Where Cars Go to be Reborn

A few weeks back, Adam Minter over at The Atlantic ran seven consecutive posts about recycling in the world. They're all interesting but this one entitled "The Metal Sorters of Shanghai" was a particular eye opener.

From The Atlantic...

This is what happens when automobile-loving societies reach living standards so high that they can't afford to take apart their old cars by hand anymore in order to recycle them. They shred them and then, after using magnets to remove the steel from everything else, they a) develop complicated, multi-million dollar technologies to separate the aluminum from the zinc from the copper from the glass and so forth; or, b) they send the shredded bits to a place where raw material demand is high, labor is low-cost and well-trained human hands can sort the parts of a shredded automobile with precision that no technology can come close to matching.

Shredded automobiles go to China in greater numbers -- millions of tons per year -- than anywhere else, where they're sorted by teams of women (conventional scrap industry wisdom says that women are more precise) who are practiced, and highly trained, in the art of, say, distinguishing a fist-sized piece of zinc from a fist-sized piece of aluminum.