Auto Recycling: What Role Do Junkyards Play?

When we hear a story about vehicles being bad for the environment, it usually pertains to exhaust emissions and what can be done to lower them. Exhaust emissions can wreak havoc on the environment, but there is another environmental issue associated with vehicles that begins where exhaust emissions end: how to dispose of junk cars in an eco friendly manner.

Enter Auto Recycling

Auto recycling — the practice of reselling used car parts and recycling recyclable car materials that are no longer useful — holds the most promise for disposing of cars in an eco friendly manner. When it comes to reselling used parts, junkyards play a pivotal role; they make the parts available to consumers at discount prices, which increases the parts’ salability.

Junkyards are also a critical link in the process of recycling the metal used for frames and bodies of automobiles. After consumers have picked salvage cars clean of parts, junkyards sells the leftover metal to scrap yards that process the metal and subsequently sell it to recyclers. The metal is then recycled into new car bodies and other metal products.

Auto Recycling Benefits

The primary benefit of auto recycling is that it helps keep landfills free of automotive parts. Inevitably, some car parts do pass into landfills, but dedicated auto recycling programs have made a significant dent in how much detritus from cars, trucks, and SUVs gets covered over with earth. As recently as a few decades ago, almost all discarded cars eventually went to landfills.

Recycling vehicles also prevents junk cars from sitting idle in natural areas such as yards, fields, and woodland, where oil, gasoline, and other engine fluids gradually leak through broken seals and into the ground. Consequently, auto recycling also helps keep the ground and water supply free of toxic substances — a benefit that many don’t associate with recycling cars.

How Wrench-A-Part Helps

At Wrench-A-Part, we help keep landfills free of car parts, and the ground and water supply free of toxic engine fluids, by recycling vehicle components. We accept junk vehicle donations and also buy junk vehicles; towing is free in either case. If you have a junk car sitting on your property, make the environmentally responsible choice of letting us take it off your hands.

To find out what your junk car is worth, call one of our locations in Austin, Belton, or Lubbock.

Wrench-A-Part
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