Kaizen for clunkers: why Toyota’s UK plant is expanding into used cars

There’s no going back for this 57-plate Vauxhall Corsa. The car’s 12 airbags are set off one by one. Some are louder than others. Often this process smashes part of the windscreen. This is how most cars end their days at an authorised treatment facility (ATF). What is very different here is the location is in a repurposed storage shed at Toyota’s long-established Corolla plant in Burnaston near Derby. Toyota is the latest manufacturer to direct their assembly skills into dissembling or – elsewhere on the vast Burnaston site – refurbishing used cars. Renault calls it the ReFactory. Toyota has dubbed it the Toyota Circular Factory, or TCF and is piloting it globally here. Car makers have long been governed by end-of-life (ELV) directives that set targets for the recycling and recovery of materials and parts from dead cars, both in the European Union and the UK. Mostly this has been farmed out to government-authorised dismantlers. The latest version applied in the EU, however, forces car makers to take more of an active interest by ordering them to reuse a certain amount of plastic from end-of-life cars back into new cars, starting with 3% from 2032 rising to 5% from 2036. Essentially that means they have to find on average 8kg of plastic recycled from old cars to make a new one. Recycled material costs more due to the labour needed to recover it – so why not apply techniques to building new cars to bring down the cost of stripping old cars? “It’s based on Toyota Production Systems in reverse,” Leon van der Merwe, Toyota Motor Europe’s head of circular economy, told Autocar. “It is all about standardised work, because only when you've got standardised work can you do kaizen to improve what you're doing,” he added, referring to the Japanese expression for continuous improvement. It’s hard work stripping old cars. How hard is revealed in the target takt time (i.e. time spent at each station) of 20 minutes, which will eventually see 10,000 old cars being dismantled annually on two shifts.Compare that to the new-car factory next door, where the takt time is a little over two minutes. Time is money and van der Merwe has given himself three years to prove that the circular factory here in Burnaston – and a second one planned for later this year at Toyota’s engine plant in Poland – can be profitable. Watching one worker painstakingly remove tyres from valuable alloy wheels shows where future time savings can be made; this is the learning phase and van der Merwe likened money lost in this phase as university fees. “It’s very easy to say ‘let’s throw a couple of hundred million at this, get robots in and they can rip the cars apart’,” he said. “But actually, if you don't understand what you're doing, that never works.” It doesn’t help that these cars aren’t just Toyotas. The facility takes all brands, subjecting workers to the vagaries of a variety of manufacturing techniques. Almost all cars are sourced locally; the transport costs outweigh the value of the car if they have to truck them for miles. That value is well understood by dismantlers, and is now by Toyota. For example, engines can be sold for between £100-£1000; catalytic converters have plenty of valuable metals in them; parts such as alternators, turbos and steering racks are shipped off for remanufacturing (a heavy overhaul) to be sold as secondhand; and car shells are dropped into a giant baler Toyota has on site that cubes them (with the force of 600 tonnes) before being sold for scrap metal. Eventually batteries will be recycled, too, but right now EVs are still too new. But Toyota as a car maker sees extra value on top. One example is alloy wheels, whereby they can be smelted down at its Deeside engine facility in North Wales and the aluminium can be used to make engine blocks. The first engine made partly from metal recovered from cars stripped at Burnaston was fitted just this month, a proud moment for a company that values both the environmental and financial benefit. The company also wants to eventually feed its on-site bumper making facility with the correct auto-grade plastic. That’s not easy. Not all plastic is suitable for reuse and sorting the good stuff from the rest is hard work. Automation might help in the future. Dismantling is too fiddly for robots, but they could be good at sorting plastics. “This is where the robots will really come into their own,” said van der Merwe. Cars in the future will ideally be built with a view to easier dismantling. Toyota has created what it calls the circular design index that calls on development engineers and designers to integrate recyclability into the many other demands on their work, for example lightweighting, ease of manufacturing and cost. What would be van der Merwe’s chief request? “A bumper is made of [around] six different materials. In the next 10 years can we get to two?” he says. Oh and one more: “Why do we have 15 different nut sizes? If we could have three or four, it makes dismantling so much easier.” The refurb operation is bigger than the dismantling, occupying half of the old assembly hall two. This hall fell into disuse after the Lehmans financial shock of 2008 and has only recently been given new life. Half is given over to production of the new US-market GR Corolla while the other half refurbishes Toyota and Lexus cars and vans mainly coming off Toyota’s own Kinto lease fleet for sale either direct to customers or to dealers. Again this is a tricky operation to get right. Unlike most refurb operations, it’s arranged in a production line so each operative does one job, with initial cleaning handing over to paint touch-up and so on. Toyota aims for each car to spend only a ‘few hours’ here overall but again the target takt time of 20 minutes per station shows up the inefficiency compared to new model production. Profits depend on getting the best price for the car, which R or retail grade. But if the car is older, or not a desired model, then the graders will tell staff to essentially dial back the prep effort. An on-site ‘paint hospital’ sorts out the worst scrapes and there’s a bodywork facility in the hall as well. Again kaizen principles are followed, with staff encouraged to suggest improvements – one discovered that pumice is a great way to lift hair from floor mats. The staff numbers in hall two – including the refurb, customisation and accessory area (e.g. towbars on new cars) – are now at 400, the second highest in the factory after assembly. This helps give new life to the factory and keeps workers on who might otherwise have lost their jobs. Toyota production at Burnaston now hovers around 100,000, well below its 285,000 volume peak in 2006. With the 12th generation Corolla now over seven years old and lots of uncertainty over what replaces it, any new business at Burnaston is to be welcomed until a firmer decision is made over its future.