Tag: scrap

Recycling Your Ride

  • Bassam Jody of Argonne National Laboratory is helping develop novel ways of sorting and cleaning shredder residue left over from cars, construction debris, and major household appliances. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

We’ve all heard over and over again
about that government program ‘Cash
for Clunkers.’ It’s got drivers
thinking about what exactly happens
to dead cars, regardless of how they
die. Shawn Allee looks at
how car recycling works and who’s
trying to improve it:

Transcript

We’ve all heard over and over again about that government program ‘Cash for Clunkers.’ It’s got drivers thinking about what exactly happens to dead cars, regardless of how they die. Shawn Allee looks at how car recycling works and who’s trying to improve it:

You might not think about it this way, but your car just might be the biggest thing you own that gets recycled.

I mean, someday you’re going to junk it, or maybe some future owner will. Anyway, I’m out in front of a car shop in my neighborhood, and with the health of cars in mind, I thought I’d ask some people around here, percentage-wise, just how much of a junked car gets recycled?

“I would say maybe, like, 5% of the car.”

“I’ll say, 20% – 30% probably, of a car.”

“I guess the recycled one could be 30% of the car.”

“I guess, like, 50%.”

“About 70%.”
++

In my little unscientific survey here, it turns out that most people are giving a pretty low estimate of how much of a junked car ends up being recycled.

The auto industry and the federal environmental protection agency say about 80% of the junked car gets recycled. The rest heads to landfills. That sounds pretty good, but that means we bury about five million tons of junked car pieces each year.

To understand why they can’t recycle even more of the car, I’m going to talk with Jim Watson.

He runs ABC Auto Wreckers in a suburb just south of Chicago.

“We don’t want to landfill anything. The objective is to take the vehicle, process it and have all the parts be used.”

Watson shows me his shop where he pulls parts for the used market. A dozen workers lift hoods, twist tires, and pull out stuff I don’t even recognize. It’s like an assembly line in reverse.

“They do an analysis and inventory each of the parts of the car that have a probability of sale and then they harvest or pull those parts off the car.”

Watson and some of the bigger auto wreckers have parts-scrapping down to a science, but it’s expensive to keep pulling parts and keep space open for scrap yards.

Eventually, Watson’s pulls off everything usefull and he’ll send it to a car shredder.

“A machine that beats it apart and shreds the car into small fist-sized or hand-sized components.”

Recyclers can pull out big shreds of steel and aluminum, but about 20% of the car is left-over. This shredder residue gets tossed into landfills. But scientists are thinking about how to recycle this shredded mess.

One works at a lab at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.

“This is what shredder residue looks like.”

Dr. Bassam Jody reaches into a cardboard box and scoops a jumble of car seat foam, metal cable, wood, and shards of plastic.

Jody says shredder residue is a recycler’s nightmare.

“Maybe there are more than twenty different kinds of plastics. I tell you, plastics are generally incompatible, they don’t like each other and they don’t work together very well.”

Jody is developing machines to safely clean and separate all this stuff. It’s tough science.

Jody: “The more things you have in the mixture, the harder it is to separate. The trick is, you have to do it economically, and to produce materials that can be used in value-added products.”

Allee: “What can you make out of them?”

Jody: “Car parts. For example, this is a seating column cover.”

Jody says he gets a kick out of his work. He might just squeeze a bit more good out of our cars.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Turning Clunkers Into New Cars

  • The scrap heap - what's left of hundreds of cars and other metal waste after they go through a shredder. (Photo by Tamara Keith)

All those clunkers are working their
way toward the final melt-down at
a steel mill. Lester Graham reports
you’ll see the steel from those clunkers
again:

Transcript

All those clunkers are working their
way toward the final melt-down at
a steel mill. Lester Graham reports
you’ll see the steel from those clunkers
again:

The steel from those clunkers from the “Cash for Clunkers” program will eventually be melted down and used again.

Bill Heenan is the President of the Steel Recycling Institute. He says it’ll be a few months before that scrap gets recycled.

“It takes some time for that old automobile, the clunker in this particular case, to work its way through the dismantling system and then through the shredding system and eventually to the steel mill.”

Scrap yards can remove things such as fenders or hubcaps for used parts, but what’s left – including the engines – goes to the shredder.

Bill Heenan says those 700,000 clunkers won’t mean a glut of scrap steel.

“Let’s say there’s a ton of steel in each one, you’ve got 700,000 tons. That seems like a lot. But in a given year, we recycle 80-million tons.”

That 80-million tons of scrap is melted down and becomes the bulk of new steel products in the U.S., including new cars.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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A Clunker’s Fate Once It’s Cashed In

  • Cars stacked up and waiting to be shredded at United Iron and Metal in Baltimore, MD. (Photo by Tamara Keith)

The federal Cash for Clunkers
program kicked off this weekend,
and dealerships were pushing it
hard to sell new cars. The program
was created by Congress last month
to give a boost to the struggling
auto industry while helping the
environment. The idea is to get
older polluting cars off the road
for good and replace them with
new more-efficient ones. Tamara Keith has this report
on what will happen to all the
clunkers:

Transcript

The federal Cash for Clunkers program kicked off this weekend, and dealerships
were pushing it hard to sell new cars. The program was created by Congress last
month to give a boost to the struggling auto industry while helping the environment.
The idea is to get older polluting cars off the road for good and replace them with
new more-efficient ones. Tamara Keith has this report on what will happen to all the
clunkers:

Car dealers suddenly have a whole bunch of cars on their lots they have absolutely
no use for. The clunkers cannot be re-sold. That would defeat the whole green goal
of the program.

So all those old trucks and sagging sedans, they’re headed to places like M and M
Auto Parts in Stafford, Virginia. Most of us would call it a junk yard. But don’t tell
that to owner Rick Morrow.

“Long before green was popular, this kind of operation, even though a lot of people
said, ‘Oh junk yard.’ But they were actually recycling cars. They were making use of
what the component was built for in the first place.”

His company’s logo prominently features a large green recycling symbol.

“This is the dismantling area where after the cars come are inventoried and then take
them apart.”

Morrow’s business is all about re-use. A fender, or a tail light, or maybe an alternator
from this car will live to see another day in a car that needs a replacement part.

You’d think Morrow would be totally excited about Cash for Clunkers. But he’s not.
Because the one component from the clunkers that absolutely cannot be re-sold is
the engine – pretty much the most valuable thing in the car.

“If we do a few dozen cars and it looks like it’s costing us more money than it’s worth,
we’ll say, ‘sorry.’”

From an environmental perspective, it absolutely makes sense to prevent those
engines from ever polluting again. But, from a business perspective it’s a real
problem for the nation’s auto recyclers.

“It will make it extremely hard to make money on a car.”

Scotty Davis is the vice president of All Foreign Auto Parts in Fredericksburg
Virginia. He says it costs him $1800 in labor to take apart a car.

“It’s going to cost me money to do this. It’s one of these things. I have to bring the
car in. I have to get rid of the tires. I have to get rid of all the fluids, the freon,
process it – just to crush the vehicle.”

Davis specializes in newer foreign vehicles. Parts from a clunker won’t help stock
his shelves. But he feels like he has to take the cars to stay in the good graces of
the auto dealers he sells parts to.

“And I’ll be very honest with you. A couple of them I do a lot of business with, I said,
‘I will take your cars.’ And they said, ‘what are you going to do with them?’ I’m going
to crush ‘em. I mean they’re not of any value.”

(sound of a shredder yard)

Once all the usable parts are removed, and the toxic chemicals cleaned out, most
cars will end up at a scrap yard like United Iron and Metal in Baltimore.

“Right now you can see the tail end of a car coming on the conveyor belt down into
the shredder.”

“A tremendous amount of friction is going on as these hammers are pulverizing that
car into small pieces.”

Bruce Savage is with the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries – a trade group. It
only takes 15 seconds, and when the shredder is done with a car, it isn’t even
recognizable.

“That big pile over there is the end result. It’s just a big pile of metal pieces.”

Savage says the metal is then sold. Whether scrap recyclers will cash in on Cash
for Clunkers all depends on the commodities prices for metal in the coming months.

“What was an old car can become a new car or can become a dishwasher or siding
for a home. It depends on the materials. But everything is being reused,
reprocessed and renewed.”

So maybe a 1989 suburban can be reborn as a 2010 Ford Focus Hybrid.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Dealerships Prepare for Clunkers

  • ‘Cash for clunkers’ became popular before all the rules were final. For the past few weeks there’s been a growing backlog of orders at dealerships. (Photo by Samara Freemark)

Today is the first official day of the cash for clunkers program. The government program offers you up to $4500 to trade in your gas guzzling car for a more fuel efficient new car. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Today is the first official day of the cash for clunkers program. The government program offers you up to $4500 to trade in your gas guzzling car for a more fuel efficient new car. Lester Graham reports:

The goal is to clean up the environment and give sagging new car sales a boost.

‘Cash for clunkers’ became popular before all the rules were final. For the past few weeks there’s been a growing backlog of orders at dealerships.

At Varsity Ford in Ann Arbor, Michigan, people have been seeing if their clunkers qualify, and picking out a new car that they’ll finally be able to drive off the lot today.

Matt Stanford sells cars there. He says as far as he’s concerned, ‘cash for clunkers’ is already a success.

“We’re going to sell new cars. We’re going to get cars that don’t really need to be on the road off the road.”

The National Autobmobile Dealers Association says some dealerships have been holding off until they learned more about the rules of ‘cash for clunkers’ which were just cleared up last Friday.

The clunkers will be scrapped. The cash ends when the one-billion dollars in government money runs out.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

San Francisco Makes Composting Mandatory

  • San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signs mandatory composting into law (Photo courtesy of the Press Office of Mayor Newsom)

San Francisco already leads the
nation in recycling. Now, that
city has the first mandatory
composting law in the country.
Emily Wilson reports that’s got
some people worried about “garbage
cops”:

Transcript

San Francisco already leads the
nation in recycling. Now, that
city has the first mandatory
composting law in the country.
Emily Wilson reports that’s got
some people worried about “garbage
cops”:

Putting recyclables into the blue bin is second nature for people in San Francisco.

But this new law now means also putting coffee grounds and eggshells into a green bin.

There are some people who are concerned about Big Brother looking through their garbage. And then there’s the $100 fine.

Mark Westlund at the Department of the Environment says ‘no worries.’ Not much is going to change.

“Well, we get a lot of calls from people who are worried about garbage cops and that frankly is not going to happen. For years now we’ve been looking in peoples recycling to make sure they’re doing it correctly and if not, they get a tag and if they continue misusing it, they get a letter and a follow up call and then a visit.”

So there are warnings before the fine.

Cities across the country will be watching San Francisco’s mandatory composting law to see how it goes.

For The Environment Report, I’m Emily Wilson.

Related Links

China to Stop Imports of Junk Electronics

  • What happens to electronics when people don't want them anymore? The economics and environmental impact of e-waste disposal weighs heavily on minds all over the globe. (Photo by Michael Manger)

China is banning the import of scrap electronics. That eliminates one place where some U.S. companies were selling broken computers and electronic junk under the guise of “recycling.” The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

China is banning the import of scrap electronics. That eliminates one place where some U-S companies were selling broken computers and electronic junk under the guise of “recycling.” The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


Each year, more than 60-million desktop computers are taken out of service in the U.S. About 85-percent of them end up in landfills. But some people take their old computers, electronics and appliances to be recycled. Unfortunately, that sometimes simply means being shipped to China and other Asian countries where the electronic gear is burned to retrieve the metal such as copper and steel. Burning the electronic gear releases all kinds of toxic chemicals. Now, China’s main English language newspaper, CHINAdaily, reports the government there is banning the imports of scrap electronic goods. The newspaper reports this marks a change in the Chinese government’s policy of always putting economic conerns in front of less tangible needs such as the environment.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Junk Cars Become Environmental Art

We’ve come a long way since Henry Ford’s black Model T. Cars of every shape, size – and color – now practically dominate American life. Which poses a problem – what to do with the cars once they’re piled high in junkyards. A recent public art project offered one passionate recycler a chance to reuse junked cars in his art. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak has this story of “Art on Wheels”:

Transcript

We’ve come a long way since Henry Ford’s black Model T. Cars of every shape, size – and color
– now practically dominate American life. Which poses a problem – what to do with the cars
once they’re piled high in junkyards. A recent public art project offered one passionate
recycler a chance to reuse junked cars in his art. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak has this story of “Art on Wheels”:


The American landscape is filled with automobiles. Lines of fancy molded steel are everywhere
– in parking lots and bumper to bumper along the highways. Or, as Canadian folk singer Bruce
Cockburn once observed, a kind of “sheet metal ballet.” But, sadly, when the dance finally ends,
there’s nothing left but junkyards of crushed steel. A recent community art project suggested that
re-use could be an answer to the old environmental debate of what to do with all the junk.


(sound of kids at the art show)


Dozens of artists were asked to come up with their own unique ways to re-use at least some of
that automotive scrap for the recent “Art on Wheels” Project. Art teacher Bruce Adams describes
what he and his high school students call the “Environmentally Friendly Car.”


“There’s a picket fence on each side. The front we call the front lawn, because the surface is a
big, grass lawn, with a bird house, so the birds can live there over the summer. Then the back of
it, we call the backyard, it’s a garden, it’s a got a pond, it’s got a stream running down to the pond
– it had fish living in there all summer.”


Adams says they built the car as sort of an ironic commentary on the whole American dream
thing. That’s what many of sculptures in the exhibit were designed to do – to make a statement.
Other sculptures, such as the cement truck chicken, were simply intended to be outlandish. But
for one of the exhibit artists, Doug McCullum, re-use isn’t a novelty. It’s a lifelong expression.
You might even say an obsession.


“My sister broke her femur…I made a lamp out of her steel leg splint. It was a little strange
thinking that, you know, this thing spent six months in my sister’s leg –
but she kind of enjoyed the lamp.”


McCullum is, well, shall we say, passionate about re-use? Okay, so you might even call him the
Dr. Frankenstein of the junkyard. His Gremlin car sculpture from the exhibit features some of
his junkyard creations. They’re popping out of the roof, the hood, the doors and the gas tank.
Come meet Scratch, Knock, Guzzle, and the rest of the Gremlins gang.


“The car is covered in a wide variety of monsters, all named after things that go wrong with your
car – henceforth the name Gremlins. They are all made out of various things like air compressor
tanks, and old recycled drive shafts, and snow blower hoods, and old air tanks.”


No, McCullum isn’t an auto mechanic, or a junk dealer. He’s an architect by trade, who likes to
create recycled art in his spare time. But McCullum doesn’t have to go far for re-use materials
when he begins a project. He just walks downstairs and scrounges around in his basement.
McCullum says he saves everything – and he’s especially partial to automobile salvage.


“I have so much steel, and so much stuff that I’ve recycled in my basement that it would take a
small crew to move that stuff out, and that’s just the way I create.”


McCullum says there are plenty of worn out or broken parts from his own cars down there. And
he’s never one to pass up somebody else’s cast off muffler or tire tread abandoned at the side of
the road. McCullum hauls it all home for his next project. And if he does run into roadblock
while creating? McCullum says he loves to go shopping – at the junkyard of course.


“It’s like shopping at the mall for me. I like climbing through the piles, and digging through
something, and I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. Like, oh… this could be a great head, and sit
that aside… I go looking for a part and I come out with like a couple hundred pounds worth of
steel. Like, yeahhhh, like there was a big sale at the mall and I’m coming out with the spoils of
my labor.”


But make no mistake, for McCullum re-use isn’t an idle past time, it’s a professional and personal
commitment. As both an artist and an architect he says he believes in the beauty and the
possibility of preserving everything. McCullum says things can and should last. He says it’s
purely a matter of vision.


“Basically, anything that is discarded can be re-used in a wide variety of ways, just people don’t
have the vision or that kind of mentality to really think in a different way. And that’s really what
this whole project is about – the Art on Wheels thing in general – you can re-use everything.”


(sound of kid yelling, “Look a bug car! There’s a bug on top!”)


MCullum says the unusual automobile inspired sculptures were fun to make – and to look at.
Mind you, he doesn’t expect to see gremlin cars or cement truck chickens roaring down the
highway anytime soon. But McCullum says hopefully the exhibit will help turn people on to the
possibilities of recycling.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Joyce Kryszak.