The EU target to recover 95 per cent of all materials used in cars by 2015 is achievable but will depend on new technologies and services, according to the car and scrap metal industries.

"At the moment 85 per cent is more or less achievable, but going from 85 to 95 is a bit of a jump," one metals recycler said.

"It is all about having the technologies to recover the plastics and the rubber or use them as fuel," said the recycler.

The end-of-life vehicle (ELV) directive went into force in 2000 to deal with the eight-to-nine million tonnes of waste generated annually from scrapped cars in Europe.

By 2015, 85 per cent of the materials in a scrapped car must be reusable or recycled and 95 per cent of them must be recovered. This figure is up from a total recovery target of 85 per cent in 2006.

Most metals, including copper, steel and lead - which is found in car batteries - have been recovered for some time.

It is materials like rubber and plastic that pose the recycling problem, and it has fallen to metal recyclers, who typically receive scrapped cars, to deal with it.

"The car manufacturers should be responsible (to reach the EU targets) - but a lot of the responsibilities seem to have been passed onto our sector for meeting the targets," said Peter Brookes, director of UK-based recycler Metal and Waste Recycling Ltd.

"All vehicles end up coming to metal recycling yards for handling, de-pollution and then shredding ... and anything that cannot be recycled ends up in our waste stream."

Technologies to mechanically sort the plastics and other light materials out of the waste stream are not sufficient. "The plastics recycling industry in the UK is mainly about plastic bottles ... so it isn't just a matter of getting the material out of the post-shredder stream - it is a matter of finding a market for the material," the costs firmly with the metal recyclers," said Lindsay Millington, director general of the British Metals Recycling Association (BMRA).

Brookes of Metal and Waste Recycling said it would help if car manufacturers developed a recycling route for the plastics and funded more research into how to best sort and recycle these materials.

Britain fell short of the 2006 medium-term target, getting a reuse, recycling and recovery rate of 83.53 per cent, up from an estimated rate of 81 per cent in 2005, an industry source said.

"If the material was burned in a waste-to-energy power station we could recover the energy and that would count toward the target," Mr Brookes said.