Vehicles that have been withdrawn from use, and this now includes boats, are ending up at environment-friendly recycling and as raw materials for new products. Kuusakoski Oy has developed into the leading recycling company in the Baltic region.

Kuusakoski, which specializes in recycling services and the further processing of metals, acquires the material it needs from the Baltic region and Russia. The markets are global.

"Besides Finland, we're a major player in Sweden, Russia and the Baltic countries, Taiwan and Poland. Our biggest customers are in the Far East," says service director Risto Pohjanpalo.

"A special feature of our activities is the level of processing. For example, we process most of the aluminium into ingots, which we sell mainly to the car and electronics industries."

Scrap removed from forests

At the beginning of September 2004 Finland was the first EU country to start car recycling based on producer responsibility. Kuusakoski has a service network that covers the country, receiving and handling free of charge vehicles that have been withdrawn from use in accordance with the Scrap Vehicle Directive.

"We handle hundreds of cars every day and we send the metals obtained from them back to meet industry's needs. Every year we withdraw more than 100,000 vehicles from use, which means in terms of the amount of material about ten per cent of our total volume," Pohjanpalo says.

"Since 1972 some 2.5 million vehicles have ended up being recycled. If there were no recycling, the scrap would be by the roadside or in the forests."

Shorelines clean

This summer Kuusakoski started cooperating with Finnboat ry in recycling discarded boats. In Finland there are some 730,000 leisure-time vessels, about 4,000 of which are withdrawn from use every year.

Pohjanpalo says it is a handling process that is technically challenging. The metals and some of the plastics are re-used as a raw material by industry. The wood and some of the plastics can be reclaimed as energy. The rest of the materials, such as glass fibre, are reclaimed as fillers in concrete and asphalt or in support structures at landfill sites.

Recycling boats is not common worldwide. "Finland is one of advance guard in this. Apart from Japan, I know of no other countries that recycle boats systematically," Pohjanpalo says.

The appropriate destruction of boats is for the time being the responsibility of their owners. In the future it is expected that the EU's Producer Responsibility Directive will also apply to boats, which Kuusakoski's recycling operations anticipated.

>> www.kuusakoski.fi

A car's chassis, from which the liquids and tyres have been removed, ends up being crushed at Kuusakoski Oy's recycling plant.