Automakers that sell vehicles in European Union countries would have to take back old cars and pay most of the cost for recycling and disposing of them under a bill approved by the European Parliament yesterday. Manufacturers would have to start recycling 80 percent of the weight of cars by 2006 and 85 percent by 2015. The car industry lobbied fiercely against language in the bill that may require them to take back and recycle cars already on the roads. The European Commission says that about 9 million cars are discarded every year, with about 25 percent of the cars ending up in landfills where they contaminate soil and groundwater. This bill is seen as setting a trend for measures on other goods like refrigerators and TV sets.
