junk cars and scooters

[birdmove]

Worked at a truck repair shop in south Seattle for 24 years. It was really quite amazing the amount of stuff we were able to recycle. Scrap metal went to one of a number of huge yards in Seattle. Aluminum, brass, steel, etc were taken to different areas. They actually were paying for these scrap metals. Of course cardboard and glass were recycled. I found someone that sold waste oil furnaces, and we ordered a couple of those, one for the main shop and one for the body shop. Since we worked of freight hauling trucks and trailers, our bay doors were very high. We bought a used metal spray paint booth big enough to put a 60 foot freight trailer inside for painting. These building needed heat, and the waste oil furnaces provided it. We had a thousand gallon main waste oil holding tank and used a bunch of 55 gallon drums to store up the waste oil in summer to get us through the winter later on. We found a gent that had a mobile system set up in a camper shell on a pickup. He would come around a few times every year and pump our coolant storage tank, from draining the coolant from these huge trucks. He would run it through a machine which purified it, added ethylene glychol to it, and the end product would be a 50-50 mix of coolant in gallon containers ready to sell anti freeze water mix.
Too bad we don't have a car smasher here where we could take these old abandoned or non usable old cars, smash them flat, and send them to some place where they recycle them. Seattle, maybe Portland, LA,etc.But then, every time we go to the dump with our flattened cardboard, I see that all too many people here can't be troubled with even flattening their cardboard. Don't know where they ship these comtainers full of cardboard to, but the ones I see could hold 10-20 times more if the stuff was flattened.

Jon in Keaau/HPP