How much of a scrapped car is recycled? (auto, tires, seats)
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About 80 percent of the metal is remade after being shredded. That is essentially the frame, body and interior structures. High value metals, like steel, copper and aluminium are valuable, so they are separated before the car goes into the shredder. Glass, plastic and soft materials like seats, are removed prior to the shred. Tires and gas tanks are removed before shred, and all liquids are drained and recycled, and sold to companies that clean, and remake them, for fleet buyers.
Now I know that seems like a lot of work, but most States have rules about how auto recyclers have to deal with their business.
On a one car recycle, the time to do it properly is about 3 hours, from the time it comes into the yard, to the point where it is completely "done '. At the end, the removed parts are sorted into their respective piles, the metals are sorted, the tires and gas tank are sorted for the used parts buyers, and the shredded metal is now a part of a compressed metal bale, that will be sold to a "melting plant ".
Some yards are happy to be in the "you pick " business, where the public can come in and take off the parts that they need for their car at home. That actually makes more cash money than shredding does.......But the downside is the time that it takes to pick a car clean...can be a year or more. That type of yard also does "parts re selling " where they pull useable engines, trans and rads, to be held in the warehouse, to be sold to the public. Again it takes time to do that type of business. And space , lots of outdoor space.
Volvo claims that their cars are 100 percent recyclable . Maybe....
In our state, the only things removed from the car before shredding are catalytic converter, mercury switches and fluids, everything else remains in the car. Once the car is shredded, 74% is metallics, and the 26% balance is considered ASR (auto shredder residue). That 26% can be reprocessed and another 6% of metal can be retrieved, the balance is called fluff and sent to the landfill.
Metal recycling has improved vastly with newer technology.
In high population LA county I used to go to a big self service junkyard frequently in my hot rod days.
A lot of illegal aliens were there all the time. They remove resalable tires for the numerous used tires shops in the area.
There is a guy with a big truck that takes good engines and transmissions to Mexico to sell there.
The cars aren't in the yard very long as they need to make room for new comers constantly.
Most junkyards around where I live turn over cars within weeks. Pick whatever parts. Then they crush it onsite and it gets transported to a recycler. I watched a show on auto recycling, they basically feed them in this machine that is a huge paper shredder but for cars. The end product gets separated in piles. The fluids plastics metal rubber glass gets separated and the unusable stuff gets in the landfill. Although from what I understood most of the stuff is now recyclable.
In high population LA county I used to go to a big self service junkyard frequently in my hot rod days.
A lot of illegal aliens were there all the time. They remove resalable tires for the numerous used tires shops in the area.
There is a guy with a big truck that takes good engines and transmissions to Mexico to sell there.
The cars aren't in the yard very long as they need to make room for new comers constantly.
There's a big one over off of Vermont Av. in Gardena. There are still lots of illegals, that hasn't changed. What is amazing in these high population areas is how quickly a car is picked clean. They put the date of arrival and for higher demand models, it seems like its only a week or a few days..
If you want to understand more about what happens in the recycling process, read "Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter.
Minter is from a family that owned scrapyards in Minnesota and he was into the international scrap trade (he lives part time in Shanghai). The book was fascinating. Besides what has already been mentioned, they even had a process to find and reclaim loose change from cars heading to the shredder.
As discussed in the book, much of the scrap from the US (shredded cars, wire, plastics, you name it) is going west to China. Americans discard tremendous amounts of metal, and the trip west to China is extremely low cost because of the trade imbalance. All of those empty containers that shipped Chinese manufactured goods need to go back west, and they'd go back empty if they weren't carrying scrap. For the Chinese, scrap is much cheaper to use as a raw material than ore. They are effectively mining American scrap for metal.
The demand and the effectiveness of the auto shredder has been high enough that it effectively emptied 60 years worth of junk cars from the United States. I remember in the 70's and 80's there were yards with mountains of junked cars all over the place. Many of those yards were emptied by the demand for scrap.
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