Recycled materials come directly from the scrapping of a truck (or car), and it also can be a by-product of the used and remanufactured transmissions businesses.
Weller Reman Center in Grand Rapids, Mich., rebuilds certain components, including transmissions most of which come from Peterbilt and Kenworth trucks owned by waste-hauling companies and school systems. The bread and butter of the 38-year-old company’s business is AllisonTransmission, and it is not unusual for Weller to rebuild more than 100 transmissions a day.
Weller gets a substantial quantity of scrap metal from old transmissions, even the ones they successfully rebuild.
Len Ryan, general manager of Weller’s main facility says “We dump a boatload of aluminum every day, as well as cast iron and steel,” “I’ve got a full-time guy who sits on the high/low forklift from 7 to 5, and it takes him that long every day to empty this building.”
After the transmission is out of the truck, Ryan said, “we’ll take that unit, completely knock it down and lay it out. You know third gear is going to be bad on every transmission you open up, so that iron gets thrown in a Dumpster.” (The failure is found routinely in trucks that travel short routes in urban areas – mostly in third gear.)
We can see that recycling goes on at all levels in the automotive and truck business. Recycling is part of how companies make money, it is part of the economic system of businesses that produce recyclable materials. Weller expects to collect a certain amount of money for recyclable materials like aluminum transmission cases, when we interfere with the basic system with a short term solution, then eventually it catches up to us.
All I’m saying is short term cures cause a lot more money down the road, that is my experience. That paradigm affects the long term results, it won’t be long before the price of products that rely on recyclable materials like aluminum transmission cases, have to raise prices. It is a great time to buy a used transmission for your car, especially if you own a clunker. The prices are still excellent.
