Green car parts make a difference

We can help you do something good for the environment while you’re with us – and you don’t even need to do anything.

From recycling waste at home to sharing hand-me-downs through schemes like Freecycle, people are recycling and reusing things like never before.

But did you know that the same has been happening with car repairs? Car repairs – and the replacement parts they require – have a big impact on the environment, but our scheme, using ‘green parts’ is supporting a change for the better. Our underwriter, Ageas Insurance Ltd established their Green Parts programme a few years ago, which is going from strength to strength.

Green parts

Typically, when a new part is needed for a car, it will come new from the manufacturer. This happens on a huge scale; the UK insurance industry replaced over 15 million car parts in 2021, with front bumper parts being the most commonly replaced item, according to figures from Thatcham Research. [1]

These new parts don’t come cheap. In fact, many damaged cars that could be saved are scrapped due to the cost of a new part outweighing the value of the vehicle.

But a new movement, with Ageas at the forefront, is making the most of ‘green parts’ – undamaged and quality-controlled parts, such as wings, doors, bumpers and headlamps, that are salvaged from cars that are being dismantled and used to fix other vehicles.

These parts are described as ‘green’ because they can not only save a car from being written off, but also reduce the amount of glass, metal, plastic and energy required to make a new part.

Using green parts can also help you get back onto the road quicker after your car has been damaged in an accident. This is because it can be faster to source a green car part than to order in a brand-new manufacturer part, especially if that new part needs to be imported from abroad.

During lockdown, when some car parts became hard to get hold of, green parts were used to help people back on the road quickly.

How Ageas is helping Rias customers

Our underwriter, Ageas, deals with nearly 43,000 vehicles that have been damaged in crashes annually, requiring an estimated 400,000 plastic and metal parts to make them roadworthy again.

After piloting a ‘green parts’ scheme back in 2019, Ageas replaced close to 7,000 car parts with green parts in 2020, and this number rose to nearly 9,000 in 2021. The insurer’s aim is to expand this number significantly, and also use green parts to settle third party claims, whenever it’s possible and suitable to do so.

The green replacements used by Ageas are undamaged and perfectly safe to use. They’re quality controlled by a specialist supplier, given a 12-month guarantee and checked by the repairer before they are used. Ageas doesn’t use green replacements for structural panels, as this could affect the integrity of the vehicle, nor safety related items, such as air bags or brakes.

So, the next time you need your car repaired, it might be that a more environmentally-friendly ‘green part’ is used to get it back on the road.

The Green Parts scheme forms part of Ageas Insurance Limited's wider insurance motor claims service provided by Ageas’s salvage provider, Hills Salvage, and its green car parts arm, The Green Parts Specialists. The content displayed on this article is for information purposes only, and is accurate at the time of publication. The information above may not be maintained, and so we cannot guarantee that at any given time the information will be up to date or complete. Please verify any information you take before relying or acting on it. This article contains links to other sites, and we're not responsible for the contents of any of these websites. We do not make any recommendation or endorse any advertising, products, services or other content on such external websites.

[1] The insurance industry replaced 15,119,092 car parts in 2021 – Thatcham Research