When scrapping your car or van you will have to notify the DVLA that your no longer the keeper and that you authorise your vehicle to be scrapped, over a million cars and vans are scrapped every year in the UK but according to the EU commission between 3-4 million vehicles go missing across Europe as unregistered scrap dealers buy and sell illegally on the black market which means over 55 million tonnes of waste fluids like engine oil and air con gas go unaccounted for damaging our environment, some vehicles are lost to paperwork grey areas and some are exported to the middle east for illegal dismantling.

In Denmark, car owners pay a minimum annual recycling fee of €11, which accumulates over the car’s life. The final owner gets the money when the car is scrapped with a legitimate dismantler.

Poland tops the charts with a whopping million cars a year reportedly missing, following closely behind France and Spain have half of that amount to which the government have no clue as to where they have gone. Germany has an outdated system contributing to the problem when a car has not been used for 7 years it is automatically removed from the system but still exist in physical form.

To reflect manufactures will all have to collaborate in the future to form a system that will track cars from source through ownership to recycling maybe following the Dutch idea of rewarding owners for responsible ownership and responsible recycling, if they don’t then we could see the problem getting a lot worse when 2020 comes around and manufacturers stop manufacturing diesel and start giving car owners incentives to buy electric vehicles.

The blog is written by

Paul Sweeney