Your Junk Car and Scrap Copper

So here’s a little trivia question for you: how much copper is used in the average automobile? Give up? The average automobile has about 50 pounds of copper in it. There are between 1,000 and 1,500 copper wires in today’s vehicles totaling about a mile in length. By comparison, the older cars of the 40’s and 50’s had about 55 wires totaling about 150 feet.

So where does all that copper come from? In the United States copper is mined in open pit mines in Michigan, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Montana. It is mined as copper sulfide from the top layer of the Earth’s crust and it is estimated that at current use there is enough copper in the Earth to last us about five million years.

So what’s the big deal? Why be concerned about it when we have a seemingly unlimited supply of copper? Well, first off, copper mining destroys the landscape. Drive by an open pit mine someday and you’ll have some idea of the damage open pit mining does to the environment. Secondly, extracting copper uses an enormous amount of energy, and energy costs money and also affects the environment.

So what is the alternative? Obviously recycling copper is the only logical alternative. Taking scrap copper to a recycling plant or to a scrapyard is the only responsible thing to do. Salvage yards like the newly formed Cars and Cores division of Cash-n-Carry will pay cash for cars and/or will buy any scrap copper parts from an old car that you may have. If your old junk car is average then you are looking at close to a mile of copper wire in it, and that’s money in your pocket and in the process you are helping the environment.

Car dismantlers will pull out all the copper in your old junk car, not charge a dime for their effort, and pay you cash for it. This is without a doubt a win-win situation and the practice is growing in popularity as more and more people come to realize the good they can do for Mother Nature and at the same time get rid of that eyesore junker that has been sitting in their yard for months. And in this article we have only discussed copper; in that junk car of yours are other metals that will earn you cash simply by calling Cars and Cores.

So what are you waiting for? Give us a call and let’s do the right thing now!