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"Cash for Clunkers"

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Exactly.

Car landfills don't exist.

It's like those people who cry about all those electric car batteries that will end up in landfills. (another of our "stupid comment" thread.) 98% of the lead batteries are recycled now.
 
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A lot of used tires are recycled in cement plants. They burn them using the rubber for fuel, and the leftover steel is used in the cement itself. They burn them at a very high temperature so the emmisions are very low. The Ash Grove plant in Louisville, Nebraska is one of them, and they give tours to see the process(this is how I learned of this practice).
 
It is great to hear that tire recycling has started to take hold big time, but still with 80%, that leaves 20% of tires dumped somewhere which still isn't good.

Waste Tires
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]...Scrap tires are a bulky waste and are hard to handle with normal solid waste equipment. When buried in a landfill tires tend to "float" to the surface over time and disrupt landfill covers as well as landfill gas and leachate collection systems. When stockpiled, large piles of tires are excellent breeding grounds for mosquitos and vermin. Although tires by themselves are not hazardous, fires in tire piles are very hard to extinguish and produce both toxic smoke and runoff...[/FONT]
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Scrap tires piling up in landfill sites
[/FONT]...Millions of tires are winding up in garbage dumps — or illegal tire dumps..
Tires Pile Up at Billings, Mont., Landfill - Science News - redOrbit
...Last year {2004}, roughly 325 tons of spent tires were buried at the Billings landfill...
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Skid Row: Where Do Old Tires Go to Die?
...
Burning rubber may be a quaint colloquial expression, but when it comes to disposing of used tires, there is hardly anything innocuous about the term. Aside from its political context, which seems to be an almost obligatory form of protest in certain troubled parts of the world, the uncontrolled burning of tires is dangerous, environmentally destructive, and a health hazard.
Today's tires are largely synthetic, and improper burning can release various carcinogenic compounds such as styrene and butadiene...

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Firegeezer.com » Tire Fire Isolates Entire Town
http://cms.firehouse.com/web/online/News/Massive-Tire-Fire-Near-Watertown--Wisconsin-Visible-for-Miles/46$43433
 
cash for clunkers

I'm not a big fan of this program as it's currently structured. Given it's popularity, I think it could have been implemented with more restrictions promoting even greater fuel economy. Also, as an engineer, something feels wrong about destroying a machine that's in working order.

Anyhow I heard this on NPR while on the road yesterday and I thought it was worth sharing:

The Shaky Economics Of 'Cash For Clunkers' : NPR
The government trade-in program requires that the engines of the clunkers be killed. More accustomed to fixing cars, mechanics will pour in a solvent called "liquid glass," then run the engine until it seizes.

From an economic perspective, that's a waste, says Sanderson, who calls the program "silly." The autos required labor and resources to build. Consider a similar program to replace old light bulbs with more efficient ones, he says. Would you smash the old bulbs?

Sanderson admits that there is some environmental benefit to the clunkers program. "The question is at what cost," he says. "For $3 billion, could we do something better for the environment than what we're doing? I think absolutely. It's a very inefficient expenditure."
 
I too question the value of these schemes for anything other than a PC way to subsidise the car industry through the current rough patch.

From Report shows emissions from cars and from car manufacturing continue to fall

The SMMT has just published the UK motor industry's eighth annual Sustainability Report, and it reveals how the industry has improved its performance on a range of environmental indicators. At vehicle manufacturing sites energy consumption and CO2 emissions have been cut, water use has been halved and far less waste is being sent to landfill. For motor industry products, the report paints a similar picture; CO2 and other tailpipe emissions continue to fall.

Key points include:

- Annual CO2 emissions from UK car and CV manufacturing have fallen 36.5 per cent, from 2.14 to 1.36 million tonnes in just four years
- Energy used to make each vehicle fell from a high of 4.3 MWh/unit in 2001 to 2.5 MWh/unit in 2006
- CO2 per vehicle produced came down from a high of 1.3 tonnes in 2001 to 0.7 tonnes in 2006
- Water use per vehicle produced has been cut from 6.2 m3 in 2001 to 3.3 m3 last year
- Total combined waste to landfill down by more than half, from 80,399 tonnes in 2000 to 39,862 tonnes last year
- Average new car CO2 has dropped 12 per cent in a decade, from 189.9g/km to 167.2g/km saving an estimated one million tonnes of CO2 each year.

So on average, cars today emit 22.7g/km less CO2 than a decade ago, meaning that to break even on the typical CO2 produced by the manufacture of your new car, you would have to drive 30837 km or 19237 miles in your new car vs. your 10 year old car that you just traded in. Of course, this doesn't take into account the additional CO2 made in scrapping your old car.

Far better to have kept those cars on the road for another couple of years, let them die a natural death and pumped the money into jump starting the EV revolution, in my opinion.
 
I'm not a big fan of this program as it's currently structured. Given it's popularity, I think it could have been implemented with more restrictions promoting even greater fuel economy.

I have been saying I want a greater gap of fuel economy twixt the clunkers and new cars. Like another 50 percent.

It's a copy of a German program. How has that one worked out?
 
There was article I read recently where apparently the German program didn't require destroying the engines, so there has been a black market of getting the cars shipped to "lower-cost geographies" to sell them. I'm glad the US program doesn't have that mistake, at least.