Sounds like an obvious question with an obvious answer, but have you actually ever thought about what happens to the individual components of your beloved, or not so beloved, motor car when you hand it over to be destroyed?

Mazda are one manufacturer at the moment which are scrapping old models for their customers, giving them cash and telling them what actually happens – and it makes for interesting reading!

Mazda has teamed up with scrappage scheme specialists Car Takeback, who provide a national network of professionally operated treatment facilities around the UK, to take care of ‘end of life’ recycling. The slick scrappage scheme outfit don’t just go about the destruction of your car in a ‘willy nilly’ fashion. No, they painstakingly (via the aid of some hi-tech machinery) take the bits and pieces of your old banger and put them back into the manufacturing process.

Any saleable parts are removed and sold. The vehicle is then crushed at a shredding facility, and separation techniques used to recover metallics for recycling into new ferrous and non-ferrous metals.

The remaining material, known as shredder residue, can be treated at Heavy Media Plants to retrieve any lost metallics and non-metallics. The remaining residue is further sorted and used in a number of applications. For example recovered glass can be used with stone as an aggregate for road building and road surfaces.

So spare a thought for your old motor when you’re giving your new car a good thrashing down a B-Road – you may well be driving all over it!

About the Author: Anthony Blascara is a writer and fan of thescrappage scheme