Cash for Clunkers - Good or Bad Idea?

fintail

Maybe that mayor needs to be put in front of some French justice, if you know what I mean.

367000 cars before 1997 in metro Paris? From my experience in France, that's a little tough to swallow - and the fleet there seems much older than in Germany. But do gooder public sector types and facts seldom meet.

gagrice

Or was it another government supported environmental boondoggle??

For each ton of metal recovered by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of shredder residue are produced, meaning about 3 to 4.5 million tons of shredder residue is sent to landfills every year. This shredder residue typically consists of a mix of materials including polyurethane foams, polymers, metal oxides, glass and dirt. A partnership between the American Chemistry Council, Argonne National Laboratory and USCAR has been working on a way of extracting more of this material, specifically the plastic. Argonne estimates that recycling just the plastic and metal would represent 24 million barrels of oil saved each year. Unfortunately, that did not happen with the 690,000 vehicles scrapped during the Cash for Clunkers program.

http://www.emagazine.com/blog/the-cash-for-clunkers-conundrum

stever

Seems like I read a while back (years ago, lol) that companies were paying for first rights of refusal to purchase mining rights to dumps and landfills. Don't think the processes quite make economic sense yet to start recycling on that level but one of these days we'll likely see it. Around here all the copper mine tailings have been reworked at least once but they are just looking for one type of ore.