Creation of a Sustainable Automobile Society Through Environmentally Friendly Recycling
Nissan led Japanese automobile manufacturers in forming the Recycling Promotion Committee in 1990. To further stimulate recycling activities, our Recycling Promotion Department was established in 1996.
Global Nissan Recycling Way
Approaches to Recycling · Emerging Issues in Nissan
Nissan's Approaches to Recycling
For Nissan as an automaker, raising the recovery rate of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) remains a high priority. Efficient recycling saves natural resources, reduces the environmental impact of waste-related chemical substances, and reduces the need for landfill area.
Over the years, Nissan has conducted a vast amount of recycling research to make it easier to recycle our products at the end of their service lives. The things we learned through this research are now being linked to activities at the development stage of new vehicles. This process looks at steps from a vehicle's design stage to the end of its service life in a joint, cross-departmental approach.
Our aim is to contribute to the creation of a sustainable automobile society through environmentally friendly recycling. To achieve this, we aim to facilitate the implementation of the 3Rs-reduce, reuse and recycle-in both design and development. Already at the design and development stages, steps are taken to decrease the use of environment-impacting substances and to design for ease of recycling.
We focus on the 3Rs in all stages. Obviously, recycling demands active collaboration between various sectors of society, and partnership between those who make a vehicle and those who recycle it is essential. We believe that joint effort, combined with sharing of information and know-how, is what enables increased synergy and, ultimately, more efficient use of resources.
Emerging Issues
There will always be issues that need to be resolved. With an average time lag of ten years between the development and recycling of a product, social conditions are bound to change in ways that cannot always be predicted. Besides rules and regulations, countries and regions differ in their collection routes, recycling industries, infrastructures, social and economic conditions. At Nissan we believe production should be carried out globally, while ELV processing should be handled locally. That is to say, we issue common design standards worldwide, but ELVs are processed under on-the-ground conditions in each country and region.
