Fall 2004
rein[car]nation
by Evan McLean
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Melted scrap steel is formed into rebar in the rolling mill. |
Steel skeletons sit in graveyards on the outskirts of towns throughout America. Scavengers pick the tastiest bits from these skeletons before sending them into the maw of a 60,000-pound yellow monster. A fearsome set of teeth then chews the mangled mess at the speed of sound. What’s left goes to a 3,000degree-Fahrenheit belly for digestion and, eventually, excretion.
This digestive process is more commonly known as automobile recycling. Americans leave 15 million automobiles for dead every year, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. These vehicles, America’s leading recycled product, are collected for reusable and scrap parts, with a salvage rate of 75 percent. Much of the scrap from cars is reused in new cars or other steel products.
Cars are not created or destroyed without waste. The Department of Ecology reported last year that one large, fully loaded car creates eight 55-gallon drums of hazardous-waste byproduct during manufacturing. Carmakers have not divulged the amount of heavy metals, such as mercury and lead, in cars, nor have they divulged in which models they are used. But carmakers, recyclers and the DOE have allied to improve the process.
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| Crushed car skeletons wait in stacks at the wrecking yard of Seattle Iron & Metals Corp. before being demolished by the powerful car shredder. |
In maintaining and improving their cars, drivers tend to trash old, sometimes hazardous parts. Service adviser Tom Forster of Chuck’s Midtown Motors said he safeguards against anything toxic, such as asbestos brake pads, entering the waste stream, but many smaller components are tossed each day.
“I’ve never heard of, or have been offered, a system of parts recycling, like soda cans,” Forster said. “It goes to whoever wants to turn it around for cash.”
Forster said he wants to see a local service that would take citizens’ and mechanics’ smaller wasted parts. He has a “scrap guy” pick up abandoned cars and large engine parts, as well as computer and gearing cores, and take them to wrecking yards. Whatcom County has more than 60 registered acres of auto-wrecking yards.
Gundie’s Auto and Truck Wrecking on Mount Baker Highway offers services for the first stage in salvaging vehicles. Every year, Gundie’s coordinator Stephen Rhoads sees 3,000 vehicles come through the yard.
The company buys wrecked cars from insurance auctions after the insurance agencies decide the repair cost exceeds the vehicle’s worth, Rhoads said. He said the company must drain the freon, antifreeze, gas, oil, and brake and transmission fluids before the vehicle can be stripped or crushed.
“It takes a certain amount of effort to prep a ‘juicy’ car,” Rhoads said.
Gundie’s reuses some fluids on-site and sends the waste fluids to specialty recycling centers. Wreckers recover body panels, reusable engine parts and other core units after they drain them. Gundie’s usually sells these parts in wholesale quantities.
Rhoads said the company fills a small retail niche.
“It’s all about supply and demand,” he said. “Some cars in these piles of scrap have apparently good parts on them, but it seems no one has high enough demand for them.”
Many body shops and local drivers neglect used parts for more easily obtained, new, post-production parts. Rhoads joked about how people don’t like calling a “junkyard dog” like him for parts when the shop mechanic can take care of it.
He added that, in part, it’s the dealer’s high-priced parts that help keep a
used-part company in business — 40 years for Gundie’s.
“If you ask (Gundie’s) owner what percentage of a car we can sell before it’s scrapped, he’d say, ‘As much as humanly possible,’ ” he said.
Once everything of value is stripped away, a tractor operator puts the vacant frame into the portable E-Z Crusher, a shipping container-sized machine that weighs more than 60,000 pounds and presses with 2,400 pounds per square inch.
Operator Brian Vintin stacks cars into the crusher, which closes its intimidating jaw with each new addition. Vintin piles the squished skeletons, which look like sliced bread, on a truck bound for General Mills, located in Tacoma, or Seattle Iron & Metals Corp., next to the Duwamish River in Seattle, where workers shove the car carcasses into a shredder.
Seattle Iron can turn a flattened steel vehicle, including engine parts and full interior, into a pile of rubble in seconds. Donning a hard hat, Marc Sidell, Seattle Iron’s vice president, grinned at the chance to explain the steel shredder and its magnetic sorting systems. The machine runs at 4,000 horsepower and twirls a phone booth-sized rotor with 16 manganese hammers at the speed of sound.
“It takes five seconds to beat the car into submission,” he said. “Then it takes about 15 more seconds to sort out all the materials into waste and usable
metal products.”
A conveyor belt rolls beneath the rotor chamber, catching the debris the hammers leave behind. The rubble rolls through two reverse magnetic sorting systems, each designed to attract ferrous (reduced iron) or nonferrous metals. The leftover shavings go to a landfill.
“About 20 percent of the shred is garbage,” Sidell said. “That’s including the seats, carpets and plastics.”
This shredder waste, combined with the wrecking-yard waste, is a quarter of a vehicle’s weight. Seattle Iron has to pay to dispose of this waste in landfills. To make sorting and recycling this junk cost-effective, the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement formed in late 2003. Some automakers — Ford Motor Co., DaimlerChrysler AG and General Motors Corp. — and the American Plastics Council share the multimillion dollar cost of the project.
More than half of Sidell’s nonferrous metals return to the car manufacturers. He sends most of his steel to Nucor Steel Seattle Inc., a 100-year-old smelter also on the Duwamish River.
Nucor Seattle General Manager Doug Jellison said he is proud of the environmental efficiencies the site has accomplished during its century of operation.
“Everything that comes in here will either go out as a finished product or ready to become a finished product, leaving a fraction of a percent going to a landfill,”
he said.
Every ton of steel recycled saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal and 120 pounds of limestone, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Using recycled iron and steel saves 74 percent of the energy necessary to make new steel. That energy would be enough to provide power to 18 million U.S. homes for one year, according to the EPA.
A hot tub-sized electromagnet drops from a crane into piles of scrap two stories high, collecting steel for the furnace. Operators combine steel bits from shredders and larger scrap pieces from wrecking yards with a touch of aluminum, forming the right recipe for the furnace.
Before smelting, the waste looks rusty and tattered. Once the steel is piled into the electric-arc furnace, three electrodes that look like man-sized sparkplugs melt the steel shards.
A vacuum catches clouds of dust and ash that billow from the furnace and fills an adjacent warehouse, called a baghouse. Inside, 6,000 bags collect particulates from the smelting process.
“The bags of dust all go down to Mexico,” he said. “It’s mostly zinc, so a mill down there makes zinc bars and fertilizers from the ash; 99-plus percent of our waste stream is recycled.”
The cauldron pours molten steel into oscillating tanks, which form it into long square bars of uniform composition. Once cooled, the 6-inch-square, 50-foot-long bars, called billets, are either stored or enter the final phase of production: formation.
Standing next to a pile of billets twice his height, Jellison pointed to a second re-heat furnace. He said the beams must be heated to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit to become malleable enough to form products like rebar.
Fifty feet of glowing steel progress along a track through a blazing, red-orange door into a line of rolling mills. These rolling mills are the steel industry’s version of a Play-Doh Fun Factory.
Rollers turn and form the billets into a desired shape, like a half-inch circular bar.
Nucor Seattle’s products can be found in Safeco Field, Qwest Field and the new Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Jellison said.
Sidell buys from only licensed wrecking yards and scrap sellers. People who want to scrap auto parts they’ve replaced at home need to visit smaller operations, such as Pacific Iron& Metal Co. Because Pacific deals with smaller parts its employees manually sort most of the components, requiring a larger work force.
Every year, car recycling results in the emission of 15.6 tons of mercury, according to the reports Toxics in Vehicles: Mercury and Toxic by Design, written by the Ecology Center, Great Lakes United and the University of Tennessee Center for Clean Products and Technologies.
Sidell, Jellison and others in the automotive recycling industry agree that final responsibility for mercury collection and disposal should lie with vehicle manufacturers. But in the meantime, extending the life of vehicles is one way to minimize these mercury emissions.
Cooperation between automotive manufacturers and smelters gives ecologic and economic promise for an efficient chain of vehicle recycling in the future. The yellow E-Z Crusher, the spinning shredder and the electric-arc furnace look and sound like monsters. Yet they are a powerful example of the innovative potential that can create a vehicle life cycle without abandoned skeletons and buried waste.