Is Junk Car Recycling Helping or Hurting our Environment?
The United Recyclers Group (URG) tried to measure the impact of Junk Car recycling in a new fact finding mission, focusing on the energy & resource savings of reusing and recycling parts such as steel fenders & wheels.
Put together by the University of Colorado’s Environmental Engineering Dept, the report’s findings were based on the assumption that 11 million vehicles are retired every year. The mission also found:
Recycling cars produce between 3 and 4.5 million tons of shredder residue to landfills each year. This material includes everything from plastic to glass to rubber.
Junk Car recycling extracts 24 million gallons of motor oil a year, which is reprocessed to keep it out of landfills.
Aluminum wheel recycling would save 1.71 billion kilowatt hours of energy that would be needed to make new wheels from virgin aluminum.
Recycling just steel fenders saves more than 8 million tons of raw material (mostly iron and coal) that would be used to make new steel.
All 3 materials are commonly taken out during the auto auto scrapping process, with steel & aluminum sold off as scrap metal. But car recycling also landfill about 25% of the average car by weight, which includes other recyclable material such as glass, plastic and rubber.
The CU study did not take into account the impact of Cash for Clunkers, which had some auto recyclers receiving 10 times the supply of cars because of a government incentive to trade-in old cars for recycling.
“Thanks to the Junk Car recycling industry, the brakes are being put on climate change,” said Michelle Alexander, URG executive director. “Energy consumption is being drastically reduced; less material is being mined, refined and used; many different types of pollution are lowered; and the carbon footprint for the whole automobile industry is being reduced.”
Recycling also creates jobs and economic development:
Example: The state of Ohio
** The Junk Car recycling industry supports 4.3% of the jobs in Ohio.Recycling supports 3,177 business establishments in Ohio, employing 98,302 people.
**The average wage paid by Ohio’s recycling industry is $36,600.00.
Ohio’s recycling industry annual sales reached $22.5 billion.
Hulio Prophet is a professional freelance author and writer for many prominent internet companies.
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