..:: AUTO REPORT AFRICA ::..
Related Articles
As the Jaguar XE celebrates its first full-year of sales, REcycled ALuminium CAR, (‘REALCAR’), the pioneering recycled aluminium project that contributes to the awarding winning saloon’s aluminium-intensive body has reached a significant milestone, a statement issued by the British luxury automaker, Jaguar Land Rover, said.
Jaguar Land Rover, according to the statement obtained by AUTO REPORT AFRICA, has reclaimed over 50,000 tonnes of aluminium scrap, the weight of 200,000 XE body shells, back into the production process during 2015/16, preventing more than 500,000 tonnes of CO2equivalent from entering the atmosphere by not using primary aluminium material.
The statement said the figures are a result of project ‘REALCAR’ which involves 11 UK press shops 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.
The Jaguar Land Rover-led research project, partly- funded by Innovate UK, also saw the development of a recycled aluminium-based alloy which can accept a higher percentage of the recovered scrap.
It would be recalled that in 2014, the Jaguar XE became the first car in the world to use this innovative high-strength aluminium alloy, developed by project partner Novelis.
More than £7m has been invested across Jaguar Land Rover’s own Halewood, Castle Bromwich and Solihull press shops 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.
Recovering aluminium in this way offers huge sustainability benefits, with aluminium recycling requiring up to 95 percent less energy than primary aluminium production.
Nick Rogers, Group Engineering Director, said in the statement: “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.”
According to Rogers, “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 percent recycled aluminium content in our vehicle body structures by 2020.”
The structural grade of recycled aluminium has since been tested and introduced in the lightweight aluminium bodies of the All-New Jaguar XF and F-PACE models.
REALCAR is part of Jaguar Land Rover’s circular economy strategy to improve resource efficiency across the business.
