Twenty-Tens Hit the Streets

  • The 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid. (Photo courtesy of Ford)

New car models are hitting the
dealers’ showroom floors. Lester
Graham reports not as many fuel
efficient cars are selling in the
wake of the government’s Cash-
for-Clunkers program:

Transcript

New car models are hitting the
dealers’ showroom floors. Lester
Graham reports not as many fuel
efficient cars are selling in the
wake of the government’s Cash-
for-Clunkers program:

It’s hard to miss the ads for new models.

(montage of car advertisements)

But in September, fuel-efficient cars didn’t sell that well.

Mark Gillies is the Executive Editor for Car and Driver magazine. He says vehicles that get good gas mileage probably won’t start selling until gasoline prices go up – just like last year.


“That’s when you saw a big move to buying more fuel efficient vehicles. And I think the obvious thing about oil prices is that long term the trend is that they’re going to go up and they’re going to stay that way.”

Fuel-efficient models did sell in August because of Cash-for Clunkers, but Gillies says people bought low-end models this time because they were cheap – not necessarily because they were fuel-efficient.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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National Parks Get a Little Green

  • Junior Rangers-to-be explore the beach at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

There was a time – not that long ago –
when a lot of the National Parks in the
country were strapped for cash. They
were cutting staff and cutting services.
But, Mark Brush reports, now Congress
is investing more in the parks:

Transcript

There was a time – not that long ago –
when a lot of the National Parks in the
country were strapped for cash. They
were cutting staff and cutting services.
But, Mark Brush reports, now Congress
is investing more in the parks:

It started changing in the last year or two of the Bush Administration. The Bush White House realized that the National Park System was coming up on its 100th Anniversary in 2016.

No one wanted the Centennial marred by crumbling roads or Parks that were understaffed. So Washington pledged to increase the overall budget for the National Park Service by 100 million each year until the Centennial.

And folks like Tom Ulrich say Congress has been making good on that pledge. He’s the deputy superintendent at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan.

“A few years ago our discussions weren’t, you know, ‘Well, we got a little bit of extra money how are we going to spend that?’ They were, ‘We have to cut from last year. What are we going to cut?’ And so it’s nice to have those discussions change.”

Ulrich says a lot of National Parks are also getting some money from the stimulus package passed earlier this year.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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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.

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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.

Related Links

No Cars Left for Cash for Clunkers

  • Dealers across the country are running out of new cars to sell that qualify for the program. (Photo source: IFCAR at Wikimedia Commons)

Two billion dollars is being added to
the very popular Cash for Clunkers
program. The original one billion dollars
is almost gone. But, Lester Graham
reports, there’s a shortage of new cars
that qualify for the program:

Transcript

Two billion dollars is being added to
the very popular Cash for Clunkers
program. The original one billion dollars
is almost gone. But, Lester Graham
reports, there’s a shortage of new cars
that qualify for the program:

The National Automobile Dealers Association says they’ve been hearing from dealers across the country who’ve been running out of new cars that qualify for the program.

Steve Demers is the General Manager of Cueter Chrysler Jeep Dodge in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a state where Cash for clunkers has been especially popular.

“There’s virtually no vehicles available, so there are other areas in the country that may not be as – the program has not been as popular – so we’re able to pluck some of that inventory out of their states, but it’s a nation-wide problem. I mean, we’re out many, many states away, thousands of miles before we can find a vehicle that can be brought in for one of our custormers.”

Factories are shipping more cars to the dealers but can’t keep up with demand.

185,000 gas-guzzling clunkers have been turned in to be scrapped in exchange for the government incentives.

Car buyers get up to 4,500 dollars toward buying a new fuel-efficient model.

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.

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Businesses Save Money by Reducing Waste

  • The lot that started Baldassari's quest to eliminate waste from his business. (Photo by Nancy Paladino of The Taylor Companies)

When you’re in the business of making things, you can wind
up with a lot of waste material. But these days more
companies are realizing trash has value. Julie Grant reports
instead of spending big bucks to dump their waste in a
landfill, these companies are making money from it:

Transcript

When you’re in the business of making things, you can wind
up with a lot of waste material. But these days more
companies are realizing trash has value. Julie Grant reports
instead of spending big bucks to dump their waste in a
landfill, these companies are making money from it:

Jeff Baldassari’s company makes sleek, upscale office
furniture.

“I would have never guessed ten years ago I’d
be the guy telling you this story right now.”

Baldassari is the CEO of The Taylor Companies.

A few years ago he started planning for a new factory. The
site where they wanted to build it was an old brownfield.

That’s a site that had been contaminated by a past
manufacturer.

Baldassari says they got grant money to clean up the land,
and it got them thinking about the environment – really for the
first time.

“‘Okay we cleaned up this brownfield – but
let’s not stop there. What else can we do for
the environment, what else can we do for our
bottom line to pay for this new facility, to
get it to pay for itself?’”

They started looking at their waste.

(sound of a factory)

On the factory floor, a worker is tracing the shape of a chair
leg onto a piece of wood. After it’s cut, the scrap wood is
tossed into a large box.

“Trees don’t grow in the shape of furniture
parts. So there is a lot of waste. Ultimately,
40% of each board ends up as scrap when it’s
all said and done – 30% to 40% will end up as
scrap.”

Baldassari says they used to pay to send all that scrap wood
to the landfill – along with huge dumpsters full of sawdust.
That cost the company.

But his team started making some calls. They found horse
farms that wanted sawdust for bedding. They found
companies that wanted wood chips for mulch.

Instead paying to have dumpsters of waste hauled away,
they found markets for the waste material.

It was the same deal with leather coverings for the chairs
and sofas. One-fourth of the leather used to end up in the
scrap heap as trash. Now a hand-bag maker in Montreal
comes to pick it up for purses and wallets.

And Baldassari is pretty happy about it. These days he’s
sending only one-eighth of the waste to the landfill as before.
That saves the company $30,000 dollars a year.

For many companies, this is the future.

Joel Makower says smart corporate leaders are finding ways
to reach zero-waste. Makower is the executive editor of
greenbiz.com.

“We’re starting to see companies think in
terms of closed loop systems. Factories
where basically there may not be any
smokestacks, drain pipes, or dumpsters.
where every waste product is turned into
some kind of raw material for another
process.”

But a lot of these companies are not necessarily cutting
waste because it’s good for the earth. Like Jeff Baldassari,
these corporate leaders often start the process as a way to
save money.

These days Baldassari says he’s the kind businessman he
never guessed he’d be: one who’s always looking for ways
to eliminate waste:

“Once I got started, I literally became
addicted to it. But it was addicted, in the
sense again, it helped our bottom line.”

Baldassari wants it clear: he’s not a tree-hugger. But, at this
point, he’s actually having fun. He’s caught up in finding
ways to save money by eliminating waste.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Under the Hood of Cash for Clunkers

  • Congress is trying to work out a bill that would mean bring in a clunker, get cash towards the purchase of a new high mileage car (Photo source: Flicka at Wikimedia Commons)

On Capitol Hill, there’s growing momentum for legislation called “Cash for Clunkers.” In fact, there are several bills circulating in Congress and the details are in flux. But the general idea is to use tax dollars to encourage people to trade their old gas guzzling clunker for a new fuel efficient car. The hope is to help the slumping auto industry and the environment at the same time. Tamara Keith gives the environmental claims a test drive:

Transcript

On Capitol Hill, there’s growing momentum for legislation called “Cash for Clunkers.” In fact, there are several bills circulating in Congress and the details are in flux. But the general idea is to use tax dollars to encourage people to trade their old gas guzzling clunker for a new fuel efficient car. The hope is to help the slumping auto industry and the environment at the same time. Tamara Keith gives the environmental claims a test drive:

At DarCars, a Toyota dealership in Silver Spring, Maryland people are shopping for cars.

But business is down.

Tammy Darvish is vice president of DarCars automotive group. Here’s how she describes “cash for clunkers.”

“It’s money from heaven.”

Well, from angels in Congress anyway. Bring in a clunker, get cash towards the purchase of a new high mileage car.

“I think they were talking about $4,000 or $5,000 or even $2,000. Whatever it is. Any incentive that you could add to the manufacturer incentives and the dealer incentives just make it all the better deal for the customer.”

And as we walk around the lot, Darvish points out plenty of cars she figures could qualify as fuel efficient replacements for clunkers. Like this one that gets 35 miles to the gallon on the highway.

“So here’s a Corolla and it’s not a hybrid technology vehicle and it’s still getting great gas mileage and all the manufacturers have vehicles, you know in those ranges.”

But not everyone is sold on the merits of a cash for clunkers program.

Dan Sperling heads the Institute for Transportation Studies at University of California Davis.

“What it mostly does, and we should be honest about it is it stimulates vehicle sales.”

He says this is more an economic policy with a green polish.

“It is supporting the use of more low carbon efficient vehicles, that’s good. It is supporting the automotive industry. That’s good. The problem is, it’s a very expensive way to do that.”

Whether a federal cash for clunkers program will be able to claim environmental success will largely come down to what counts as a clunker – and just how fuel efficient the car that replaces it needs to be.

For example, one version of the legislation would allow any car 8 years old or older to be junked in exchange for cash.

But an 8 year old car isn’t exactly a gelloppe. That’s younger than the average car on the road.

Bill Chameides is dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

“I would say that cash for clunkers programs that only put a requirement on the age of a car, from an environmental point of view is a real clunker, if you pardon the pun.”

To really analyze the environmental impact of a program like this Chameides says you also have to consider what it takes to manufacture a new car. And it turns out a lot of greenhouse gas emissions come from building a car.

“When you drive that new car out of the showroom, you already have 1 year of carbon dioxide emissions already in the atmosphere.”

So, to make up for those emissions, he says cars getting junked have to be real gas guzzlers, and the new cars need to be gas sippers.

“If we want to sell this as an environmental program we need to make sure that it’s focusing on really making a difference in the amount of gasoline we use, the amount of CO2 we emit. And therefore we need to have a limit on the miles per gallon of the scrap car. It need to be way down at the bottom of the spectrum. And we need to have a limit on the new car. It needs to be up high on the spectrum.”

There’s disagreement in Congress about what the mileage requirements for the program should be.

It’s one of those details yet to be worked out, that will determine just how green cash for clunkers will really be.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

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Money Over Mother Nature

  • A Gallup poll finds people feel the economy should be given priority over the environment (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

A new poll shows Americans put money over Mother Nature. Lester Graham reports it amounts to a real shift in attitudes:

Transcript

A new poll shows Americans put money over Mother Nature. Lester Graham reports it amounts to a real shift in attitudes:

A Gallup poll finds people feel the economy should be given priority over the environment.

51% think so. 42% still think the environment is more important.

Frank Newport, Gallup Poll Editor-in-Chief, says Gallup has been asking this same question every year for 25 years.

“This is the first time that we have had more Americans say growth should be given the priority not the environment. So, it’s a fairly dramatic and significant change this year.”

Newport says the results reflect people’s concerns about keeping their jobs and keeping their homes in this economy.

He concedes the issue is not just black and white – the environment versus the economy.

Jobs are being created in a shift to greener fuels and energy efficiency. But apparently that’s not clear to the American public. Newport suggests that might be the challenge facing people in the environmental movement.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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