The 2005 Chrysler Town and Country that's more or less permanently parked in my driveway has seen better days.
And I would know — I remember them. This van was bought by my in-laws, back when my husband and I were high school sweethearts. When we left home and drove across the country at 18 years old, I sat in its front seat and had a good coming-of-age cry. Its ample back carried all our possessions on the long haul across Interstate 10. Many years later, after our in-laws passed it down to us for good, my carpenter husband used it to haul sheets of plywood around with the rear seats folded down. ("Better than a pickup truck," he'd crow with delight.) My kids adore it. They named it Vanny, and claim it's secretly a Transformer that can turn into a robot and save the world.
But after 20 years and 183,000 miles, Vanny is no longer in its prime. We don't trust it for road trips any more. We put more miles on the electric cargo bike than the van last year. We recently opened Vanny's trunk to discover that wasps were getting more use out of it than we were. And it's not starting (again). Faced with the prospect of another repair, we realized it's time for Vanny to go.
But go where?
America's automobiles are lasting longer and longer. On average, new cars have a lifespan of 17 years, new vans and SUVs last 20, and pickups last 25, according to recent research on when cars are scrapped. That's significantly longer than vehicles lasted two decades ago.
Multiple factors — mostly positive, but some not so much — are pushing this trend. On the good side, modern cars are better built than they were in decades past. On the grimmer side, inflation keeps cars on the road longer, when drivers who might prefer a new car keep an old one limping along instead.
But eventually, a car does reach the end of its road. Repair costs go up, usefulness goes down. After some tipping point, a once-valuable possession starts to become more of a liability — both economically and environmentally. As long as it's being driven, an old vehicle keeps emitting air pollution, typically much more than a newer car would. And once it dies, that chunk of metal is packed with fluids and aging plastics that are ecological hazards if they're not disposed of properly.
Like everyone else with an aging car, my family faces a few questions. First, is Vanny actually at the end of its life? And if so, how do we do the right thing both by our community — and the planet?
Is it useful?
To answer these questions, one of my first stops was at Keith's Auto Shop, a used car dealer not far from my home in Virginia, to chat with its eponymous owner, Keith Knupp.
I described Vanny in all its glory, then asked, tentatively: "Would you like to buy my minivan?"
"I would not like to buy your minivan," Knupp said firmly.
I tried to make the case that this wasn't just any old van, this was Vanny. I may have waxed rhapsodic about how it carried our hopes and dreams to Arizona when we were teenage lovers. "It was good then," Knupp warned. "I hope you're not going to Arizona in that van again."
Sell it for scrap, he recommended, and have done with it.
Carmax agreed, offering me the princely sum of $200 for our beloved beater.
But not everyone was ready to write Vanny off so quickly. Ashley Gorden-Becker is the executive director of Way to Go, a nonprofit in my hometown that fixes up cars for people who can't afford them.
She wasn't put off by the mileage or its current inability to start, and said she'd love to take a look at Vanny. "For a family that has no means of transportation, a vehicle that's 20 years old — it doesn't matter, as long as it's safe and reliable," she said. Those are two very significant caveats for Vanny, but it's entirely possible another family could squeeze more miles out of it.
So is Vanny still useful? Knupp shook his head and said, "it doesn't have that much life left in it." But Gordon-Becker emphasized that "not much" is not the same as "none."
"End of life," after all, is a matter of perspective. An insurance company might consider a car totaled in a crash — even if it's still driveable. Cars that are considered undriveable in the U.S. are fixed up and driven overseas.
There are countless cars out there like Vanny that cost more and more to keep running, but haven't failed catastrophically. And people do keep them running, especially now that the average new car is nearly $50,000, the average used car is nearly $30,000, and beaters for a few grand are increasingly impossible to find.
… or should it be recycled?
And "end of life" might not be the right phrase at all. When a car is done for, there's still one more trip ahead — a trip into a kind of afterlife.
I love Clodagh Beresford Dunne's poem "Ford Galaxy," which describes a racing-green family car, complete with the "ground-in chocolate, mud, crumbs" left from years of service: "it sits for scrap now / on the tow truck. / Majestic as a king … before the final journey."
That final journey might wind through a place like M&M Auto Parts, a salvage yard in Fredericksburg, Va, where old vehicles are broken down into their components to be recycled, re-sold, rebuilt — a kind of reincarnation. The goal is to get high-polluting older vehicles off the road, while salvaging as many of their parts for reuse as possible, at an environmentally certified salvage yard. Proceeds from the valuable parts in the car go to support training for salvage yard workers.
Jonathan Morrow, a third-generation auto recycler, takes me on a tour. It's a hot day for a stroll through a salvage yard, with smashed-up vehicles baking in the sun. Stacks of truck beds loom over us and long rows of axles line the side of a squat building.
"We're really good at taking cars apart," Morrow says with a grin.
Most of the vehicles we walk past have clearly been totaled in a crash. But Morrow's salvage yard is also part of a new nationwide program called SHiFT, which encourages car owners to donate their vehicles to be recycled.
Unlike a car that's sold at auction and heads to a scrapyard, a car donated through the SHiFT program will have its engine recycled — not reused. Taking an old engine out of commission is part of the environmental case for the program. "Typically five to 10 tons of carbon dioxide per year are going to be saved by retiring that motor," Morrow says.
Morrow makes the case that Vanny is a prime candidate for SHiFT: "I think your minivan still has parts that somebody could use."
Here's how those parts would get broken down. When a vehicle arrives at the yard, its fluids are drained and stored for reuse. Gasoline that's gone bad is a loss, Morrow says, and needs to go to a company for disposal — but everything else gets a second life. Gasoline that's still good goes back in M&M's own vehicles. Oil gets saved for the winter, then burned to heat the buildings. Antifreeze is cleaned and resold. Washer fluid is given away to some customers or sold for a reduced rate. Freon is sold for reuse.
Next comes "demanufacturing." Using a lot of the same equipment that you'd find in a garage that fixes cars, the crew here takes them apart instead.
"I like finding what other people deem to be trash and creating treasure with it," Morrow says. It's almost like mining. Each time he sees something useful, he thinks: "I was right. That is a good part. And we're going to put this to the highest, best use it can be — and it's in another vehicle."
Even parts that aren't currently useful can often be rebuilt or remanufactured. Inside M&M's warehouse, long rows of shelves are filled with thousands of engines, transmissions and body panels. Pallets of wheels and catalytic converters and other valuable parts are ready to ship out to specialized remanufacturers. Parts that can't be rebuilt are sorted out for scrap metal, piled up in large containers right outside these warehouses.
And the vehicle, now stripped of many of its parts, isn't done yet. Morrow points out one of these "depolluted" vehicles to me. "All the fluids had been drained. The tires are off the vehicle, the engine and transmission have been removed," he says. "What we have left is still very much sellable parts."
Instead of removing every part from the car, they inventory what's still good and plop the car down in their yard. Its parts are listed as available for sale. And then when someone, anywhere in the country, suddenly needs that specific part, it's ready and waiting.
A crushing realization
But it's not waiting forever. Eventually, the vehicle is picked over. It's time for it to meet the crusher.
Morrow walks me over to the rusty blue-and-yellow behemoth, which squishes cars as flat as pancakes. Where the hydraulic arms rise up on either side of the crushing surface, it kind of looks like it has horns. As it opens up, it resembles nothing so much as a giant mouth.
We watch as a black Nissan Rogue is loaded in and the unrelenting jaws clamp down. Its windows pop out in a satisfying spray of broken glass.
Morrow tells me, with a tinge of regret, that aftermarket glass is so cheap that most of the glass on a car just gets pulverized, instead of being taken off for a second life. Plastic bumpers, too, are a challenge; he'd like to work through how to recover more of those materials.
The crusher's upper jaw rises up and lowers down again, pressing the Rogue flatter and flatter. A pile of seats stripped from another vehicle get heaped up on top, and then another car. It all turns into a very crunchy sandwich, as the cushions disappear between the layers of smashed metal. This sandwich will later head to a shredder, to break it down further. Then the metal will be filtered from the fluff and plastic, to be melted down and reused.
It's fun to watch the machine work; it's scratching some primordial itch to see destruction.
Morrow raises his voice over the roar of the crusher as it squishes the SUV even flatter. "When we do this, it's keeping all of these things out of the landfill, right?" he says. "Because that's the end goal."
That, and making money, of course — but Morrow notes that for auto recyclers, the two goals align. The more they can save from the landfill, the more money they make, too.
And while these metal maws seem like the very end of a vehicle's life, they're not, really. Bits of this black Nissan Rogue will live on, filed away in that warehouse or shipped off to a body shop to keep another Rogue rolling. Even its mangled shreds will be reconstituted: as rebar, a toaster, maybe another car.
It's not as tragic an end as I once would have thought. And while my van's fate remains undecided, it strikes me, as I watch the Nissan Rogue merge into the mass of metal, that perhaps Vanny really could be a Transformer.
Someday, it might turn into something else.
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