By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 21, 2009
Link to WashingtonPost.com
Killing a clunker takes patience and intestinal fortitude. Five minutes ago, a hulking Infiniti Q45 at Fitzgerald Auto Mall in Germantown guzzled a lethal dose of sodium silicate — liquid glass that hardens engine arteries. A technician keeps stepping on the gas. The Q45 keeps purring.
“She’s holding on,” says Scott Addison, a Fitzgerald executive watching the execution while puffing a thick cigar. Then the car begins coughing. “This is a terrible way to kill a car. This is suffering.”
The cough gets louder. “Here it goes,” Addison says. Silence. Time of death: 1:33 p.m. Hundreds of clunkers surround him, awaiting their fates. Not even “Obama ‘08″ bumper stickers can save these gas guzzlers from the 435,000-vehicle sell-off created by the president’s Cash for Clunkers program. Addison calls this sea of discarded vehicles Clunkerville, but this is no car’s final destination. Even after their engines are silenced, the dead clunkers face a long journey to auto heaven.
They embark on an odyssey through family businesses nearly as old as the car industry. Auctioneers in Elkridge shout “$25, $25, $25, do I hear $50?” to salvage buyers who then take their winnings to junkyards to be picked over for parts. Junkyards eventually sell what’s left of the clunkers to processors, who use mammoth shredders to chew the cars into tiny pieces of scrap metal that are later recycled into steel. Almost nothing is wasted.
This gritty side of the car business is largely unseen in a country where the dominant image of the automotive industry is pristine cars rolling off production lines. But the Cash for Clunkers program, which Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced Thursday will end Monday, is leaving behind vast lots full of discards — a big job for the $22-billion-a-year auto recycling business and its many colorful characters.
People wonder: Where do all these cars go?
“It’s sort of like flushing a toilet. Nobody knows what happens after that,” said David Simon, president of Baltimore Scrap, one of the region’s largest car shredders. “This aspect of the recycling industry is often out of sight, out of mind for the general public.”
After the government-mandated engine killings — a measure that ensures that the old cars cannot be resold — clunkers are trucked to auctions or sold by dealers directly to outfits like Crazy Ray’s in Jessup, a junkyard in a locale that immediately tells lost drivers they are headed the wrong way.
Crazy Ray’s is what’s known as a you-pull-it operation, meaning that customers dive into the heap and find their own spare parts. Co-owner Joe Duff, a bubbly fellow with a heavy Baltimore accent, sits at a desk on a slightly elevated stage. Outside, sweaty men haul toolboxes to extract parts from his inventory. Duff picked up a handful of clunkers this week at Manheim Total Resource Auctions in Elkridge. Winning bids: $150 to $250 each.
His junkyard rules are strict; his prices, nonnegotiable. You come out with a brake drum, that’s $10.37 — cash. Intake manifold, $25.47 — cash. Crazy Ray’s Web site warns: “We do not keep an inventory. It is constantly rotating.” If you are not out by 5:15 p.m., the prices double.
Duff runs a tight operation. He has to, he said, because of the shenanigans some parts hunters pull. Not long ago, a man walked up to the cash register, all hunched over. He put a cylinder head on the counter but remained hunched over. The attendant asked him to lift up his shirt. “He had another cylinder head stuck down his pants,” Duff said. “Complete with rockers and all.”
Despite the hassles, Duff said, it’s a good business. Cars break; people need parts. Clunkers come along; parts are replenished. Yin-yang. Looking out his office window, Duff said: “There’s a guy buying a door. That’s $50. That rear hatch there, that’s $65. There’s a guy over here getting tires. A car lasts 30 days or so around here. Here’s a guy bringing up a rear seat. That’s 25 bucks.”
Other junkyards are slightly more orderly. Fitzgerald sold the Q45, circa 2000, for about $150 to Brandywine Auto, which will tow it 53 miles to the company’s 45-acre facility in Charles County. Brandywine Auto, which dates to 1927 and is still owned by the Meinhardt family, sells car parts to body shops, insurance companies and individuals who repair their own vehicles. Think legal chop shop.
“We go in and take ‘em all apart,” said Mark Rhodes, Brandywine’s general manager.
Brandywine’s dismantlers might be called organ-transplant surgeons. The patients roll into four dismantle bays all day long, and the surgeons remove the guts: starters, taillights, calipers, batteries, mirrors, doors. A dismantler can take apart two cars a day, and the parts can fetch anywhere from $35 (Q45 starter) to $800 (’98 Corvette door) and beyond, turning clunkers into potential ATMs for Brandywine.
From the dismantle bays, the cars are lined up in a sprawling field in neat rows of Fords, GMs, Chryslers and imports. When a vehicle is picked clean, when there isn’t much left except for the frame and old McDonald’s wrappers, a forklift picks up the carcass as if it were as light as a book, sliding it into a crusher that flattens the remains in less than 30 seconds. The industry term for this moment is EOVL — end of vehicle life.
“I call it ‘gone,’ ” Rhodes said.
But there is actually one more stop. After clunkers have been picked apart and flattened, they are sold to shredders. Brandywine often uses Baltimore Scrap, located in an industrial shipping area not far from the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel.
Baltimore Scrap is run by David Simon (not the famous Baltimore writer behind TV’s “The Wire,” though the two Simons once sat next to each other at a bat mitzvah). The scrap man’s grandfather founded the business in Pennsylvania nearly 100 years ago with little more than a horse and wagon; Simon’s three brothers and their 83-year-old father work at the yards now.
The other day, Simon stood outside and watched trucks pull up onto a scale. Simon pays by the hundredweight or ton. A typical 3,000-pound car might cost him between $100 and $200. Every evening, the flattened vehicles feed into his 300-foot-long, 60-foot-wide shredding apparatus and, after being chewed up by a 3,000-horsepower motor, are spit out into tiny, unrecognizable pieces of metal. The piles of this stuff around the facility are high enough that one wouldn’t climb them without a rope.
Simon, in turn, sells the metal to steel manufacturers, which turn it into railroad rails, heavy machinery, steel plates, maybe even car parts. Some of his customers are close by, perhaps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Others are distant, in China or India, for example. That means the Q45 clunker that sputtered and fought and then died in Germantown actually lives on, in bits and pieces, around the world — in developing countries building their infrastructures or maybe even returning just a few blocks away at a depot that receives new cars.
This irony is not lost on anyone operating on the EOVL side of the car business. As Simon said, “It’s all just a large circle.”
