How are cars recycled?
Your first car was probably a bit rusty, a bit clattery, but it got you where you needed to go for a few years until it started to fall apart. All cars eventually die, but they retain a level of value, even when nothing works anymore. They are destined for the scrapyard, where they’ll be sliced up, churned and spat out as cubes of metal. But this isn’t the end of your car’s life – it’s the beginning of a new one.
The parts inside your old car can be removed and recycled or repurposed. These parts will be removed before being compressed and stacked with the contents of other cars that are set for the crusher. They will then in time go on to become part of a new car or product – almost everything, right down to the engine, can be reused.
The process requires a lot of complicated stages of extracting parts and disposing of hazardous materials, starting with the removal of the battery, tyres and catalytic converter, followed by draining all of the vehicle’s fluids. The highest-value parts may be removed and sold as a new restored product or as a second-hand part. This historically labour-intensive process has been made more efficient with the introduction of machine-based vehicle-recycling.
After the hazardous chemicals, including airbag propellant and mercury, are removed, only an empty shell of the car remains, which is crushed into a cube or totally flattened before being transported to an industrial shredder. It is often then remade into new car parts.