More of your car could soon avoid the landfill, thanks to developing technologies to recycle various types of plastic used in cars. Up to 80 percent of the materials that make up cars is currently reused or recycled, but researchers hope to boost that number soon.

According to the web site Environmental Science and Technology Online, a program at the Argonne National Laboratory is testing new ways of sorting, separating, and extracting various forms of plastics so that they can be used to make new products.

Automobile recycling is already the largest recycling industry in California, and is growing elsewhere. But it's not always as green as it might be: chemicals such as coolants, oils, and even metals like mercury are often improperly disposed of by unlicensed recyclers.

In Europe, new rules require up to 95 percent of car parts to be recovered by 2015.

Photo credit: EPA