With popular advertisements, celebrity endorsements and major community programs for recycling in place it seems almost everyone is doing what they can in terms of the three R's (reducing, reusing and recycling). People are separating their recyclable materials from their garbage, composting, unplugging unused appliances and buying and using more earth friendly forms of lighting - but there is one avenue that a lot of people aren't yet traveling that could do wonders for the environment.
Auto wreckers, junk yards and auto salvage yards all serve pretty much the same purpose - they seem to be the final resting place for automobiles that are no longer wholly functional. There are several reasons that a car may end up in a junk yard or auto wrecker - irreparable body damage, a seized engine, cracked suspension or perhaps all of the above, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is nothing that is useable left within the broken shell.
You know, as an automobile owner, that things go wrong with cars and that the repairs can be costly - by recycling used auto parts you can help the environment by reusing things that would have most likely ended up going to a landfill, and you can keep some of your hard earned cash in your pocket because a used auto part from a junkyard will most certainly be less expensive than a new part form the factory. The auto parts that would have ended up in the landfill are not biodegradable, they would be there forever causing a burden on future generations that will already have more than enough to deal with from problems handed down to them from previous generations. Reusing what cannot be broken down by nature will help to leave open that space that would have been otherwise occupied in some already overflowing landfill. If you can reuse an item from an old car that isn't currently capable of being broken done and recycled, if that part lasts long enough in your vehicle there's a chance that new technology will develop in the intermittent that will allow for at least some extracting of materials from the part helping to reduce the future environmental burden even further.
Though no studies as of yet have formally been completed, there are some currently underway to see if the mass recycling of used auto parts from unusable vehicles into ones in need of repair could lessen the carbon footprint left by auto parts manufacturers. It's presumed that the machinery and factories used to manufacture new auto parts (even ones that are as "green" as possible) give off some form of pollutants and use up a reasonable amount of natural resources to complete the parts production. Reusing used car parts would conceivably create nothing harmful to the environment and in fact produce only positive benefits.
When a new car is "totaled" in an accident (when the cost of repair would amount to more than the car is worth in terms of book value), there could conceivably be dozens of parts in perfect working order that get hauled away to the auto salvage yard. These parts may be brand new, or only have a few thousand miles on them. If there were more advertisement for the use of used car parts and used tires by mechanics for repair and methods were developed to breakdown what was left of the autos in a recycling plant to be reused in another method, we could drastically reduce the size of the carbon footprint we bestow upon future generations.
If you had never considered yourself to be a part of the movement for a greener style of life, this is one method of helping the environment that could win you over. Making the choice to install used car parts in your vehicle for repair requires almost no extra effort on your part to make the repair and it could save you a substantial amount of money on the repair bill - perfectly functioning used car parts from a junk yard cost a fraction of what brand new factory parts do.