MOUNT VERNON – Auto recycler Sam Price may be the busiest man in Skagit County.
Standing behind the counter at Larry’s Car and Truck Parts in Burlington, the wrecking yard operator held a cordless phone near his left ear while chattering into another phone cupped firmly against his head.
“I probably have just the door, and I can tell you that myself if you give me a second,” Price said before rushing toward the building’s back room, the cordless shoved in his jacket pocket.
The rush, apparently a constant at Larry’s, continued when Price returned to the desk. Even as he drew a diagram for a customer whose Ford tie-rod was failing, he jerked the phones to his ears to field calls from customers looking for dust shields and bed liners.
While Price’s customers grab much of his time and energy, the environmental agencies active in Skagit County also take their share.
Licensed auto wreckers such as Larry’s operate under the same environmental restrictions that regulate other heavy industries, but the rules have caused fundamental changes in how the industry operates.
Two decades ago, wreckers paid vehicle owners for their junk cars. Now, however, car owners must pay to dispose of their cars so yard operators can recoup disposal and permit costs.
The protections, now commonplace at most legal wrecking yards, are not undertaken by dozens of large, unlicensed yards scattered around Skagit County.
Bill Buttram, owner of Almac Auto Wrecking in Anacortes, said the illegal junkyard operators have a competitive advantage over legal yard owners like him.
“All these illegal guys, they don’t have to put out several thousand dollars a year in insurance,” Buttram said. “They don’t have to buy bonds.”
The Skagit Valley Herald reported recently that there are hundreds of illegal junk auto sites around the county that code enforcement officers are trying to close down. But the effort has been hampered by the lack of a strong county ordinance.
Nor do the county’s unlicensed operators obtain the variety of permits and licenses legal yard operators must maintain, Buttram said.
Unlike illegal yards, licensed wreckers obtain titles for each vehicle they take in, Price said. The documentation process creates a lot of paperwork, he said, which adds to his expenses.
Environmental protections have become such an integral part of the industry, publications from state agencies and industry associations commonly refer to wrecking yards as “auto recyclers.”
“We have truly become the politically correct place to dispose of cars,” Buttram said. “That’s what our job has become.”
When vehicles arrive at a legal wrecking yard, the fluids are drained from all of their parts, even the windshield fluid reservoir. At Buttram’s facility, the fluids are drained into steel and concrete containment tanks, then trucked to landfills designed to handle hazardous waste.
A vehicle’s tires are sent either to landfills or incinerators, then, after any resalable parts are removed, the car is crushed and sent to a steel recycler.
State and federal regulations have also changed the way yards handle their hazardous waste.
The laws allow the government to hold any entity that had contact with a hazardous material responsible if the materials are mishandled.
For Buttram, that means that if a contractor he has hired fails to dispose of waste oil from his yard effectively, he can be held responsible for the cleanup cost.
To avoid paying disposal costs twice – or paying for a someone else’s spill – most wrecking yard owners have turned to recycling.
Buttram said oil from his yard is reprocessed and sold as bunker fuel to freighters. Tires from his yard are sent to eastern Oregon, where they’re incinerated to produce electricity.
“That way, the tire is completely gone,” he said.
In 1998, Price developed his own ingenious way of getting rid of some spare tires at his yard – Mr. Samz Superblocks.
On the outside, the 6-foot-long, 4-foot-tall blocks look like any other chunk of concrete. Under the shell of poured concrete and rebar, however, are dozens of old tires held in a tight bale by steel wires.
Price said the Superblocks can be substituted for traditional concrete blocks in almost any application.
The innovations aren’t enough to defray the disposal costs for most vehicles, Buttram said.
“We used to pay $50 for any rolling vehicle. Now, at this point people are paying us to pick them up,” he said. “We’re not making the money we did 20 years ago, but we’re surviving.”
Larry Altose, a spokesman for the Department of Ecology, said the auto recycling industry is held to the same standards set for other heavy industries in the state.
“There’s no special treatment because it’s an auto wrecking facility,” he said. “They’re treated the same way as any other business.”
Altose said, however, that many wrecking yards don’t produce enough hazardous waste – more than the 220 pounds-a-year threshold – to fall under his department’s purview.
“Even though a wrecking yard seems like a place that generates lots of waste, they’re not because they’re recycling most of the stuff that comes out of the cars,” he said.
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