DANA reaches the scrapyards: the ruin of treating 200,000 scrap cars

Rafael Pardo, general director of Aedra, explains to ABC that the most urgent thing in the current context is to remove all damaged vehicles from the esplanades where they are being abandoned in order to carry out cleaning work and prevent thefts from occurring, not so much the mechanical parts of the vehicles, but rather the documents found in them. «They may be giving situations of looting of all documentation “which is usually kept in passenger cars,” he says. Beyond the information known to anyone, there is the problem that all that automobile mass, for the moment, cannot move.

It is the owners who have to process, through the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) removes it from the vehicle so that the tow trucks can remove it. «Some of the owners of these cars died in the disaster, and others are alive such complicated personal situations “That, as is normal, they have not started with this type of bureaucracy,” they say from Aedra. Pardo is one of the voices within the industry that is asking the Government that, within the framework of the decrees that are being approved, a rule be included by which all this scrap metal can be transported once the drivers have been financially compensated.

The Executive announced that the Consortium will compensate the owners with the appraisal value of vehicles plus 20%. The situation is also going to be complicated for scrapyards, since the transfers alone are economically very costly. Once the driver deregisters it, the vehicle recycling process begins with the destruction certificate, by which the car is delivered to the CAT (Authorized Treatment Centers) where liquids and materials considered hazardous waste are decontaminated and extracted. Then comes the disassembly processwhere a kind of screening is made of those parts or components that can be used. At this point: or They are sold to scrap dealers or end up in shredding machines.where a separation is made by chemical components to subsequently assess whether they can be used energetically as fuels.

Blocked

Within this chain, DANA is going to especially complicate the work of the scrap yards, also transportation managers and the decontamination of these cars that have been submerged in mud for several days. In fact, under normal conditions, scrapyards usually take care of the removal ‘in exchange’ for not paying anything to the owner, since the transfer alone can be worth more than the parts and bodywork that can be used. According to Alicia Granell, from Ro-des, the Operational Network of Spanish Scrapyards, all this human and natural tragedy is going to cause a tearthquake in the world of scrap metal.

«Far from what many people think, scrapyards are not going to make any profit. All the mechanical, electronic and interior parts have been left unsalvageable.. At most, the bodywork could be recoveredbut it also seems, from the images that have reached us, that it may be irrecoverable,” Granell points out. At street level, and as this newspaper has learned, there is concern in the union about the price of scrap metal, which could drop considerably. But does this market value depend on the volume or conditions in which the vehicles are arriving? ¿Has the network capacity to take on 200,000 destroyed vehicles? Prados and Granell agree that in the short term the volume will not cause the price to fluctuate, since the price of the metal depends on international factors such as wars or Asian markets and are reflected in the London Metal Exchange.

Prices up to 80% lower on flooded cars

In any case, they do regret that the work will be “uneconomical”, as well as “extremely laborious.” From Ro-des they indicate that the value of a car that arrives flooded can be reduced between 60 and 80%. «For vehicles that are more than ten years old the value will be zero. Or, rather, negative. This is going to be a burden, as will the transfer. It is unknown who is going to assume these costs because the scrapyards do not have sufficient economic capacity,” warns Rafael Prado. But what there won’t be, he says, is a collapse. In 2023 about 700,000 vehicles were deregisteredalthough there have been years in which it has reached 1,400,000. The last link in the process, in which the fragmenters intervene, is the one that could obtain the greatest economic benefit, although everything will depend on the extent to which the embedded mud is cleaned, say FER, the Spanish Federation of Recovery and Recycling.