Close loop recycling turns out to be the biggest resource opportunity for JLR & Novelis

Aluminium is in high demand in North America due to the pressure of sticking to the higher Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for 2025. So, the key business drivers for the North American automakers happen to be:

• Light weighting
• Reduce material impact
• Fewer carbon emissions
• Use the maximum of recycled material to cut down on the environmental footprint

Light weighting has been the top priority of Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) group in last eight years. “Every 100kg saved in vehicle mass saves around 2% in fuel consumption,” said, Adrian Tautscher, Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) group leader for sustainable aluminium strategies.
Keeping that in mind Jaguar started the REALCAR (Recycled Aluminium CAR) project in collaboration with Novelis. This project involves 11 UK press shops implementing a closed-loop, segregating waste aluminium scrap to be re-melted into recycled aluminium sheet which would be used in Jaguar Land Rover vehicles.



The Jaguar Land Rover-led research project led Novelis to develop a recycled aluminium-based alloy RC5754 which can accept a higher percentage of the recovered scrap. 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.

JLR’s engineering director Nick Rogers said of the announcement: “We are driven by the desire to produce increasingly world-class, lightweight, vehicles, but we also want to be world leading in how we build them.”

As a result of implementing this project Jaguar Land Rover has recovered over 50,000 tonnes of aluminium scrap, about the same weight as 200,000 XE bodyshells and put it back into the production loop during 2015/16. This close-loop-recycling process thus prevented more than 500,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent from entering the atmosphere by not using primary aluminium material. This also turned out to be much more profitable economically as the same buyer turned out to be their material supplier. JLR too confirms that the use of recycled aluminium is helping to cut down costs, especially as the recycled alloy production requires up to 95 per cent less energy than primary aluminium production.