Take My Scrap Car has always believed that the only thing better than recycling is reusing waste products directly. Which is why we’re always keen to see and hear how creative folks all over the world are bringing scrap cars back to life in weird and wonderful ways.
One name that continuously pops up is that of Eric Lundgren – a guy who’s become famous for turning trash into treasure. This time around, he’s created a seriously impressive EV he’s named the Phoenix, which it’s safe to say is giving even the biggest names in the business a run for their money.
Initially, he publicized the results of his latest venture on the 1st of April. Which was so impressive that quite a number of people immediately wrote them off as a prank. He tested his own electric vehicle against a variety of those currently available commercially – each and everyone his Phoenix wiped the floor with. And just to prove that it wasn’t a joke, he went out again last week to prove that his DIY EV was and is the real deal.
Eric Lundgren has always been an advocate of electric vehicles – he’s got no less than three in his own collection, including a Tesla. But in this instance, he wasn’t intending to promote the plus points of EVs or even point out the flaws of the cars his creation outperformed. Instead, he simply wanted to demonstrate to the world exactly how much electronic or mechanical waste is generated every day, which could easily be put to much better use.
And he’s single-handedly proved the full potential of the scrap auto-parts and technology out there, making you wonder what the biggest names in the business could do if they tried.
What follows is an extract from a statement made by Eric Lundgren, when quizzed about his motivation:
EL: We set out to prove a point. We really want to bring awareness to hybrid recycling, which is an inefficiency in America. Basically, revolving around electronics. It’s not a sexy topic. Since we do that on a micro level, I decided to blow it up into a macro level just to garnish attention, and to gain interest from people that would otherwise not care about hybrid recycling. I also wanted to push the EV industry. I own two of those cars that go 90 miles on a charge. They’re just annoying. I also own a Tesla. I spend, or my company spent, $145,000 on this Tesla, and it gets 255 miles with a nine percent degradation the first year out. I’m big fan of Tesla. They make really cool looking cars. I’m a big fan of Elon Musk, except when it comes to hybrid recycling. That company is not practicing hybrid recycling, and they should be. They’re the industry leader when it comes to green, and environmental inefficiency. The thought that they just melt their battery packs irks me being that it’s my industry.
I’m hoping that if nothing else, those out there, the powers that be, that read what you write will be pushed and motivated to start practicing hybrid recycling. When I say the powers that be, I mean corporations that manufacture these electronics, but then, in many cases, don’t actually salvage the working parts and components, or let others salvage the working parts and components for different applications away from the auto industry. When it’s mandatory to put something into a landfill, that’s just an archaic solution to the fastest growing waste problem in the world, which is electronic waste. If we do things like this, and nobody hears about them, then we’re having a rock concert in the middle of the woods with nobody listening.
In regards to China. There’s a place in Southern China, right next to Shenzhen. I lived there for four and a half years. I went over there when I was 19 years old. Then I went back when I was 23. I stayed until I was 28. When I lived there, I learned the language. I speak fluent Mandarin. I went over looking for opportunity in the recycling realm. I analyzed everything that they did correctly, and everything that they’re doing wrong. They neglect having a full recycling process where zero percent of the product goes into a landfill or hurts the environment. But they were also doing something right. One thing that we don’t do in America. They were reusing the parts. They were reusing the components. In America, sometimes, we reuse parts, right? We’ll take RAM or a hard drive, or maybe we’ll replace the LCD screen. What we won’t do is, we won’t reuse batteries. When you drop your electronic device in America, we instantly identify cosmetic defect as functional defect. We identify that if it has one functional defect, now it’s trash. It’s been ingrained in us as a consumer society.
What that’s creating, is the world’s largest waste epidemic called E-Waste. It’s not really mandated well. It goes into our landfills, in your backyard, and it leaks harmful chemicals into our environment like lead, and mercury, and bromine, and cadmium. Then we drink our water, and eat our food, and wonder why we get cancer. It’s just one of the many reasons why we get cancer. But it’s a big contributing factor. Our solution, in America, is to shred it, or smelt it, melt it down, or bury it in the dirt. All three of those solutions destroy any potential value, don’t allow for any potential reuse. They’re just primitive. It’s bad for the environment. It’s bad for business.
This thing that I do, hybrid recycling, it’s a global solution. You need to be able to get the working parts back to wherever things are getting manufactured. In America, we don’t value batteries, and capacitors, and RAM, and IC chip sets, and all that jazz. In the world, those products are highly valued. When I went to China and stayed for five years, I saw a lot of people make millions of dollars very quickly. What they were doing was buying America’s trash from corporations, and from landfills, and from recyclers or fake recycles. Guys would aggregate, collect, and then sell to China. They were buying it all up, and then they were selling each piece by piece to factories to build new products. It was brilliant. When I came back to America, I said, “Well, why don’t we just do that here?” So, we did. We started a company to do it here. It started out, the moral of the company was, “We’re going to become successful by doing something that’s good for society.”
It was hard to change the mentality of corporations. Every corporation thought, “Wait a minute. You’re going to pay me for this trash? I’ve been spending millions of dollars a year to get rid of it, processing it in an environmentally friendly fashion. Now, you’re going to pay me to take it? What’s the catch?” Right? It throws people off. We’re doing this cool thing, hybrid recycling, but the problem is, nobody understands it yet. When I try to explain it to people, it either goes over their head. If they understand, they don’t care until they start seeing the applications. When I start showing the cool things that we can build, that’s when you getting people’s attention. We’re going to build a solar power array out of used batteries, made from over 95 percent trash, and it’s going to tour around with a well-known rock band. They’re going to play every one of their rock concerts off of garbage, off of what consumers threw away.
