Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 24 · column 3 of 4 · from the scan, no model involved
Automotive scrap yards have been looked down on as blights on the landscape — eyesores populated by undesirable characters. In his ‘70s hit song, Jim Croce captured the popular concept when he described Leroy Brown as “meaner than a junkyard dog.”
It’s ironic that “automotive dismantlers” (their polite moniker, and there are some 12,000 of them in North America) are the hub of an environmental success Story — automobile recycling.
Numbers tell part of the story. First, 94 percent of the automobiles scrapped in the United States are collected for reuse and recycling. In real numbers, some 9.4 million of 10 million vehicles that are scrapped each year end up in dismantlers’ yards.
The dismantler removes any parts th. t still have useful life, which are either sold as cores for remanufacturing, or as used parts. Parts such as radiators, catalytic converters, fluids and batteries, go through their own recycling processes.
What’s left is the hulk, which is flattened and sent to a sophisticated operation called a shredder.
The fact that there are only 200 automobile shredders in the U.S. is evidence of how expensive this equipment is. The shredder slices and dices the hulk into small bits within a few seconds. The fragments are sorted magnetically into ferrous (iron and steel) and non-ferrous materials, then the non-ferrous pile is sorted into metals and non-metals.'
From all this sorted material, the recyclable products are sold to appropriate industries for re-use in new products. Every year, this amounts to about 11 million tons of recycled steel and close to another million tons of non-ferrous metals (primarily aluminum, copper, lead and zinc).
Even in the recycling, there’s another environmental up side: Making recycled steel requires half the energy and a small percentage of the water required to produce steel from iron ore. And, compared with aluminum made from bauxite, recycled aluminum requires 85 percent less energy to produce.
When all is said and done, about 75 percent of the material (by weight) from scrapped vehicles is recycled. What’s left, qalled automotive shredder residue, or
93.0%