Jaguar XE, the new super car in recycled aluminium

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In one year the automotive company has recycled over 50 thousand tons of metal, reducing waste and helping the environment.

How can a car be both new and second-hand? No, it’s not a scam. It’s the new miracle of the circular economy, which makes it possible to create a car with recycled materials without compromising on quality. We are not talking about little-known brands, or niche obsessions for environmentalists, but about Jaguar, the famous British brand that today celebrates the first birthday of its XE model, a vehicle developed within the aluminium recycling project Realcar.

Between 2015 and 2016, the British company reclaimed over 50 thousand tons of aluminium scrap, the equivalent of 200 thousand XE body shells, reintroducing them in the production chain. This allowed the company to reduce its primary aluminium needs, avoiding the equivalent emission of over 500 thousand tons of CO2.

The Realcar project, presented in a suggestive video by Jaguar, involves 11 press shops in the UK. It is based on a closed-loop system of aluminium scrap segregation: the scrap is sent back to the production, transformed into recycled aluminium, and used for Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles. The system allows to collect and redistribute the aluminium scrap to be melted, so as to reduce waste and ensure high quality levels and material value. This led to a considerable improvement of the company’s sustainability: the recycling of aluminium consumes 95% less energy than the production of primary aluminium.

The research project was led by Jaguar Land Rover, which invested over £7 million, and partially funded by Innovate UK. It saw the development of a special recycled aluminium-based alloy which can accept a higher percentage of the recovered scrap. This high-resistance alloy was developed by project partner Novelis and used for the first time in 2014 on Jaguar XE. The project seems extremely promising, considering that Jaguar invested more than £7 million to implement the new process in the press shops of Halewood, Castle Bromwich and Solihull, UK.

For further information, see Jaguar’s website.