End-of-life vehicles
Car recycling
Around 95% of a scrapped car, by weight, is reused, recycled or recovered — that is the legal target every Authorised Treatment Facility works to. Here is what actually happens to your car once it leaves your drive and arrives at our yard in Mexborough.
1. Arrival and the paperwork
Every vehicle that comes in is logged against its registration and VIN, matched to the collection record, and notified to the DVLA through the Certificate of Destruction system. From that moment the car legally no longer exists as a vehicle, and you are no longer its keeper.
2. Depollution
This is the part the licence is really about. Before a car can be dismantled, everything hazardous comes out on a sealed depollution rig: the battery, then fuel, engine oil, gearbox oil, coolant, brake fluid, power steering fluid, screenwash and air-conditioning refrigerant, each into its own tank. Airbags and seat-belt pretensioners are deployed or removed, tyres come off, and the catalytic converter is taken out for precious-metal recovery. Mercury switches, where fitted on older cars, are removed. Nothing goes down a drain.
3. Dismantling and reuse
With the car made safe, parts with a second life are removed: engines and gearboxes in good order, alternators, starter motors, panels, lights, alloy wheels. Reuse beats recycling, because a part that goes straight back onto another car saves all the energy of making a new one. What is left — the bare shell, the harness, glass and plastics — goes for material recovery.
4. Shredding and separation
Shells are baled and sent to a shredder, where the car is reduced to fist-sized fragments in seconds. Magnets pull out the steel — roughly 65–70% of a car by weight — and eddy-current separators recover aluminium, copper and other non-ferrous metals. The remaining “shredder residue” of plastics, foam, rubber and glass is sorted for recycling where possible and used for energy recovery where not.
The 95% target
UK regulations, carried over from the EU End-of-Life Vehicles Directive, require that 95% of each vehicle by weight is reused, recycled or recovered, and that at least 85% is reused or recycled rather than burnt for energy. The steel from your car is back in the supply chain within weeks; recycled steel takes around 70% less energy to produce than steel from ore.
Why the licence matters to you
An unlicensed yard can pay a few pounds more precisely because it skips the depollution and the paperwork. The cost lands on you: without a Certificate of Destruction you remain the keeper on the DVLA record, liable for tax, insurance and anything the car is later used for. Always check the buyer holds an ATF permit — ours is on file with the Environment Agency and the driver will show you a copy on request. Book a collection and we will take it from here.
Common questions
What is an Authorised Treatment Facility?
A site licensed by the Environment Agency (SEPA in Scotland, NRW in Wales) to depollute and dismantle end-of-life vehicles. The permit sets conditions on how fluids, batteries and other hazardous parts are handled and stored. Only an ATF can issue a Certificate of Destruction.
Are parts from my car sold on?
Sometimes. Where a part is in good condition and there is demand for it — an alternator, a door in the right colour, a set of alloys — reuse is the greenest outcome and it is encouraged by the regulations. Anything safety-critical or worn goes for material recycling.
What happens to the battery and the fluids?
They are removed first, before anything else. Fuel, oil, coolant, brake fluid, screenwash and refrigerant are drained into separate sealed tanks and collected by licensed waste contractors. Lead-acid batteries go to a battery recycler; hybrid and electric packs to a specialist.
Is it better for the environment to scrap or keep running an old car?
It depends on the car and what replaces it. A well-maintained older car can be greener than manufacturing a new one. But a car that fails emissions tests, leaks fluids or is unsafe is better recycled — the steel goes back into new products at a fraction of the energy of virgin steel.