He is referring to a time when motorists usually had a bit of mechanical nous and used scrapyards as repositories of spare parts when their cars broke down. Customers, spanners in hand, would search for a donor car, negotiate a price, then remove the required component themselves.
At its Poole facility, for instance, Charles Trent has invested around £10m to set up a “deproduction” process for “end-of-life vehicles” , as scrap cars are now called. When it is fully operational, the plant should be able to render more than 100s a day into their constituent parts. With plans for five more plants, the firm aims eventually to disassemble 300,000 vehicles a year, around a fifth of the total number scrapped in Britain.
Worn parts, such as engines and gearboxes, can be refurbished or even “remanufactured”, a more involved process designed to return them to the condition they were in when new.is a Chicago-based firm that operates 170 dismantling plants in North America that process 700,000s a year. It reckons remanufacturing uses about 15% as much energy, and produces about 30% as much carbon emissions, as making a new part from scratch.
Other pressures come from the market rather than the statute book. Rising prices for raw materials and parts make the cost savings from second-hand components more attractive. According to eBay, an online marketplace, used car parts are up to 70% cheaper than new ones. Second-hand parts are often faster to get hold of as well as cheaper, thanks to the supply-chain problems that have dogged the car industry since the covid-19 pandemic.