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Sustainability of HSR as a mass transportation mode in terms of efficient use of natural resources

Due to the high rate of scrapped cars around the world, transport is responsible for a large
proportion of solid waste. Regarding the railway transport, there are abandoned lines, equipment
and rolling stock. Improving recyclability by 10% in the European railway sector can produce an
economic benefit of around 170 Million Euros per year (Garcia, 2010).

Regarding the car industry, in the UK in 2014 there were 2.47 million new cars sold, and it was
estimated that more than one million of old cars and more than 40 million tyres were scrapped
(www.bra.co.uk). Also, old batteries and other semi-hazard materials from motor vehicle
production needed to be disposed. These millions of scrapped cars annually result in millions of
tonnes of waste material. Such waste materials required recycling, reclamation and disposal. With
an increasing amount of plastic in the production of cars there are not enough technologies that
have been developed to recycle all the different types of plastic. Furthermore, the construction
of one kilometre of three-lane motorway requires around 80,000 tons of aggregate and that
gives a clear picture of the scale of the related damage to the natural habitat and landscape.
For example, approximately 90 million tonnes of aggregates are used in the UK every year in the
construction and repair of roads (Hoyle & Knowles, 1998).
Existing cars are not efficient and unsustainable when considering the overall cost and benefit
as they incur very large expenditure of materials, energy, and effort to deliver a comparatively
small benefit. 6%%

1%Figure 2.1 Materials intensity of an average modern car
Figure 2.1 shows the percentage of resources that are used to produce one car. An average modern
car consists of 0.75 ton of steel, 0.07 ton of cooper, 0.01 tons of other non-ferrous materials, 0.27
tons of plastic and 0.04 tons of tyres. On average, the total weight of a car is 1.14 ton (Whitelee &
Haq, 2003b). All these raw materials must be extracted and processed to manufacture the car and
that requires energy and produces waste in the range of 25 tons which may pollute air, land and water.

Figure 2.2 Typical train material content (Source: www.uic-environment.org, 2016)

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 389