Marie Harder once earned herself the unusual nickname of the Bumper Lady.

The University of Brighton academic collected 5,000 old car bumpers, stacking them in all sorts of places, including the old Shoreham cement works and Magpie Recycling's depot in Brighton.

But the bumper collection had a serious purpose, to see how the car parts, which often contain more than 25 different plastics, could be recycled.

Dr Harder said: "Most of the businesses we collected them from were very thankful because they had been storing them for years. "

The solution, which was not as easy as it sounds, was to shred the bumpers and use some of the redundant plastic to make recycling baskets.

The problems associated with recycling car parts go some way towards explaining why there are fears new EU rules will lead to a rash of illegally-dumped cars.

The End-of-Life Vehicles Directive (ELV), which came into force in November, means all cars have to be disposed of at a licensed facility, where they can be taken apart in an environment-friendly way.

Manufacturers will become responsible for the recycling from 2007 but until then the vehicle's final owner will have to pay the bill, expected to be between £50 and £150.

Brighton Pavilion MP David Lepper, who sits on the Parliamentary select committee which scrutinises recycling policies, said Dr Harder's work should be supported.

He said: "We have to start thinking in more imaginative ways. I would like to see the kind of research work going on at the University of Brighton continuing.

"With so many directives from Europe about waste we can no longer think in terms of where we are going to dump old cars, old fridges and the rest."

Almost two million cars come to the end of their lives in Britain every year. At the moment only about 200,000 are de-polluted in the way they will have to be under ELV.

About 98 per cent of every old car could be recycled or value otherwise recovered from some of the waste if, as Dr Harder puts it, enough money is thrown at the problem.

Junked cars are processed in giant shredding machines. About 75 per cent of each car goes back to the steel industry as scrap metal.

Shredder residue makes up the rest, which is usually put in landfill as part of the 800,000 tonnes of automotive waste buried in Britain annually.

Dr Harder's work at the university's School of the Environment has concentrated on the residue, a mixture of plastics, foam, textiles, glass and some metal.

By using a technique known as pyrolysis, heating the waste in an inert atmosphere, Dr Harder's team reduced the residue into workable material.

It produced sand, which can be used in the construction industry, and remarkably good diesel fuel. Some of the plastic, separated from the waste beforehand, has been turned into other products, such as the recycling baskets made from Brighton's mini-mountain of old bumpers.

Funding for the work, which could have gone a long way to helping meet the ELV targets, has now stopped.

Dr Harder and her team promised an even bigger prize - tackling household plastics, one of recycling's biggest headaches.

Dr Harder said: "If everybody had seriously looked at the problem of recycling cars it would have made household recycling much easier"

She said about half of household plastics, a sizable chunk of what is either landfilled or incinerated, could quite easily be recycled.

Which makes Dr Harder wonder why funding for the work, which promised so much, was stopped.