The automotive industry is faced with environmental problems during a car's life-cycle: energy consumption, air pollution and waste. This paper demonstrates the environmental impact of an increased use of aluminium in cars by presenting the results of a cradle-to-grave analysis based on officially approved models and data. The energy consumption and pollution of the air with toxic gases and CO2 can be significantly reduced by using aluminium instead of steel, even taking the ecological impact of the production of aluminium from bauxite into account. Different techniques for recycling aluminium in scrapped cars are presented that can guarantee high recycling rates and significant energy and CO2 savings. Nevertheless, with growing quantities of aluminium from scrapped cars, a major R & D effort is needed in order to achieve further improvements in the recycling process.
