From the Wreckage - scrap car services, their strengths and shortcomings

With a number of governmental scrap car initiatives having failed in recent years, are the privately-owned scrap car businesses playing their part, providing reliable and efficient car recycling schemes that are actually helping the environment?

If you've suffered a car accident, it can be a harrowing and often traumatic experience that impacts on your life in a number of ways; your health, your well-being and your financial situation.

If the money for your next vehicle purchase is tied up in your old, broken or damaged car, it can be difficult to know what to do. Unable to sell your car, you may turn to the loan companies to give you a helping hand, and provide you with the money you need to purchase another.

Unfortunately, as is often the case when you deal with loan providers, their interest rates can cripple you, and you might stand to lose more money than you would by simply doing nothing with your damaged car, and giving up on it.

Scrap car companies provide a solution, but are they doing enough?
Growing in popularity in recently years, there are a number of scrap car companies out there who now help you recoup some of the costs from that newly-written-off car; companies that offer cash for your damaged car and make sure that all hazardous parts are disposed of in accordance with the latest environmental procedures, and that all metal is sent to steel mills where it's able to be reused.

Unfortunately there have been reports of scrap car dealers operating illegally, failing to ensure that the scrap cars are being scrapped, recycled and de-polluted efficiently. And not just this, there's a disturbing trend that sees scrap car thieves targeting car garages and stealing specific car parts to later sell on.

Where do our priorities lie?
We now find ourselves in a situation in which used cheap cars are more valuable when scrapped than they are when sold on - and even when they are sold on, many scrap car companies fail to dispose of them properly; a trend that sees both theft and pollution rising.

So it seems that rather than an effort to reduce the harmful impact our current car production and disposal methods are having on the environment, many initiatives have been set up with one goal in mind: money.

What can be done to tackle to growing trend of vehicle theft while still providing scrap car owners with an initiative that'll see them opt to have their scrap car salvaged for parts and being recycled?

By Rob Henry