Jaguar XE aluminium RECYCLING reclaims 50,000 tonnes in just a year

Photo Jaguar XE REALCAR Aluminium recycling

Jaguar’s REALCAR recycled aluminium project has reclaimed 50,000 tonnes of waste aluminium in a year of XE production in the UK.

The Jaguar XE has been in production for a year, and Jaguar are trumpeting that with the news that their ‘REALCAR’ aluminium recycling project has managed to reclaim 50,000 tonnes of waste aluminium in the last year which, say Jaguar, has saved 500,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions which would have been generated had Jaguar produced new aluminium instead of recycling the waste.

Clearly, although linked in the press release to the XE’s one year anniversary, it’s not just waste aluminium from XE production that’s been recycled, but is waste from clever closed-loop recycling processes in 11 UK press shops which segregates waste so it can be sent back in to production by being re-melted, a process that uses just five per cent of the energy needed to create new aluminium.

The whole REALCAR recycling project is led by JLR and part-funded by Innovate UK, and has also managed to create a recycled aluminium-based alloy which can take a bigger percentage of the recovered scrap, with the XE the first car to use the new high-strength alloy developed by Novelis.

JLR has invested £7 million in the recycling project, but if the figures for just the last year are anything to go by it’s money well spent.

Nick Rogers, JLR’s Group Engineering Director, said:

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.
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% recycled aluminium content in our vehicle body structures by 2020.

That aim seems to be well on track, with not just the new XE using the recycled aluminium, but the new F-PACE and XF too.