Toyota’s Burnaston site is an OEM ELV ‘learning lab’, not a rival ATF network. By safely dismantling low-volume vehicles and tracing materials such as catalytic converters and plastics back into new cars, Toyota aims to set standards and partner with recyclers that can meet its safety, quality, and data requirements.
Toyota Motor, Europe’s first in-house end-of-life vehicle (ELV) facility at Burnaston in the UK, isn’t trying to be another high-volume breaker’s yard. It’s being treated as a learning lab, what Vice President Leon van der Merwe cheerfully calls Toyota’s “university fees”, and it could signal how OEMs and recyclers work on circularity over the next decade.
“We’ve been operational since the middle of August ‘25,” he says. “The focus of these six months was always what I call my university fees. It’s about learning how to do what needs to be done, but do it in a Toyota way… Because if we’re just going to open up a site to be another ATF, there’s no value in doing it, or we should just go and buy someone and leave the same person running it.”
The message is clear: Toyota is not entering the sector to become a rival ATF chain; it’s trying to understand the process well enough to set standards and secure materials, then partner.
A learning lab, not a finished blueprint
Burniston is currently dismantling around six cars a day. That modest throughput is deliberate. Toyota wants to prove out processes, data and safety before ramping up.
“What we’ve created [is] a dismantling line, where at full capacity each dismantling line’s got the capability of dismantling 20 ELVs per shift,” says van der Merwe. “And then that is scalable to how many shifts and lines you want.”
The early focus has been on disassembly efficiency rather than squeezing every pound of margin from each car. For the first six months, Toyota sent all material streams to a single waste partner while it concentrated on the production flow. Only now is the team “taking control of each of these elements”, analysing which plastics, metals and other fractions should be rerouted into Toyota’s own value chain.
“We had a choice: study it for two years, or just start and fix problems as we go along,” van der Merwe says. “We’ve taken the latter.”
Proving ELVs can be incident-free
One area where Burnaston is already making a point is safety. When Toyota benchmarked ATFs across Europe, it found what van der Merwe describes as an uncomfortable norm.
“When we went around a lot of the ATFs across Europe, it was an accepted norm that accidents and incidents happen,” he recalls. “We’ve now been going for six months and not even an incident where we’ve needed a plaster. For me, that’s a great achievement.”
Toyota doesn’t want to keep that learning to itself. “We can’t professionalise on our own, we need to do it with partners,” he says. Sharing methods on safe depollution, handling, and dismantling is, in his view, part of the company’s social responsibility as it steps deeper into ELVs.
It also aligns with Toyota’s overall circularity strategy. “Times are changing. We’ve got a social responsibility, and this is about taking that social responsibility,” van der Merwe says.
Owning the value chain from ELV to new car
What really differentiates an OEM-run facility from a traditional ATF is the ability to control and optimise the full value chain for certain components.
“We’ve got the industry insight, and we’ve got the capability to manage the total value chain, which puts us in a unique position,” van der Merwe explains. “If we take something like catalytic converters, we’re not stripping off a catalytic converter and then at a spot price trying to sell it somewhere. We are taking off catalytic converters and reintegrating them into our manufacturing plant to manufacture [catalysts] for the next vehicle. We own it from the minute we buy the car… until it gets fitted into the next new car. And that very few people can do.”
The same logic applies to plastics and other high-value fractions. Toyota buys plastics at scale for new vehicles, and Burniston can provide a predictable, traceable feedstock once volumes rise.
“If we’re an operation that generates 500 kilograms of plastic a day, suppliers trust us that they will get 500 kilograms of plastic a day,” he says. “This is what most recycling or reintegration companies are missing: stability of both quantity and quality.”
Behind this is a very straightforward commercial motive. “We want these raw materials back in our cars so we can sell more, ever better cars,” van der Merwe says. Toyota has already made commitments on recycled content in its vehicles “for the next five or ten years, and this is how we can guarantee we can do that.”
Why the UK – and why older ELVs?
From Toyota Motor Europe’s perspective, the UK is a logical place to start.
“It’s got the biggest end-of-life vehicle market in Europe, if we classify the UK still in that,” VanDer Merwe notes, defining Europe as the countries under Toyota Europe’s responsibility. The UK exports fewer ELVs to North Africa because of right-hand drive, so more vehicles reach domestic treatment.
On top of that, he says, “there [are] big professional players in the UK already. We weren’t going fishing in a pond just for sardines; there were already some big fish.”
Toyota has also been careful not to pitch Burnaston directly against dismantlers whose business model depends on salvage and green parts. The site is focused on genuine ELVs in the 15–22-year range, plus a limited stream of slightly younger vehicles to help the numbers stack up.
“Our model is about getting raw materials to recycle, not used parts,” VanDer Merwe says. The parts removal target is “way, way lower than the average ATF… about the 10% parts that an average ATF needs to get out is our target. And that’s just to help us cover some costs.”
Burniston is multi-brand: “We don’t just dismantle Toyotas… we dismantle whatever vehicle is offered to us to buy.” That creates its own learning curve around non-Toyota value chains, but it also mirrors the real-world mix of vehicles arriving at most yards.
OEM muscle without an ATF land-grab?
For recyclers worried about OEMs muscling in, van der Merwe strikes a reassuring note.
“The good ones or the ones with good intentions, no,” he says when asked if operators should be scared. He uses the tyre sector as a comparison, where franchise networks brought structure and locked out “cowboys”, but stresses that Toyota has “no intention” of ending up with thousands of ATFs across Europe.
Instead, the aim is to understand the process well enough to set clear expectations and then work with partners. “Maybe it’s a way of saying, this is our rulebook, the way we operate… These five principles, if you stick to these five principles, we will guarantee we will buy your plastics at market plus prices,” he suggests.
Looking ahead, Burnaston will begin processing its first EVs, adding high-voltage batteries and EV-specific dismantling to the mix. For van der Merwe, that underlines how early Toyota still is on its journey.
“It’s been an enormous learning curve, and we’ve probably learned 5% of what we need to learn,” he admits.
For auto recyclers, that humility and the explicit desire to collaborate rather than compete may be just as significant as the new ELV flows Burnaston will eventually handle. The facility is less a threat and more a signal that serious OEM attention and investment are finally arriving at the end of the vehicle’s life.
Further reading on ATF Professional
-
Driving Circularity Forward: Why the automotive industry needs strategic recycling partners now more than ever
-
EcoPlast: Advancing Circularity in Automotive Plastics with Digital and Recycling Innovations
-
EA launches consultation on new waste motor vehicle permit rules
-
Auto Recycling in Transition: Insights from IARC 2025 in Antwerp
