The End: Recycling Old Clunkers a Good Green Move
By John O'Dell June 3, 2008
By Robert E. Calem, Contributor
Automakers may be touting gee-whiz technologies to power their eco-friendly cars of the future, but respectful treatment of that old clunker that's in your garage today when its useful life is over could be equally helpful in the overall effort to save the environment.
There's lots of metal and plastic there and, as it does for soda bottles and newspapers, recycling can mean redemption for even the biggest gas guzzler.
According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA) – a Fairfax, Virginia, based group comprising nearly 3,000 automotive recycling businesses worldwide – automobiles are the most recycled consumer product on the globe.
In the U.S. alone, auto recycling yields enough steel to produce almost 13 million new cars annually. It's the 16th largest industry in the U.S., generating about $10 billion annually and employing approximately 100,000 people. "Thanks to advances in technology, everything from floor mats and instrument panels to upholstery, aluminum and steel can be recycled for use in new automobiles," Sandy Blalock, ARA's president, said at a recent presentation in New York.
"Plastics are now being recycled to be used in the manufacturing of components like bumper reinforcements, splash shields, and many other automotive components… [And] the manufacturing of new automobiles is virtually done 100 percent from recycled scrap" steel, she said.
The amount of "new" steel made from recycled autos topped 14.5 million tons in 2004, the most recent years for which figures are available.
Of course, not everything in an old car is ground up or melted down -- recycled auto parts account for 12.5 percent of replacement parts used in collision repairs, ARA statistics show.
Green, But Not Green Enough
Recycling one pound of steel saves enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for 39 hours, Blalock said, and recycling an entire car reduces greenhouse gas emission by almost 9,000 pounds – the equivalent of 475 gallons of gasoline.
"Automotive recyclers are the key to protecting the environment through conservation of resources and energy," she proclaimed, adding that while automotive recycling is "one of the greenest industries in the world today," automakers and legislators should be doing more to make recycling cars easier and more commonplace.
In order to become sustainable, Blalock said, the automotive industry must design, engineer and produce new vehicles with recycling in mind. Other barriers to efficient auto recycling, she said, include local zoning laws that push recycling operations away, a "jumble" of state and federal regulations, and lock of federal funding federal for the industry.
By comparison, the European Union, Japan and Canada have clear national laws or government-sanctioned programs to encourage automotive recycling.
The European Union's End-of-Life Vehicles Directive, established in 2000, calls for 85 percent of Europe's junked vehicles to be recycled by 2015. In 2002, Japan enacted a similar End-of-Life Vehicle Recycling Law. And Environment Canada, the Canadian equivalent of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, is preparing a "national scrappage program" that will provide financial incentives for Canadians to recycle their old vehicles.
The program expects to have about $60 million (Canadian) to allocate over the next three years, said Steven Fletcher, managing director of the Automotive Recyclers of Canada trade organization.
New Technologies, New Challenges, Same Conclusion
In an interview with Green Car Advisor, Blaylock said a program like the Canadian auto recycling incentives plan should be the model for the U.S.
Like many in the business community, she opposes mandated programs such as those enacted in Japan and Europe. "I don't think that if the United States promoted professional auto recycling that we should ever have to be concerned" about legislating an "end of life program," she said.
Under any sort of voluntary system, though, it will be incumbent on professional automotive recyclers to keep up with advancing automotive technologies and learn the new skills necessary to dismantle and recycle future generations of green cars – just as they had to learn new skills to deal with hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles, Blaylock acknowledged.
"Any new technology is going to present challenges to our industry," she said. "We're acutely aware of those changes, more so than ever before."
But of biggest interest to the automotive recycling industry, Blalock said, is to make sure that all vehicles taken off the road are properly processed.
In the end, all cars should be deconstructed equally.
This is the first of an occasional Green Car Advisor series examining what 's happening to the cars and trucks we no longer use for transportation.
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