When you hear the word \u201crecycling,\u201d you may think instantly of a couple of things: paper, cardboard, or those artsy Facebook videos promising to teach you \u201c15 Ways to Turn a Milk Jug into Home D\u00e9cor!\u201d On the other hand, what you may not instantly think of is cars. Yes, cars!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What happens to cars at the end of their lifetime? For most personal vehicles owned by Americans, they get recycled. According to this paper<\/a>, produced by Argonne National Laboratory in 2010, between 10 and 15 million vehicles are recycled by Americans each year<\/em>. And a good thing, too, because the automotive industry is one of the largest consumers of materials in the entire United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the\u00a0US Environmental Protection Agency<\/a>\u00a0states that four major components of vehicles\u2014plastic, metal, rubber, and glass\u2014accounted for only 30.2% of our national Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in 2017, it is estimated by the\u00a0Steel Recycling Institute<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cnearly 100 percent of the out-of-service automobiles are collected for recycling.\u201d That means that Americans are recycling their cars at higher and more consistent levels than almost any other consumer product. <\/p>\n\n\n\n