In a £100m drive to reuse, refurbish, repurpose and recycle, Jaguar Land Rover is sparing robots at its Merseyside factory from the great junkyard in the sky by giving them a ‘second life’. Tony McDonough reports
Carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is giving robots at its Halewood factory a ‘second life’ in a £100m waste-not-want-not drive.
JLR is aiming to reduce waste across its industrial operations in the UK and Europe through a reuse, refurbishment, repurposing and recycling drive. The company is transforming its operations to produce a new generation of electric vehicles.
In 2023 JLR announced a £15bn investment into the production of electric vehicles that would include a new model rolling off the production line at Halewood in 2025.
Hundreds of second‑life robots are now installed at Halewood, Solihull and the Electric Propulsion Manufacturing Centre (EPMC) in Wolverhampton ready to produce JLR’s next generation electric vehicles and battery packs.
And instead of buying new equipment, JLR has reused more than 50,000 sq metres of kit – the equivalent of seven football pitches.
This kit has come from Castle Bromwich which ceased production last year, from the EPMC and Graz, Austria and redeployed across JLR sites in the UK and Nitra, Slovakia.
As a result, tens of thousands of pieces of equipment and tools – spanning from entire production lines to screwdrivers – have been put back in circulation, when possible.
In addition, 18,600 tonnes of scrapped metal from Castle Bromwich and Graz have been sent to a supplier for recycling, helping to enable the reduction of CO2e emissions by 1,258kg per tonne of new steel generated from scrapped metal.
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Andrea Debbane, chief sustainability officer at JLR, said: “ As we are entering a critical phase in our electrification journey, JLR has at heart and aims to act as a responsible user of resources by enhancing product utility and longevity, and maximising recycling and repurposing.
“It’s not only the right thing to do, but it also improves profitability and increases supply chain resilience.
“Through these initiatives, JLR advocates that sustainable choices are not always more expensive, they can help reduce costs and even become opportunities for the growth and development of our colleagues.”
This circularity drive has been led by a broad cross‑functional group with members from industrial operations through to vehicle programmes – working across sites and technologies to identify asset reuse opportunities.
A new digital management system has also been developed in‑house, aiming to manage the life of every vehicle programme asset from acquisition through to sale, scrapping and reuse.
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