Inventory acquisition plays a key role in the profitability of auto recycling operations. While the process can be time-consuming, two men how spoke during the Automotive Recyclers Association 77th Annual Convention & Expo, which took place online in mid-November of last year, explained why it’s critical and offered tips for monitoring and improving success in this area.

“If you want to sell parts, you’ve got to buy cars; it’s part and parcel to what we do,” said Bill Stevens, CEO of Fenix Parts Inc., which has corporate offices in Hurst, Texas.

Stoney Rutledge, vice president of purchasing and procurement at Fenix, also joined Stevens during the session titled “Inventory Acquisition: The Single Most Important Thing You Do.”

Fenix is a recycler and reseller of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) automotive products. The company was founded in 2014 to create a network that offers used auto parts sales, fulfillment and distribution in key regional markets in the United States. The Fenix Parts companies have been in business an average of more than 25 years and currently operate from locations throughout the eastern U.S. and Texas.

“So much has changed in the industry since I started 35 years ago,” Stevens said. “Back in my day, we were buying cars at live auctions, bidding against our local competition and, for the most part, even selling against local competition.”

He continued, “One thing that really hasn’t changed is the success or failure of your business really will ride on how well you buy.”

Buying challenges

Stevens said that when a company buys well, “it is hard to mess it up,” referring to the overall success of the business. “If you buy poorly—you don’t buy good quality vehicles, you don’t buy enough vehicles—it is impossible to recover from it,” he added.

Among the challenges he identified in acquiring vehicles was the lot quantity nature of the purchases. “If we need an engine, we have to figure out how to buy a whole car to acquire that engine.”

Open online auctions also contribute to the challenges in that auto recycling businesses are not only competing against one another for vehicles but also against the public in some cases. “We are certainly competing against the world,” Stevens added.

Also lacking is the reduced pricing some other businesses get based on the large scale of their buying, he said. “That is just not the case in our industry.”

Buy better, grow sales

The good news for auto recyclers, Stevens said, is that demand outstrips supply when it comes to parts sales. “Simply improving your in-stock percentage will drive revenue increase,” he said. “What it really means is that the top line is completely in our control. We have the ability to grow our sales simply by buying more and buying better.”

By buying the right quantity and quality of vehicles, an auto recycler has the opportunity to improve all aspects of the business, Stevens argued, including the opportunity to broker parts to other auto recyclers.

”If you buy poorly—you don’t buy good quality vehicles, you don’t buy enough vehicles—it is impossible to recover from it.” – Bill Stevens, CEO, Fenix Parts Inc.

Stevens advocated for using a four-line profit and loss statement that consists of revenue, gross profit, total expenses and net expenses, adding that a company’s gross profit is a function of how many vehicles it purchases and how well those purchases are executed. “You have to buy good quality merchandise,” he added.

Quick returns are a sign that a yard is buying good quality, Stevens said. Given the cash-intensive nature of the business, he said, the amount of time it takes to get a yard’s money back on the purchase of a vehicle is critical. A yard will need to recoup its investment in a vehicle within 90 days of the purchase, Stevens said, “otherwise it’s hard to fund next purchase.”

“It’s a ton of work to do this and to do it right,” he added. “The more time and effort you put into this, the better it will be.”

Invest time and resources

Stevens advised auto recyclers not to limit themselves to a few auctions but to instead use all the technology available to purchase the vehicles they need. “You need to bid a lot of vehicles.”

Also necessary, Stevens said, is measuring the results of a yard’s buying. If a yard is purchasing the right vehicles in the right volume, it will generate enough gross profit to cover vehicle-related expenses. “Whatever else we get beyond parts sales should be the gravy.”

Rutledge was a co-owner of Late Model Auto Salvage, which is now part of Fenix Parts. He explained the benefits he saw from changing his previous company’s car buying process in response to the change in the Copart online auction schedule. That change meant the employee he had looking at cars in person wouldn’t have had enough time to do that and he would instead have to buy based on pictures. “I knew I was going to make a mistake,” Rutledge says. “I had to remove myself from a small degree from the equation.”

As he saw it, he could buy more vehicles using one of two strategies: bidding more cars or paying more for the cars he bid. “I decided to bid more cars.”

To do this, he first calculated his win rate by dividing the number of bids he won by the number of cars he bid per day. Rutledge said this figure should be no more than 5 percent. “The lower you can make it, the better you will perform on your vehicles,” he explained, saying more gross profit would be realized.

Rutledge said numbers drive performance, adding that recyclers with the best cost of goods are not always the recyclers with the smartest buys.

He advised auto recyclers to figure out how they can bid 20 to 30 percent of the cars they most commonly sell parts for per day so they can pay what they want for the one or two cars they will win. By bidding fewer cars, Rutledge said, auto recyclers are giving themselves fewer opportunities to win these vehicles and paying more for those vehicles they do win.

He suggested that auto recyclers make 40 to 50 percent of their bids on vehicles in local auctions on a weekly basis when tow rates are low, and 10 to 20 percent of their bids at auctions that are at a greater distance and have higher tow rates. Rutledge said these vehicles should be those that are more difficult to buy, such as later models or trucks.

He advised attendees to deduct auction and tow fees from their bids. “Don’t be afraid of large tow fees as long as you are deducting from your bid,” he added. “It just matters that you bought it at the right price.”

Rutledge said he separated his company’s buying department into two positions: bidders whose salaries are based on commission and who go to auctions, review the vehicles and supply data and buyers who review the supplied data and make the final buying decisions.

After implementing these changes, Rutledge said his purchasing grew by 30 percent from 2015 to 2016, while sales and gross profit also increased. Additionally, the number of days needed to break even on vehicle acquisitions decreased by 20 percent.

“Adding volume to bids isn’t hard if you add resources to your buying department,” Rutledge said. “You won’t give up profit.”

The author is editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at dtoto@gie.net.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the information technology asset disposition (ITAD) business experienced the start of an evolution as more clients viewed these services as essential rather than an afterthought. Companies were closely monitoring legislation regarding data privacy, such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Brent Berry is executive director of ITAD and reverse logistics at Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services, Irvine, California. He highlighted these trends and changes occurring in the ITAD space just prior to the pandemic in the keynote presentation at the ITAD Summit Nov. 19-20, 2019, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Berry has worked in ITAD for more than 25 years at companies including Arrow Electronics, Dell and Express Point Technology Services in addition to Ingram Micro.

Since the pandemic, Berry says, the ITAD business has evolved from traditionally serving corporate clients at their offices to serving these clients at their employees’ home offices.

“We’ve gone from a very centralized environment with our customers—what I mean by that is a lot of Fortune 1000 customers had internal support mechanisms within their buildings. Those buildings are no longer populated by their employees, and those employees are now dispersed throughout really the globe,” he explains. “So, the question becomes: How do we transition our service capabilities to really align to support those customers and how they have to transition and start managing their assets, their risk and their data on that global, more work-from-home type environment?”

In the past 12 months, Berry adds that demand for depot services, which are services performed on end-user devices that require exchange, repair, shipping, receiving or storage, has increased. Berry says Ingram Micro has offered depot services for a long time but has seen a “huge influx” in demand for those services since the pandemic began.

Berry connected with Recycling Today in February to talk about the impact the pandemic has had on ITAD providers and what that means for the near-term future.

Recycling Today (RT): Based on your experience at Ingram Micro, what has it been like on a day-to-day basis providing ITAD services during a pandemic?

Brent Berry (BB): Eleven months ago, we had an environment where we had customers who had 10,000 resources and 10,000 people sitting in a building. In that building, the bottom floor was their IT support infrastructure. Overnight, those folks went to that remote environment. And our customers brought a need to us to support those remote employees, not only from a data management perspective, but again, [from] the depot scenario: How am I going to get new assets out to employees? Because hiring didn’t just completely stop across the board. They still had to hire people and then get those assets out to those employees who were new. So, we had a lot of customers come to us with that piece of it.

It’s a unique scenario today where we are now seeing ITAD get connected to depot, and they go together as one really kind of global service delivery option for our customers. Customers are saying, ‘Can you manage the warehousing, imaging, asset tagging of all of our new stuff, distribute that out to all of our employees on a need basis?’

Refresh cycles may have gotten extended a little bit, but they didn’t go away. They were taking employees who had workstations [and] desktops who are now going remote. We got to the point where we were bundling desktop kits with monitors and desks because there was a shortage of laptops. ...

Then the secondary piece is continuing to manage the returns of those assets—the management of that data and that asset back through the reverse supply chain to ensure we are mitigating risk. That, in the last [11 months], has taken a forefront in our business. Not that ITAD is not at the foundation, but ITAD has changed at the foundation.

RT: How do you think the pandemic shaped the industry?

BB: It’s been dramatically changed. Our service is very labor-intensive. ... We are always going to have this labor-intensive, high-touch service.

When COVID came along, we saw a really big strain put on the global labor market. That kind of falls into multiple buckets. We have a big female workforce in our facilities, and, all of a sudden, moms were having to stay home because their kids were home. That put a strain on that subset of the labor force.

Then, just COVID itself—the safety, people not feeling comfortable with going into work and being in that kind of an environment. At some point, it didn’t matter if you were an essential service or business, it comes down to people, right? It’s making sure that you’re putting together an environment where your people feel safe, new people feel safe coming to work for you, and you have all the pieces of that puzzle put in place to create a really good, healthy environment where people know they’re going to be protected and taken care of to the best of our ability.

From a customer perspective, these big retailers—like Amazon—their volumes are skyrocketing because everybody’s at home, nobody wants to go out. They’re ordering everything on Amazon and different sites. So, what did Amazon and these websites have to do? They had to go out and drive their labor intake up as well to cover their increase in volumes. They’ve also always paid at a very high level from an operational warehouse environment, which drove labor rates up. If you’re an ITAD provider, you weren’t in the upper echelon from a pay perspective because you’re trying to manage your business the right way. And that put a big strain on your ability to be competitive in the labor market as well.

RT: What were some of the biggest trends before the pandemic?

BB: Thinking back to 2018 and pre-COVID, and back to the days [when] I worked at Arrow Electronics in the value recovery group, there were lots of acquisitions. So, the consolidation of the ITAD market was continuing to happen from a service provider perspective. That really slowed down quite a bit, but there was still a bit of activity into 2019 and 2020. Then, when COVID hit, you saw this really quick stop of any of that activity. The consolidation activity slowed down quite a bit.

I think you saw a shift toward partnerships—people trying to find ways to be more effective and efficient in their businesses. Even as one of the larger companies in the space, we have really strong global relationships and partnerships with folks who do other things in the space that we don’t do because we had to change our model a little bit during this time. So, I think that was a big shift.

We’ve always been in a high-touch, high-end customer-engagement environment, but we shifted to zero travel [during the pandemic]. That adjustment from an engagement model and how we as service providers engage with our customers was a big shift for us. I think the folks that hadn’t had really good, connected customer engagement probably felt the pain during the shift because those relationships got relied on very heavily in 2020 because of all these moving parts and our customers trying to figure out how to stabilize their businesses during this time of uncertainty.

”On the ITAD side, our volumes are trending in the right direction back to pre-COVID levels.” – Brent Berry, executive director, Ingram Micro

Then how companies addressed labor is an ongoing shift in our space. That’s not something that’s fixed, that’s not something everybody’s figured out. That’s something that will be ongoing as long as we have COVID in our environment. From a global perspective, the labor shift and change is going to be significant. In the last six months, hourly labor rates across the globe, specific to services industries, have gone up over 30 percent—that’s a huge impact. So, how do you manage your P&L? It has to be managed differently.

On the customer side, one thing we saw is a reliance on more single-source opportunities. Customers are coming to me and Ingram Micro to do more and broaden our scale and scope and reach into their ecosystems because of the uncertainty of how overall COVID was going to impact their ability to function, grow and expand and do more internally versus outsource more. If you look at a lot of the larger companies, their hiring is pretty flat right now. So, they looked at how do I put my arms around all of this and manage it more efficiently and with more impactful, single-source suppliers? That certainly doesn’t mean we had customers transition away from a dual approach. Most customers kept a core, primary service provider and a secondary backup. But what we’ve been asked to do as a core, primary service provider has really broadened in scope and the scale.

Another piece of it is the [IT service management] side of it. How do you manage your entire asset life cycle and make it automated and get it tied to your asset management tools? That’s something we continue to see—this evolution of ITAD getting connected to the bigger asset management conversation.

The last thing, and this is a good trend, we continue to see our customers, our prospective customers, trend ITAD up the priority chain. ITAD has always been a secondary service, if you will, and now we are a core service. It’s something that our customers are paying a lot more attention to. They’re trying to control their entire asset management ecosystem from end to end in a new environment today.

RT: What did the pandemic economically do to ITAD businesses?

BB: This is just my opinion—I don’t know all of the details of finances for other companies and competitors—but what I’ve heard in this space was very, very positive so far. Certainly, we were all impacted at some level financially, whether it be from a slowdown of income or volume, which ultimately impacts top-line revenue and trickles its way down to bottom-line revenue, or labor and not being able to get labor so the throughput in our facilities has been condensed, and backlogs have been created. So, there’s a lot of different motions that from a financial perspective played into the environment that we are in; but, overall, when you keep it relative to the greater global market, I would say ITAD has fared extremely well.

There was certainly a moment of great hesitation in March of last year [and] in that [following] three-to-four-month range, where everybody almost panicked a little bit and didn’t know quite what was going to happen and how to react and what to do. But I think, for the most part, our industry is filled with really smart people, really intelligent financial minds and really savvy and smart business owners. So, from that side of it, I think as an industry we fared very well.

That doesn’t, by any means, take away from some of the impact that we have all felt [in the ITAD sector]. We have all felt certainly some shrinkage and some condensing from a growth perspective.

If you look at 2017, 2018 and 2019, the industry was on this big trending trajectory—just grow, grow, grow. Everything was moving fast and going, going and going. And we hit a wall. It was full-speed ahead 100 miles an hour to 10 miles an hour. And we all felt that at some level. But for the most part, you haven’t heard about a ton of the shutdowns or closures or major layoffs that we’ve heard about in other industries.

I think the industry will come out on the other side of it better and faster. Again, this is my opinion—when our customers hit their brakes, that trickled down to us. For us, volumes are coming back to pre-COVID levels now.

But there’s a wave coming. There’s a whole bunch of customers still sitting on assets out there. … [A]nd we all need to be prepared for that wave. Because the labor piece of it, to me, is the biggest risk for our entire industry right now. How do we manage labor to ensure the services that we commit to, that we’re supposed to provide to our customers in the time frame that we’re supposed to [provide them in] are executed appropriately?

RT: When do you think that “wave,” as you call it, is coming?

BB: To be honest with you, it feels like it’s starting now. But I think by midyear, we’re going to be knee deep in it.

And, for [Ingram Micro], we’re in peak season. We have the largest retailer out there, and I have three different facilities supporting that customer. And, the volumes, they haven’t stopped. It’s just crazy. It has not slowed down at all. And then you throw this peak season on top of it and then the labor cluster, [and] it’s a very interesting time for sure.

But, on the ITAD side, like I said, our volumes are trending in the right direction back to pre-COVID levels. We certainly see by midyear that wave being in full effect again.

RT: Data breaches have been a big concern in recent years, and it seemed to be a concern during the pandemic as well. Could you talk about concerns people had with transporting assets for ITAD services during a pandemic?

Brent Berry is the executive director of information technology asset disposition and reverse logistics at Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services, which is based in Irvine, California. For more information about Ingram Micro, visit www.ingrammicro.com.

Business owners and managers in the recycling industry started 2020 with budgets and expectations that almost certainly considered numerous variables that could affect supply, demand and pricing. A global pandemic likely was not one of them.

After reading about the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 and its impact on human health and society in China, and then Italy and other parts of Europe, March 11, 2020, the notion that COVID-19 was about to change America became a reality. That was the day sporting events started being canceled and Americans found out Hollywood power couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were COVID-19 positive.

During the next 12 months, recyclers experienced material volumes and prices that moved rapidly up and down, matching the uncertainty of social distancing restrictions as virus caseloads rose and fell.

The deployment of vaccines in the first quarter of 2021 is providing hope for the health and safety of Americans—and the economic projections of recyclers. How a rising vaccination rate and a potentially inflationary climate will affect the recycling industry provide new sources of uncertainty as recyclers prepare to leave behind the eventful prior 12 months.

Working through the volatility

Maintaining a profit margin remains the core mission for private-sector recyclers of all materials, but the path to doing so for processors and traders has required quick decisions in the COVID-19 era.

Business managers of processing companies concentrated on matters such as acquiring “essential worker” status, plus sufficient hand sanitizer and face masks. Acquiring technology to work from home also emerged as a priority. These were circumstances that were not part of the landscape before March 2020.

Workplace restrictions and factory shutdowns meant processors and traders were confronted with considerable reductions in the availability of material. In some markets this matched declining demand for finished goods, but in consumer packaging-related sectors, such as aluminum used beverage cans or old corrugated containers (OCC), the scant supply was soon met with rising prices.

Overall, the second quarter of 2020 was one of dramatic economic contraction. By the time Recycling Today surveyed its metals recycling sector readers in July for its 2020 State of the Scrap Recycling Industry supplement, 67 percent of those responding reported lower volumes in the second quarter of 2020 compared with before COVID-19.

At a May 20, 2020, Zoom roundtable meeting that also was part of our State of the Scrap Recycling Industry, panelist Matt Kripke of Kripke Enterprises Inc., Toledo, Ohio, said, “Those of us that take orders for an entire year in advance based on where our projected flows are, the scrap is not there to fulfill our commitments.”

That conversation occurred shortly after one benchmark U.S. industry indicator, weekly steel mill output as measured by the Washington-based American Iron & Steel Institute (AISI), hit a record low of 1.14 million tons, with mills operating at 51.1 percent of capacity.

Industry statistics and recyclers’ assessments have pointed to the ramping back up of scrap supply and global demand. Asked about material flows in February of this year compared with February 2020, one metals processor tells Recycling Today of a year-on-year increase in volume, while another says, “We are getting very close” to pre-COVID levels.

Two others in the metals sector cannot claim that big of a rebound, with one trader saying as of February, “Our scrap volumes were down around 20 percent from 2020.”

A processor gives the identical volume decrease figure, but adds, “Pricing on zorba has more than doubled, and aluminum and copper and steel price jumps have been very helpful.”

John Shegerian, president of California-based multilocation electronics recycler ERI Inc., says, “February 2021 yielded inbound material volumes that were significantly greater than February 2020. There had been a downturn during the early COVID months, but we have gained that all back, plus more.”

An outlier in the February comparison picture is Dallas-based Texas Recycling, a buyer and processor of OCC, other scrap paper grades, metal and plastic that is profiled starting on page 36 of this issue. That firm’s CEO Joel Litman says its volume issues were not COVID-related, however, but caused by Texas’ turbulent weather and power outages that month.

“Approximately 30 percent of February’s working days were lost because of plant closures,” he says. “The company was on pace in early February to outperform February 2020. The month did finish on an upbeat note, and the momentum is carrying over into March.”

Of bullwhips and hypodermic needles

Positive momentum largely is what business owners and managers want to experience. Even before the economy had emerged from the worst of its woes in the spring of 2020, however, commodities analyst Jason Schenker of Texas-based Prestige Economics pointed to the possibility of a commodities pricing “bullwhip” effect as national economies rebounded after COVID-19 restrictions lifted.

Much of what Schenker predicted has come to pass as China and then other nations began rebounding from their earlier, most severe reactions to reduce the spread of the virus. For many recyclers, the upward price momentum in their markets yielded benefits in the form of increased material flows and rising inventory values.

With health and safety, several of the recycling executives contacted say their companies will be encouraging vaccination among their staff members. (See the sidebar, “Seeking immunity.")

Contacted 10 months after his May 2020 roundtable participation, nonferrous trader Kripke says, “Our expectations are that the tightness in metal begins to subside and spreads widen a bit as the year goes on. We expect volumes and margins to be very strong in the second half.”

A metals processor based in the Midwest says, “Volumes have been picking up in many areas, and year over year, 2021 has been a bit stronger all the way around. The biggest driver is the recovery of postshredder product demand and pricing.”

”The company was on pace in early February to outperform February 2020. The month did finish on an upbeat note, and the momentum is carrying over into March.” – Joel Litman, president, Texas Recycling

“I expect that the COVID recovery in the coming months will restore volumes, and we could have a banner second half of 2021,” says David Caffee, a partner of Maryland-based Atlantic Recycling Group.

Electronics recycler Shegerian sounds the most bullish of all, stating, “The second half of 2021 is looking particularly strong for us. In terms of spikes in processing activity, hiring and business travel, we are preparing for significant increases in all three. Volumes have already increased massively; we are hiring more employees at this very moment, and our business travel is about to explode to a level exceeding all previous levels of activity.”

Several other recyclers refer to bolstering their workforces in the second half of 2021, which was considered a sizable challenge even during the depths of the pandemic, according to Recycling Today May 2020 roundtable participants.

Affluence, but aggravation?

As scrap supplies diminished in the second quarter of 2020, trader and consultant Nathan Fruchter of New York-based Idoru Trading Corp. reminded Recycling Today on multiple occasions that “scrap is a product of affluence.”

He correctly predicted that scarce scrap supplies would lead to rebounding prices as demand returned.

As the global and U.S. economies enter a likely rebound in the second and third quarters of 2021, the return of supply and accompanying volatile prices could bring some high margin opportunities but also some recurring headaches.

On the operations side, a shortage of shipping containers and escalating freight prices have been trends that started in the third quarter of 2020. One metals recycler says container and booking availability in mid-March is “as bad as ever” and is affecting inland locations at least as much as Atlantic and Pacific coast ports.

As vaccine programs were just starting to make inroads, economists and metals industry analysts already were expressing concerns about inflation, particularly within the commodities sector.

In the second week of March, Bloomberg reported that Richard Adkerson, the CEO of global mining firm Freeport-McMoRan, referred to current conditions as having “a degree of an echo” of previous copper price spikes.

Adkerson, who spoke at a Fastmarkets AMM event, said the higher prices this time will be accompanied by few additions to mined supply, potentially putting more upward price pressure on the red metal.

That potential supply shortage was backed up by Jeremy Weir of Australia-based Trafigura, speaking at the same event, who is forecasting a global copper supply deficit “in the region of 10 million metric tons” by 2030.

For copper scrap traders, excessively high prices can create helpful margins but also greater risks and some operational aggravation. The risk can come in the form of sudden downturns that can cause scrap to lose value while it is still in a warehouse or on a long ocean voyage, while aggravation on the operations side can involve higher credit insurance prices and increased theft incidents and law enforcement scrutiny.

Inflation alerts have been sounded by many economists examining government budget deficits and rising retail prices. For the Arlington, Virginia-based Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) and its construction industry members, rising materials prices are a concern.

In mid-March, AGC CEO Stephen E. Sandherr says, “Contractors are caught between a pandemic market that isn’t willing to pay more for projects and materials prices that continue to spike. Construction firms won’t be able to thrive if rising materials prices continue to shrink already pressured profit margins.”

For recyclers, it is a reminder of the old saw “the cure for high prices is high prices.” Previous bull markets for metals typically have met their match when manufacturers seek lower cost materials substitutes and construction projects receive a red light because of cost issues.

In the near term, however, after 12 months of intermittent pandemic-related health concerns and materials scarcity, recyclers sound excited to be able to contend with issues pertaining to busier facilities and rising commodity values.

The author is the senior editor with the Recycling Today Media Group and can be contacted at btaylor@gie.net.

Maintaining the same email address for more than two decades has its disadvantages, including a steady buildup of so many press releases and inquiries arriving daily that some are skimmed over or outright neglected.

One of the advantages to the ongoing landslide of business information is the opportunity to spot trends in where investment dollars and corporate attention are being directed.

Spotting the difference between a trend and a fad, of course, presents a challenge of its own. Even trends that eventually prove out can move in fits and starts, providing heartbreak to some investors and entrepreneurs along the way.

When it comes to electric vehicles (EVs), separating the hype and the hopes of fossil fuel detractors from legitimate market momentum has become important for recyclers for many reasons.

”Globally and in North America, EVs are not going away as a groundswell of human and financial capital flows into the sector.”

That topic was addressed in our April 2020 story, “Currents of change,” and, one year later, government policy (mostly outside of the United States) and investor enthusiasm have combined to build EV momentum.

There are more data-driven ways to gauge this momentum than my email inbox, without question. Even this information source with its admittedly small sample size, however, helps to illustrate the amount of capital that is pouring into EVs.

The public and private sectors are putting money into charging stations. Companies large and small are allying with universities and research institutes to design EV batteries that can increase the cruising range of electric cars, trucks and buses.

Drivers accustomed to the sound and feel of gasoline-powered engines will continue to have reservations about EVs. Americans like choice, and the United States could continue to resist EV production mandates or required internal combustion engine phaseouts, relying instead on incentives, disincentives and corporate sustainability leadership to drive this change.

Globally and in North America, however, EVs are not going away as a groundswell of human and financial capital flows into the sector. Auto dismantlers, recyclers of factory-generated scrap and auto shredder operators all have reasons to better understand EV production and materials choices.

Certainly, some staff members and readers of Recycling Today prefer the roar of a gasoline engine to the whir of an EV motor. That being said, they cannot necessarily expect news regarding EV production, sales or recycling methods to slow down anytime soon.