Even cars headed to the junkyard have some value

Dear Car Talk:

We all have seen pictures of wrecking yards with stacks of crushed, rusting cars. What happens when those cars are EVs with large batteries installed? — Roger

They won’t have batteries in them, Roger. The batteries — even very used batteries — are too valuable to crush.

Regardless of age, batteries have anodes and cathodes that contain rare earth metals like lithium, cobalt and nickel. Those metals are really expensive.

The metals are also hard to get.

They require carbon-intensive mining. And many of them now come from China, which presents certain national security, energy independence and even human rights concerns.

So, a big industry — or what the players hope will become a big industry — is getting started. There’s a company called Redwood that’s spending billions of dollars to build factories that recycle old batteries and use them to make new anodes and cathodes, which they’ll sell to EV battery manufacturers. I’m sure other companies will join in as well.

So, you’d better believe that any EV that arrives at a junkyard is going to have its battery pack removed before it gets crushed. And the truth is, that’s what happens with all cars, even those with internal combustion engines.

When a car arrives at a junkyard at the end of its useful life, there are many parts on it that can be sold and reused. So junkyards remove all the valuable stuff — everything from the radiator to the steering rack to the window cranks — and even then, they often leave the cars lying around the yard for a while just in case someone needs a right side mirror housing for a ‘98 Dodge Neon.

Once the car has been fully stripped of its useful parts, only then does its shell go to the crusher. Then the scrap metal is put on a boat and sent to Malaysia where it returns to the U.S. as selfie sticks.