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The automobile industry is the largest manufacturing industry in the world, and as expected, the industry connected to the recycling of those automobiles is equally large. Every year over 11 million vehicles are recycled. These recycled cars and trucks produce almost 40 percent of the ferrous scrap for the scrap metal processing industry. The automobile recycling industry is a major source of scrap metal for the steel industry. This scrap metal is much cheaper than raw ore and as an added benefit, EPA estimates that steel mills which substitute low-sulfur scrap metal for high-sulfur raw ore can reduce their air pollution potential up to 86 percent and water pollution potential by up to 76 percent (EPA, 2002).

Automotive recycling facilities can vary in size from a small warehouse to a major manufacturing facility. Some operations are vertically integrated, meaning that more than one processing step takes place in one location. These facilities tend to have more environmental issues because a wide range of activities take place on-site. When deciding if and how to remediate an automotive recycling brownfield, the specific nature of the operation that was located on-site should be investigated to better characterize the pollution potential of that facility. There are a number of unique activities that take place in the automotive recycling process consisting of:

There are many possible contaminants that could be located at an automotive recycling facility brownfield. Each step in the process generates waste streams which can impact soil and water in and around the vicinity of the recycling operation. Common soil contaminants at an automotive recycling facility include petroleum hydrocarbons, oil and grease, volatile organic compounds, and semivolatile organic compounds from gasoline, motor oil, antifreeze, and transmission fluids. There can be soil contamination from such metals as aluminum, cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury. Cars older than 1993 models may contain chlorofluorocarbons in the air conditioning system. Older cars may also contain asbestos in brake shoes. Generally, the same contaminants that affect soil have the potential to affect ground and surface waters in around vehicle recycling facilities. There are two media which any remediation program must address: the soil and the water. Each media can be contaminated by the same chemicals, but the ways that developers and managers reduce or eliminate contamination in these media can vary.

Contamination from automotive recycling can pose a very real danger to human and environmental health. The contaminants released span the full spectrum of toxicity. Remediation of sites contaminated by chemicals associated with automotive recycling can be costly and time consuming, but it can be done.

Technical Approaches to Characterizing and Cleaning Up Automotive Recycling Brownfields provides and overview of the contaminants and remediation technologies typically used at automotive recycling brownfields, yet every site is unique, and developers will need to develop a remediation plan based upon the contamination actually present on-site.