Quote:
Originally Posted by SwampYankee
As I think about it, it might even be the cost of the real estate as much as it is the liability. There's just not a lot of space left around here to keep acres of cars spread out until they've been picked clean. They just don't have the room so they dismantle them, keep the good parts and scrap the rest.
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I'll bet you're right on that one - might be other state issues but real estate could be a biggy, especially in CT.
There was an independent yard adjacent to the Oakland Pick n Pull, I liked the guy who ran it, had pretty good inventory. Somewhere around 2000, I went in and saw a sign that they were closing down. He said he was getting burnt out on all the EPA compliance and was "just gonna crush 'em."
Pick n' Pull is a subsidiary of Schnitzer Steel, I guess they harvest the income they can on parts and then melt 'em down. Once I went to the Schnitzer yard in Oakland to sell a bunch of scrap steel I got when I cleaned out a ladies yard - her late contractor husband had loads of steel items that were past their pull date. In the distance I saw a huge stream of brown looking debris shooting out onto a large pile. I asked the guy what it was, he said they shred the vehicles before they melt them and they have an arrangement of magnets and fans to separate the steel from the copper, alum, and everything else - plastic, upholstery, etc. The stream of crap was everything that was worthless. I think they used to just burn the crap out, not sure.