Recycling Cars – A Breakdown

Recycling a car isn’t as difficult as it sounds, although you can’t put your vehicle into a recycle bin, a scrap man would be more than happy to take it off of your hands, and may even give you a small sum for it. However, have you ever wondered what happens to the car when it’s recycled? Where does all of that metal go? This guide will break down for you how a car is recycled, and what happens to each part of the vehicle.

The recycling of a vehicle begins at the junk yard, otherwise known as the scrap yard. At the junk yard, if the car isn’t sold as a whole, it will be taken apart piece by piece. Parts may be sold off to mechanics, or various other people, but the majority will be weighed in purely as scrap metal, to be recycled and used elsewhere.

Before the car is pulled apart, all fluids are drained from the car to be filtered and reused, although the way in which they can be used differs, fuels can be reused once it has been recycled, antifreeze is captured and resold, and oil can be used as fuel for heating.

The pulling apart of the car is done using complicated, magnetic machines, to remove fabrics such as the interior, along with seating and seatbelts. The material goods will likely be sent away to a landfill site if they’re not bought, as the scrap yard can’t make use of them.

Parts such as the engine, radiators and condensers are in high demand due to the metals that they are made of, and so can be sold on for a high price. Other parts of the car such as the chassis are often crushed at the junk yard or at a scrap facility and are later sent to a steel mill where they will be melted down and reused. These metals could perhaps be seeing the roads again as once melted down, they can be made into another car part, and fitted within 30 days.

Glass, whether it’s from the windscreen or rear window of the car, can be extracted whole and recycled. The glass can be recycled into objects such as wine glasses, fruit bowls, or even photo frames.

China is one of the biggest consumers of scrap metal, as they tend to use it for their office buildings and foundations. China imported roughly $7.4 billion worth of scrap metal in 2008, with Canada following close behind them with imports of up to $4 billion. This may sound like a lot, but in comparison to the $86 billion worth of scrap metal that is exported every year, $4 billion doesn’t really compare.

Scrapping cars for money is becoming more and more popular due to the increasing pressure that companies are being put under to become eco-friendly, although there are those who believe that scrapping working cars rather fixing them is worse for our environment and should be stopped.

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