Age, accidents, abandonments, absence of air con – there are many reasons why cars are scrapped. In the UK, two million of them reach the end of the road each year. Four hundred thousand wind up at Sims Metal Management, and End-of-Life Vehicle (ELV) Technician Simon Dalton depollutes up to 10 a day – around 2,000 a year.

Dalton works at Sims’s 36-acre ELV and WEEE recycling site at the Newport docks, in the shadow of the world’s biggest metal shredder. Before cars can travel up the belt to be flattened, smashed by teeth that could eat a bus whole, and separated for recycling, they must be depolluted in accordance with the EU’s ELV Directive, which – for the cars that arrive in Newport whole, as opposed to baled – is where Dalton comes into it.

The ELV Directive was only fully implemented into UK law in 2007, making Dalton’s job a relatively new one. Inaddition to requiring that 85 per cent of each car be recycled or reused (a figure set to rise to 95 per cent in 2015), the directive requires that all hazardous substances are safely removed from a car before destruction. In the past, Dalton explains, cars “used to go through [the shredder] with everything in tact. They’d just rip the tanks off – the petrol, the diesel – so there were no explosions, and they’d go straight in”. Now, everything from tyres and batteries to oils and antifreeze must come out first.

For each car brought in by the public, Dalton starts with a once over, ensuring that there are no ‘non-conforming items’ like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tanks. LPG tanks are costly to offload and eek into a car’s profit; they’re also highly explosive – “I’ve seen videos of LPG tanks going off like splinter bombs”, Dalton explains – so handling them (understandably) makes him a bit nervous. He also looks out for items a canny customer might use to boost his profit, as payment is by weight. “Sometimes, people will fill up the car with unwanted stuff”, Dalton explains. “They’ll put rubble in the boot or they’ll fill the tank up with water. I’ve had paint, as well.”

This initial check complete, Dalton uses his telehandler to bring the car to his open-air rig, equipped with car stands, containers for removable bits, blue tanks on wheels (“like little Daleks”) for drained fluids, and the requisite tools for completing the job.

Dalton, who used to work in Sims’s picking shed and far prefers his current role, first isolates and removes the battery – later sent for recycling – and then takes off the tyres.

Then, the car is placed on a short-legged stand, and the little army of blue Daleks surrounds it to suck fluids from a surprising number of places. If the vehicle has shock absorbers, those are punctured first using a device that looks like a spanner with a spear in place of the adjustable jaw, and the oil is suctioned into the appropriate tank. It drains to the level of the puncture and Dalton sticks in a gun to suck up the rest. The radiator and screenwash reservoirs get similar treatment, though the hose used for them leads into a tank marked ‘Water’.

At this stage, if the car has air conditioning – which the beat up old Vauxhall Astra I’m seeing depolluted doesn’t – the refrigerant is removed into a pressurised cylinder (later sent for high-temperature incineration). Dalton notes that while refrigerant gases never go bad, the systems that house them often develop leaks: “I’d say that 90 per cent of the cars with air con systems haven’t got air con in them. And that’s probably one of the reasons people are scrapping the car – this and that are gone, so they’ll get rid of it and get another one.”

Dalton then moves the car up to a higher stand to gain access to its underside, which is about to experience multiple punctures. He uses an electrically-controlled spear in a cylinder to punch holes in the various tanks. First up is the petrol tank and following the emphatic pop of metal being pierced, nothing happens. “Bone dry!” Dalton exclaims, noting that whoever brought the car in had clearly thought to recover that valuable commodity – petrol – first. (Part of the exhaust system, the catalytic converter, is also missing; Dalton says this happens frequently as the ‘cats’ contain precious metals like platinum and palladium.) Had there been petrol, it would have been sent for processing as waste fuel.

A ‘noisy impact drill’ comes out now to get to the dirty engine oil, and Dalton then punctures the transmission to get its (bright red) oil. All the oils are stored in ‘Daleks’ and eventually reprocessed into recovered fuel oil, used to generate electricity. Depending on the car, other bits and bobs might have to be taken care of (and fancier cars have more bits and bobs) – such as power steering and wheel weights.

And then comes the ‘best bit’: airbag detonation. “You have to have a little bit of a finale to the show!” Daltonenthuses. Airbags that are electrically controlled all have a detonating control unit (DCU) somewhere in the car. Dalton has become familiar with DCU locations in different models over the years and quickly locates the Astra’s under the handbrake. (He admits, though, that they can be hard to find – sometimes requiring extensive searches both through the car and online.) To the DCU he attaches a modified DCU, which is hooked up to a nine-bolt battery via a 10-metre cable. Dalton presses the button and a loud ‘pop’ goes off as the solitary airbag fills the front seat with its billowing, powder-covered sheet. While this car only has one airbag, some newer, high-end models can have as many as 20, and all of them have to be deployed prior to shredding. Airbags often contain the highly poisonous explosive sodium azide (the effects of which are comparable to cyanide), which acts as a chemical propellant. Upon explosion, it is neutralised by an oxidiser to form inert nitrogen, which inflates the airbag.

And now the car is considered fully depolluted, ready for the shredder. Any items left in the car (so long as they’re not explosive) go through the teeth with it for health and safety reasons – so operatives don’t search for goodies in the glove compartment and get a needle jab instead. Dalton says there are often valuable (and strange) items in the vehicles: “You find a lot of people will pick the cars up because the council has put an order on them to be taken away, and sometimes a man’s been living in the car because his
missus has chucked him out. And so his worldly possessions are in there – telly, everything. It’s madness.”

Thanks to Dalton’s work and the likes of magnets, eddy current separators and dense media drums, which come into play later, Sims says it recycles more than 85 per cent of vehicle material. The 2015 target of 95 per cent is, of course, fast approaching.

Now, there’s no doubt that 85 is a very high percentage, but seeing cars being scrapped, you can’t help but feel the emphasis should be on reuse more than recycling. While all liquids and hazardous wastes are removed for reprocessing (or incineration), and almost all the shredded materials are recycled, many perfectly useable whole parts (the results of hours of labour, and containing a great deal of embedded energy) are lost forever in the teeth of the shredder – from callipers and alternators to turbochargers and whole engines. Wouldn’t it be better if these were removed in tact and reused in turbo-less or calliper-less cars?

To do so would require not only a new end-of-life process, but also a new design approach. Joining the efforts of manufacturers and dismantlers is a mammoth task, though, and one that hasn’t been helped by the recession: producers are more interested in surviving than in designing for disassembly.

Given the right mix of legislation, innovation and financial pressures, it could be possible, though. One day, the nature of Dalton’s job may have changed so that he both completely depollutes and disassembles.