End-of-life product-specific material flow analysis. Application to aluminum coming from end-of-life commercial vehicles in Europe

End-of-life products contain valuable materials that should be efficiently recovered to contribute to the sustainable use of resources. Material flow analysis is known as an efficient tool to map material flows and stocks across the economy. This tool is increasingly applied to waste recovery, although its application to specific products is rather limited. In this paper, a comprehensive step by step method to build an end-of-life product-specific material flow analysis is proposed. Its main originality is to mix a top-down approach based on the analysis of databases with a bottom-up approach resorting to the contribution of experts involved in the product and material life cycles. Another contribution of the paper is to present results of the method when applied to aluminum coming from end-of-life commercial vehicles. The method shows useful results concerning the product and material: identification and quantification of relevant processes and flows; identification of material sinks in a region; graphical presentation of material flows and stocks. For example, it was shown that most of the 129,000 tons of aluminum contained in commercial vehicles leaving use in Europe in 2003 was recovered locally. The study also demonstrated differences in behavior for different product types.