A sustainable approach to a products End-of-life processing needs to be a balance between the environmental impacts of a particular course of action, and it’s economic viability. The research reported in this paper has investigated a structured costing framework to be used in conjunction with improved environmental practises, to provide an economic understanding of varying End-of-Life Vehicle processing routes. The paper presents an holistic end-of-life cost model for the vehicle recovery sector and focuses on the potential applications of this model to support both high and low level decisions, in terms of a processes economic merits and its influence on the ELV Directives recycling and recovery targets.