Germany Ranked No.1 in Recycling Automotive Waste

Germany leads the way as the top nation recycling automotive waste into new vehicles within the European Union, a study by a recycling lobby group says.

The study by SaveOnEnergy suggests Germany is nearly twice as good at recycling automotive waste as its nearest rival, Austria.

The issue has become vital for European automakers having to help their countries meet the EU’s End-of-Life Vehicles Directive intended to reduce the annual volume of vehicle waste being generated among EU members, currently between 8 million and 9 million metric tons a year.

To assess individual countries’ effectiveness in recycling automotive waste, SaveOnEnergy calculated the total tonnage of vehicles reused and recovered as a percentage of total waste. To measure the performance of each EU country, it compared each country's reuse and recovery rate to the average rate across the EU.

The results put Germany firmly in the lead as doing the most to reduce end-of-life vehicle disposal by outperforming the EU recovery and reuse rate from 2006 to 2018 by an average of 7.75%.

In second place, Austria outperformed the recovery and reuse rate for the same period by an average of 4.79%. Iceland was third with an average of 4.28%.

At the bottom of the league of 31 countries was the tiny island state of Malta at -17.6% while Italy underperformed the EU recovery and reuse rate from 2006 to 2018 by an average of -6.99%.

Probably more worryingly the U.K., the world’s fifth-biggest economy which was part of the EU during the study period, was in 25^th place with an average recovery and reuse rate of -1.82%.