Such is the fate of dashboards, passenger seats and the rest of that 25 per cent of a discarded car that can't be melted down for scrap metal or sold as used parts.

But projects at Toyota Motor Corp and Nissan Motor Co aim to rescue and recycle unwanted automotive plastics and textiles before they end up spending eternity in a landfill.

"Making cars is difficult, but so is taking them apart," said Nissan managing director Akio Tenmei after a recent tour of a Yokohama recycling facility an hour-and-a-half outside Tokyo.

"We need to make effective use of the resources in scrapped vehicles," he added.

Japan's trade ministry has set a non-binding target of recycling 85 per cent of scrapped vehicles by 2002 and 95 per cent by 2015. Toyota and Nissan, Japan's two biggest carmakers, have also set goals of making vehicles that are 90 per cent recyclable by 2000.

While Japan's carmakers are confident they can develop recycling technologies or obtain themfrom their Western counterparts, Nissan officials said fragmented domestic systems for collecting and scrapping vehicles and distributing used parts still pose a major hurdle to meeting recycling targets.

"We have to build relationships with the (vehicle dismantling) industry if we're going to reach our goals," said Toshio Nakagawa, general manager of Nissan's recycling promotion department.

This means, he said, helping Japan's thousands of tiny car dismantling companies to get the tools and technology they need, for example to purify and reconstitute spent coolant fluids or to strip away insulation so that carpeting can be recycled.

A recent study by the Japanese unit of Germany's Volkswagen AG, the top-selling foreign brand in Japan, found scrapyards in Japan that were simply dumping toxic automotive fluids into the ground or burning plastics that emit dioxin and other poisonous substances.

At Nissan's demonstration project in Yokohama, 400 scrapped cars a month are properly drained of their variousfluids, then stripped of reusable or recyclable parts and materials before being sent off for melting down into metal or shredding into dust.

The aim of the project, Nissan officials said, is to develop small-scale technologies that allow dismantlers to remove as much plastic and fibre as possible for recycling before they send the remnants to the shredder.

Toyota is going one step further, looking at post-shredding processes as well.

A Toyota plant using air and gravity to separate copper, glass, polyurethane foam and fabric from shredder dust will begin full-scale operations this month.

Foam and fabric particles, which comprise about 30 per cent of the residue, will be recycled as sound-proofing material for new cars, while the glass will be used in building tiles.

The facility, to be run by a Toyota subsidiary outside the industrial city of Nagoya, will shrink the remaining residue to about one-fifth its original volume so it will take up less landfill space.

Toyota is also looking at ways toburn shredder dust as fuel to generate electricity.

But Nissan officials said such processes would not be enough to meet strict recycling requirements.

"We can't reach 95 per cent by 2015 if all the recycling is done after this stuff reaches the shredder," Nissan's Nakagawa said.

If, as in Germany, Japanese carmakers are required to take on most of the burden of recycling scrapped vehicles, they would need their own networks of dismantlers and recyclers, he said.

Although the trade ministry's stance has been that users should bear recycling costs, a feasible way of enforcing this is still under discussion and Nissan officials said debate may last another year or more before the issue is resolved.

In the meantime, Japanese carmakers are also stepping up efforts to develop various recycling techniques.

Toyota in late July signed a memorandum of understanding with Volkswagen to help each other recycle their cars in Europe and Japan.

The two automakers will also conduct joint research in Germany onhow to calculate recyclability rates, in order to promote common standards.

While Japanese officials say Germany is far ahead in establishing a network to dismantle and recycle cars, Toyota president Hiroshi Okuda brushed off suggestions that the Germans were ahead of the Japanese in recycling technology.

"There's not as big a difference as the media and other people say," he told a recent reception for foreign reporters.

Nissan executive vice president Kenshow Kusumi added that Nissan's technical centre in Brussels was also actively exchanging information with European automakers on recycling.

A slew of new domestic models which the two carmakers have rolled out in recent months include a number of features to make recycling easier.

These include a recyclable plastic which Toyota used in the dashboard and other interior parts of its new Nadia multi-purpose sedan, and an easily dismantled polyurethane headrest in Nissan's remodeled Skyline coupe.