A jump of more than 6% in the End of Life Vehicle (ELV) recycling and recovery performance in the UK during 2015, means that the country has met the 95% target set by the European Union for the year.

The latest figures published by the European Commission show that the UK’s performance in 2015 rose by a record amount to an overall recovery and reuse rate of 96.9%.

This means that the performance has risen from around 90.7% in 2014. This figure is higher than recorded by Germany, France, Norway and Sweden. Six countries were above the UK including Croatia with 99% and both Poland and Luxembourg on 97%. Italy was the lowest recorded with 84%.

The data for 2015 is the latest available as the numbers take about two years to be compiled by the EU’s statistics team.

The figures show that the number of end of life vehicles counted for the UK (cars and light commercial vehicles) was down by more than 110,000 in 2015 at 995,527 compared to the 2014 figure of 1,106,846. This continues a downward trend on the overall number of cars processed since 2012.