Scrap cars processing methods have been featured in many films from James Bond’s ‘Goldfinger’ to the spoof ‘Top Secret’ in 1984 to the modern day classic Pulp Fiction. They are often seen as the sinister way to dispose of the person that met an untimely demise at the hands of villains.
This movie depiction is used for a very good reason, because the processing of scrap cars involves squashing, crushing or fragmentising the car into unrecognisable shapes from blocks to small pieces of fragmentised scrap.
Depending upon the size of the scrap car merchant the scrap car is processed in different ways. The smaller scrap yards will use their grab or grapple to beat the scrap car shell flat; this is done to reduce the volume of the car to ensure that more weight is achieved during transportation. Flat scrap cars are often placed on the top of wagons of other loose light iron to prevent smaller pieces of scrap metal from ‘blowing out’ of the wagon as it travels to one of the larger metal processing facilities.
Scrap yards that are slightly larger might have a car press or a car baler, which do as the name suggest and either flatten the scrap car, bale it or in some circumstances create a ‘car log’. The objective of this process is to maximise the pay-load of the transport to the ultimate scrap car processing equipment; the fragmentiser or ‘frag’.
The yards that are the ‘top of the food chain’ operate metal fragmentisers that can range in price from approximately £2Million to well in excess of £15Million depending on their speed and their processing volumes. The frag turns the scrap car, and most other low scrap metal grades into the ultimate scrap metal recyclate, named aptly after its processor as ‘Frag Grade’. Read more about the fragmentiser process here.
