Wrecking yard

A wrecking yard (Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian English), scrapyard (Irish, British and New Zealand English) or junkyard (American English) is the location of a business in dismantling where wrecked or decommissioned vehicles are brought, their usable parts are sold for use in operating vehicles, while the unusable metal parts, known as scrap metal parts, are sold to metal-recycling companies.

Scrapyards will sell their accumulations of metals either to refineries or larger scrap brokers.

It is becoming increasingly common to use satellite part finder services to contact a number of salvage yards from a single source.

If the yard has the requested item, the customer is usually instructed to leave a deposit and to come to pick up the part at a later time.

Late-model vehicles will often have entire halves or portions of the body removed and stored on shelves as inventory.

Unbroken windshields and windows may also be removed intact and resold to car owners needing replacements.

Once vehicles in a wrecking yard do not have more usable parts, the hulks are usually sold to a scrap-metal processor, who will usually crush the bodies on-site at the yard's premises using a mobile baling press, shredder, or flattener, with final disposal occurring within a hammer mill, which smashes the vehicle remains into fist-sized chunks.