Rumor has it there is a new eco-friendly junk car website about to go beta! MrCarJunk.com

Loved this from the onion

“Aggressive, top-notch facilities that understand the power of networking and education”.  That is how the Locator Executive V.P Charis Lloyd describes what it takes to be listed in the top 25 most influential recyclers list for 2009.  And our friend David Gold was voted number one, as the most influential auto recycler of 2009!

We caught up with David for a brief chat on Monday morning and when asked how it felt to be voted number one as the most influential auto recycler of 2009 he replied, “I was in shock!  I love the business and love all the great people involved in it.” “It is a huge honor and over at Standard Auto Wreckers we are committed to helping our fellow recyclers across North America and the world.”

The ARA conference this year was a great success and a lot of fun for all those that attended.  With a tag line like “Experience the Horsepower Driving the Industry” most of us took the challenge quite seriously.

It seems the entries for Standard Auto Wreckers and Car-Part exchanged a few words before the big race.  Rumor is Green-Gold Thunder started talking smack first, whispering things like, “you look like you were born in a junkyard” and “get ready to eat my radioactive dust” – Car-Part High Octane replied with, “hey sissy, at least I don’t glow in the dark”.

In the end every horse that participated was a winner because all racing proceeds went to benefit charity!

For those of you that missed the news a couple of months ago we partnered up with CarsForums.com and we have our own forum area titled Used Auto Parts and Car Recycling – Just today we cracked 2,500 views and are looking forward to having many more visit.

We have some really great topics over there and I would like to encourage our members and visitors to swing-on-over and contribute!

Thanks again to everyone that has helped this partnership become such a great success!!!

This piece of news is quite funny and probably falls into the area of weird.  It seems in Sunnyvale the adage ‘finders keepers’ does not count when it is public servants finding cold, hard cash!  because amid the crushed soda cans, plastic bags and soiled cardboard, a shower of $100 bills started raining from the ceiling.

Workers at the Sunnyvale recycling station ran giddily about early Tuesday morning, catching the cash and stuffing the money inside a plastic bucket. They had even found a body among the hundreds of thousands of tons of recyclables sorted at the SMaRT plant over the years. But cash? Buckets of it? Never.

“It just kept coming,” Geronimo Martinez, 57, a supervisor at the station, said Wednesday, “more and more. It was crazy. I thought at first it was a joke.” All told, they retrieved $3,200 — and now Sunnyvale police are sorting out the mystery of how hundreds of Ben Franklins ended up in the trash. Sunnyvale spokesman John Pilger said the money was in a load of recyclables that came from Mountain View. Could it be drug money? Stolen from a bank? Someone’s life savings? If it’s yours, good luck claiming it.

Pilger said the money has been booked with the city’s Department of Public Safety. If the cash goes unclaimed for 90 days, it will be turned over to the city’s general fund.  That is a bit of a downer, I would like to see half go to charity and the other half go to the workers themselves.

It seems those amazing ‘fuel efficient’ hybrids are guzzlers of a different type!

The Prius hybrid automobile is popular for its fuel efficiency, but its electric motor and battery guzzle rare earth metals, a little-known class of elements found in a wide range of gadgetry and consumer goods.  That makes Toyota’s market-leading gasoline-electric hybrid car and other similar vehicles vulnerable to a supply crunch predicted by experts as China, the world’s dominant rare earths producer, limits exports while global demand grows.

Worldwide demand for rare earths, covering 15 entries on the periodic table of elements, is expected to exceed supply by some 40,000 tonnes annually in several years unless major new production sources are developed. One promising U.S. source is a rare earths mine expected to reopen in California by 2012.

A Toyota spokeswoman in Los Angeles declined comment on its resource development plans. But media accounts and industry blogs have reported recently that Toyota has looked at rare earth possibilities in Canada and Vietnam.

Canada’s own Retire your Ride program is an initiative of The Government of Canada, Clean Air Foundation and its partners, designed to enable people to get their high-polluting cars off the road and reward them for doing so. The program is committed to improving air quality by responsibly recycling vehicles and aims to retire at least 50,000 vehicles per year until March 31, 2011.

And this is all fine and dandy and I am a big supporter of anything that encourages folks to help the environment and it even puts a few bucks in their pockets. But there is a big problem when it comes to the fact that these cars need to be running and insured – and they only get $300 for a car in that condition.

What that means (and I know because I was in this situation with my 1994 Concorde that had only 75k kilometers on it) is: I have to get rid of my current car that is serving its purpose of getting me around to work and play but I only get a paltry $300 which won’t even cover one month of my new car payment of $400 for a Honda Civic. So really what is my incentive? Now if it was like the USA and I was getting a $3,500 discount off my new car I would say whoa, that pays for 10 months of my new car and maybe my old one would be dead by then anyways.

It is good to see various car companies coming out with incentives above the $300 the government is offering but to make this program a ‘real’ success I would like to see the minimum amount raised to $900 or even $1,200 for each car brought in through the program.

The ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program now renamed CARS was a huge success in the USA because it offered a real, worthwhile incentive to get old cars off the road, now it is time for the Canadian government to step up and offer more to make the Retire your Ride program even more successful.

- A recent study by Shelton Group of Knoxville, Tenn.  helps us understand that a typical ‘green’ consumer might not be that typical at-all.   They surveyed 1,007 people who at least occasionally buy green products.  Many  said they know what they should do to save the planet, but often do not take those actions.  “Most green advertising is created as if there´s one pool of green consumers and they´re all motivated by ´save the planet!´ messaging,” said Suzanne Shelton, whose firm conducted the study. “We need a revolution in this thinking. Not all green consumers are the same, they´re not all motivated by the same messages and they´re not all inclined to buy only green products.”

- NASA and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, or AFOSR, have successfully launched a small rocket using an environmentally-friendly, safe propellant comprised of aluminum powder and water ice, called ALICE.

- Scientists are reporting some unsettling news about homes in the residential areas of California. The typical house there — and probably elsewhere in the country — is an alarming and probably underestimated source of water pollution, according to a new study reported at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.