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Where Your Car Goes to Die
What happens to your car after it lands in the junkyard? For one thing, an encounter with the fearsome maw of a 4000-hp shredder. An unflinching look at the final hours of America's most recycled product.
SHORT
STACK: Squashed cars arrive by flatbed trailer at Fritz Enterprises’
shredding facility in Taylor, Mich. The company owns six roving
crushers that can crunch vehicles into eight-car sandwiches.
The crusher is hungry;
it must be fed. Its hardened steel maw opens to accommodate an American
sedan. The jaws begin to close, and the crusher rocks softly side to
side as it brings its full force to bear. The car emits high-pitched
rending noises and then — pop! — the windshield blows. And — pop! pop!
— the headlights explode. In a matter of seconds, the sedan is less
than 2 ft. tall, and the crusher yawns to accept another rust-bitten
victim. It’s all part of a highly efficient salvage industry that
ensures that, after death, your car is reduced to its basic elements
and reborn — to be used over and over again.
LAST
GRASP: A hydraulic crane dangles the next victim over the 4000-hp
Hammermill shredder. After a brief trip down the conveyor belt, the
vehicle will no longer be recognizable as a car.
Fed by annual new-car sales that hover around 17 million, the U.S. automotive recycling industry reclaims some 750 million pounds of scrap each and every month. Much of that scrap — bits of steel and copper and aluminum and rubber — travels through a series of crushing, shredding, sorting and smelting facilities in southern Michigan that salvage almost every usable material in a vehicle. A short distance away, employees at the Big Three automakers toil on assembly lines, spending hours to build cars that the crusher will eventually destroy in seconds.
The demolition and rebirth of mankind’s most personal machine is a multistage process that is both unsettling and beautiful to watch. At any point in the journey, you can’t help but wonder: How many road trips, adventures and snarled traffic jams did that car see before becoming just another pile of debris?
HORIZONTAL
MAMBO: The R.M. Johnson E-Z Crusher is a formidable beast. Moved from
salvage yard to salvage yard, it has a 20-ft.-wide mouth, and it exerts
50 tons of crushing force from each of its two hydraulic cylinders —
enough to flatten cars, trucks, farm equipment, even buses.
The automobile is the most recycled consumer product in the world — 95 percent of all vehicles are reclaimed. The rate far exceeds the numbers for recycling giants such as newspaper (74 percent), aluminum cans (51 percent) and glass (22 percent). And much of the reclaimed material winds up back in new cars: Coffee-stained carpeting becomes air-cleaner assemblies, and chewed-up tires morph into brake pedals and floor mats.
After a car gets torn into bits by one of Fritz Enterprises’ shredding facilities (above), conveyor belts move the scrap past huge magnets to extract the steel. What’s left is dumped into piles of “zorba” (nonferrous mix) that are taken to Huron Valley Steel’s processing plant in Belleville, Mich. A high-tech flotation process sorts out the “twitch” (aluminum) from the rest of the debris, which is exported to cheap labor markets such as India and China for hand sorting.
Pound for pound, aluminum, brass, copper and zinc are the most valuable stuff in a car. Huron Valley sends its aluminum scrap to Fritz Products smelting plant in River Rouge, Mich., where Ken Filipkowski (above, standing) and Larry Dupuie help melt, mix and form the metal into ingots — ready to reuse. “The recycled aluminum finds its way into everything from automobiles to barbecues,” says Filipkowski, a shift foreman at the plant. “I see products all the time and wonder if part of them came through here.”
Still, as much as 25 percent of each car ends up in landfills. That’s largely because landfill space is still relatively cheap and the technologies to recover nonferrous material are still expensive. That may change, thanks to pricing pressures on both real estate and resources. But, as long as we drive, one thing will remain constant: The crusher will always be hungry. And someday, it will come for your car.
The automobile is the most recycled consumer product in the world — 95 percent of all vehicles are reclaimed. The rate far exceeds the numbers for recycling giants such as newspaper (74 percent), aluminum cans (51 percent) and glass (22 percent). And much of the reclaimed material winds up back in new cars: Coffee-stained carpeting becomes air-cleaner assemblies, and chewed-up tires morph into brake pedals and floor mats.
After a car gets torn into bits by one of Fritz Enterprises’ shredding facilities (above), conveyor belts move the scrap past huge magnets to extract the steel. What’s left is dumped into piles of “zorba” (nonferrous mix) that are taken to Huron Valley Steel’s processing plant in Belleville, Mich. A high-tech flotation process sorts out the “twitch” (aluminum) from the rest of the debris, which is exported to cheap labor markets such as India and China for hand sorting.
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| PIG WRANGLER: Jack Basinger is part of a five-man crew that works the “pig line.” Aluminum scrap is heated to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, then poured into forms to make 22-pound ingots (“pigs”). The crew stacks the ingots in 2000-pound bundles. “When a stack falls,” he says, “the bars pretty much shoot everywhere — a big mess.” | SPARE SOME CHANGE: Nickels, dimes and quarters don’t just hide under couch cushions. The average scrapped vehicle contains $1.65 in change. It’s the job of Bernard Seay to ensure that no coin goes unsalvaged. The legal tender is retrieved post-shredder and is often defaced beyond usability. The company sells the coins back to the U.S. Mint at a per-pound rate that’s close to face value. |
Pound for pound, aluminum, brass, copper and zinc are the most valuable stuff in a car. Huron Valley sends its aluminum scrap to Fritz Products smelting plant in River Rouge, Mich., where Ken Filipkowski (above, standing) and Larry Dupuie help melt, mix and form the metal into ingots — ready to reuse. “The recycled aluminum finds its way into everything from automobiles to barbecues,” says Filipkowski, a shift foreman at the plant. “I see products all the time and wonder if part of them came through here.”
Still, as much as 25 percent of each car ends up in landfills. That’s largely because landfill space is still relatively cheap and the technologies to recover nonferrous material are still expensive. That may change, thanks to pricing pressures on both real estate and resources. But, as long as we drive, one thing will remain constant: The crusher will always be hungry. And someday, it will come for your car.
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| PARTS BIN: The shredder has a curious way of turning car parts into art objects. The steel coil spring (left), sprung free from a suspension system, survived the machine’s gnashing teeth generally intact. This section of crankshaft, though, ran a tougher gantlet: It was snapped free of its engine, along with two connecting rods that have lost their pistons. | |