The European directive on end-of-live vehicle (ELV) recycling will demand substantially more effort in the recycling of old vehicles than currently the case. The increased reuse/recovery quotas foreseen – 85% by 2006, 95% by 2015 – will require the development of recycling technologies and solutions addressing both achieving the legal requirements and doing so economically.

PLAFER® is a special process for the treatment of ASR = auto shedder residue and an answer to these requirement.
ELV’s will end up finally as valuable metallic scrap especially for the steel mills. The cars are disassembled by dismantlers. Gasoline, oil, Lubricants and other liquids are drained or removed. The so pre-treated ELV-bodies are further processed by the shedder-industry. The car bodies are shreddered / fragmentised. A great part of the scrap contains Fe-metal and can be assorted by magnetic separation. The metal-scrap returns to the mill for the steel production. All other materials like plastic, wood, rubber, textiles as well as other organic and inorganic materials are denominated as ASR auto-shredder-residue; it is a hazardous waste and normally destinated for landfills.

ASR, also called "shredder-fluff" a fine light fluffy material with a particle size of < 10mm difficult to handle and non magnetic with a calorific value over 14.000 kj/kg. This fluff can be treated with the process PLAFER® to a storable, inject-able product as substitute for carbon in the process line of the blast furnace operation.

By using the PLAFFER® process non-magnetic materials like copper, aluminium alloy metals can be sorted out from the fluff to a high extend, reaching a suitable Cu-level for the blast furnace operation.