RECYCLING VEHICLES: THE STEPS
Once a car reaches the junkyard, it goes through several steps before finally being shredded to scrap metal.
1.The car is stripped of many resellable parts. For example, a car may have a cracked engine block, but the transmission is fine. Salvage crews pull out the working parts for resale.
2.Hazardous materials are removed. The battery is pulled out and chemicals in the air-conditioning system are drained. The gas tank is removed and drained (and resold if it's in good condition).
3.The car is left in the junkyard until it's time to be crushed.
4.Cars are loaded onto the crushing bed with a forklift, an excavator with a huge claw on the end or a magnet. Some crushers have a crane with a lifting claw or magnet built into the crusher itself.
5. Cars are crushed as flat as possible. The crushed cars will take up less than half of the space they originally required, and in some cases as little as ten percent. How flat they get depends on the crusher and what kinds of cars are being crushed. Baler crushers can reduce a car to a brick of crushed metal that's about three and a half feet high, two feet wide and three to five feet long [Source: Al-jon].
6.The cars are loaded onto trucks and shipped to a recycler where they will be shredded down to chunks of scrap metal.
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