What happens to junk cars after pickup
After pickup, a junk car is drained of its fluids, stripped of the battery, wheels, tires, catalytic converter and reusable parts, then crushed and shredded so its metal can be sorted and melted again. Here's each stage in order, from Smart Scrap Metal Buyers, a Chicago scrap car buyer and metal seller, with the Illinois paperwork that closes out the car's life.
What happens to a junk car after it’s picked up?
- The paperwork is recorded, and the car's title heads back to the state.
- Fluids are drained: coolant, oil, transmission fluid, refrigerant and fuel.
- The battery, wheels, tires and catalytic converter come off, along with parts worth reselling.
- The shell is crushed flat or cubed for transport.
- A shredder breaks it into small pieces.
- Steel, nonferrous metals and residue are separated, and the metals are sold to be melted again.
That’s the whole journey, usually spread across more than one business. Here’s what each stage involves.
1. Paperwork: the car stops being a car
Illinois tracks scrapped cars closely. When a licensed scrap processor takes in a vehicle, 625 ILCS 5/5-401.3 requires it to record the VIN and a proof of ownership, such as the title, and keep the records for three years.
Then 625 ILCS 5/3-117.2 closes the loop. Within 15 days of receiving the title, a scrap processor or automotive parts recycler sends it to the Secretary of State with a Junk Vehicle Notification. After that, the state will not issue a title or salvage certificate for that car again.
2. Draining the fluids
Before anything is cut or crushed, the fluids come out: engine coolant, oil, transmission fluid, air conditioning refrigerant and gasoline, as Wikipedia’s article on vehicle recycling lists them. This is the environmental step. Those liquids would otherwise end up in the ground or in the shredder.
3. Pulling the valuable parts
Next come the parts that are worth more whole than shredded. Off come the wheels and tires, the battery and the catalytic converter. The battery is usually lead-acid, and the converter holds platinum, palladium and rhodium (why that matters). Depending on the car, working parts such as engines, transmissions or body panels may be pulled for resale.
4. Crushing
What’s left, the shell, is crushed flat or pressed into a cube. That’s mostly about transport: a flattened car takes up a fraction of the space, so a truck can carry several to the shredder.
5. Shredding
The crushed car goes into an industrial shredder or hammer mill, which tears it into small pieces. This is where one object becomes a stream of mixed material: steel, aluminum, copper wire, glass, plastic, fabric and rubber.
6. Sorting the metal
Sorting starts with the property the Recycled Materials Association uses to define ferrous scrap: a magnet sticks to iron and steel. The steel is pulled out as its own stream. The rest goes through further separation; Wikipedia’s article on scrap metal shredders describes eddy current separators splitting nonferrous material from glass, fabric and plastic. The recovered nonferrous metals, such as aluminum and copper, are sold separately, and Wikipedia notes that their profit often covers the shredder’s operating cost.
7. Back to the mill
The steel goes to steel mills to be melted into new steel. The scale is large. The Recycled Materials Association calls end-of-life vehicles the largest single source of obsolete iron and steel in the United States, at more than 13 million tons a year, and the American Iron and Steel Institute puts steel recovered from end-of-life vehicles at more than 14 million tons a year, equivalent to nearly 8.5 million new cars.
Where you come in
From the owner’s side, all of this starts with one pickup. We buy junk, wrecked and scrap cars across Chicago, tow them for free and pay at pickup; see scrap car recycling in Chicago. And if you want to know what your car is made of before it goes, how much steel, aluminum and copper is in a car breaks it down.