North Americans purchase about 17 million new vehicles each year. 17 million vehicles! That is a lot of cars. At an average length of 5 meters (16 feet) if you stuck the cars end to end, the world's longest traffic jam would extend over 51,000 miles, which is almost exactly twice around the world! The total automotive population in North America is currently approximated at around 270 million, which would stretch around the globe a staggering 34 times!
The thing is, these cars don't last forever and when one of them gets in a wreck or has simply run the full gamut of family "hand-me-downs," they have to end up somewhere. For most of us the last we see of them is in handing over the keys to either a new or used car salesperson as we trade in for a new set of wheels. If they are lucky (and still worth something) they will be wholesaled/auctioned off to find another temporary home somewhere. If however, your car has a dramatic component failure and you turn it in (with the cost of repair equally more than the car is worth) then it is off to the garage in the sky.
Auto heaven used to be really just some lot or field somewhere with less strict municipality laws where cars would endlessly rot with hundreds if not thousands of other has-beens. But fortunately, today those junkyards you remember seeing as a kid along the highway etc, are not growing at the rates they once were as Auto Reclamation or recycling has ballooned into big business.
Roughly 6 million vehicles per year now find their way to the more efficient, though less humane for the cars, reclamation sites where items like batteries, catalytic converters and parts worth resale are removed and categorized for the used parts market. Then the car is usually sent through the shredder, wheels, engine, body and all where it is spit out as scrap metal. Scrap metal itself has become big business with emerging markets and growth in places like China, where much of the metal is now sold (sometimes in the manufacture of cars again). Additionally, federal, local and state laws protect the environment and landscape by regulating the disposal of vehicles as the numbers have grown.
So next time you turn in the tired family roadster, if you tell it that it is off to pasture (literally) where it can serenly live out it years, you would be lying. It is much more likely in for a trip through a gigantic cusiniart and then possibly on to a slow boat to China. The one solace is that it may live to roll again.
To see some of the different shredding possibilities, click here, here (choose car), or here.
To see some interesting industry stats, click here.
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