-of-life cars in landfill sites. You can read about how ARN Recycling achieves this in its policy statement.

Shredder waste
Shredder waste is what remains after a car has been through all the recycling processes. The liquids and some materials are first removed from the car, which is then brought to the shredder. A shredder is a big grinder that shreds the car and separates the metals for further processing. The shredder waste that remains, is a mix of different materials, which makes it difficult to recycle. However, useful raw materials can still be recovered from the shredder waste using mechanical separation techniques. These raw materials can be put to a wide variety of uses.

Increasing the recycling percentage
In 2010, 95.3% of the weight of all end-of-life vehicles in the Netherlands was recycled. However, this recycling performance does not yet meet the legal distribution requirement for 2015, which requires that a minimum of 85%
must be recycled as product or material, with 10% being achieved through incineration with energy recovery. At present, the latter still accounts for 12%; achieving the final few percent is extremely complex and costly. The PST facility recently opened by ARN is expected to make an important contribution to achieving the target, by enabling shredder waste to be processed into reusable material.

Post Shredder Technology
As mentioned above, ARN Recycling uses Post Shredder Technology (PST), a technology that was originally developed for VW-SiCon. The plastic separation module was developed by Galloo. Utilising this technology, useful raw materials can be recovered from the shredder waste using mechanical separation techniques. The materials are separated on the basis of properties such as density, particle size, magnetism, electrical conductivity or optical attributes. Broadly speaking, shredder waste is separated into four fractions; metals, plastics, fibres and a mineral fraction.