Westover Auto Salvage Continues to Evolve Its Recycling Efforts
Shifting into a Different Gear
CEO Brian Bachand
As he walked with BusinessWest in the large lot behind Westover Auto Salvage in Belchertown, CEO Brian Bachand was quick to explain that he doesn’t care for the word ‘junkyard.’
That’s because handling these vehicles — and there may be between 1,500 and 2,000 here at any given time — involves layers of purposeful processing to extract — and, hopefully, sell — as many useful parts as possible before they’re crushed or otherwise disposed of, and doing it in an environmentally sound manner.
“We pride ourselves in selling used parts, but we’re actually selling relationships and experience, going the extra mile to take care of the customers,” he explained. “We try to do everything in a clean, eco-friendly way. Everything you see back here, there’s an outlet and opportunity for it. All the fluids that we drain from the vehicles are reused or repurposed. We filter the gasoline to use in our delivery trucks, and we use the oil to heat our buildings. It’s about sustainability and promoting the circular economy model.”
That’s especially true with Westover’s recent adoption of the SHiFT Vehicle Retirement Initiative, a global enterprise that helping consumers and companies recycle end-of-life vehicles with environmentally responsible protocols.
SHiFT was founded to address the environmental concerns associated with end-of-life vehicles and their impact on greenhouse gas emissions. The program partners with automotive recycling facilities across the U.S. to process and dismantle vehicles in accordance with strict environmental safeguards while also ensuring reusable components are made available for sale to consumers — all while ensuring these cars don’t end up back on the roads or shipped to landfills in third-world countries.
“The ShiFT initiative is an eco-friendly alternative to just recycling or junking your car, so to speak,” Bachand said, explaining that participants in the program must be certified by the national Automotive Recyclers Assoc.
“It was really intriguing to me to figure out what we do with vehicles when they’re truly at the end of life and how we turn that into environmental value and not just treating them like refuse.”
“It’s a rigorous program, and you have to be vetted. A third party comes in and audits our whole operation to make sure we’re following best management practices — what our layout looks like, stormwater permitting, where all our fluids are going, how our processes are vetted out back,” he explained.
“We’re one of only four certified auto recyclers in the state of Massachusetts, but one of only two high-voltage certified recyclers in the state. That was, again, done by a third-party auditor that made sure we have the proper tools, proper training, and only trained techs are allowed to touch high-voltage vehicles.”
Chapin Griffith, who heads up SHiFT, was formerly Amazon’s senior product manager of delivery fleet remarketing, developing its nationwide vehicle retirement service and end-of-life-cycle strategies and helping scale that practice area into a $100 million business, enabling the retirement of more than 20,000 end-of-life vehicles annually.
“The SHiFT program was actually in its infantile stages before I joined,” Griffith told BusinessWest. “It was really intriguing to me to figure out what we do with vehicles when they’re truly at the end of life and how we turn that into environmental value and not just treating them like refuse.
An end-of-life vehicle is prepped for recycling under the SHiFT Vehicle Retirement Initiative.
“If end-of-life vehicles are not tracked, they can end up in a landfill or in a yard — like in someone’s backyard or side yard — and kind of just rot. And the fluids and leakage and battery can have negative impacts from just sitting and leaching into groundwater,” he explained. “And then, it’s estimated that up to 30% of vehicles are exported to other countries when they reach end of life in the U.S.”
Griffith’s vision for SHiFT is to reduce the export and outflow of vehicles and engines that end up outside the control of U.S. emissions policy.
“SHIFT is unique in that it’s the only program in the U.S. that guarantees the engine will be fully retired,” he added. “So you can count on that carbon reduction, that carbon negation, because that engine will stop producing whatever its carbon output is at that point.”
A Greener Solution
In partnership with the Automotive Recyclers’ Assoc., SHiFT connects a network of more than 1,000 recyclers across the country that are committed to recycling SHiFT vehicles in a way that achieves the best environmental outcome. To date, almost 36,000 cars have been retired, resulting in more than 477,000 tons of carbon reduced, the program claims.
To participate in SHiFT, recyclers — who receive these cars at a lower cost than they typically would — sign affidavits and agree to retire and recycle the carbon-emitting internal combustion engines. This means the engine cannot be sold whole to be put into another car, but recyclers can still profit off of the recycled engine components.
Chapin Griffith
“It was really intriguing to me to figure out what we do with vehicles when they’re truly at the end of life and how we turn that into environmental value and not just treating them like refuse.”
Participating SHiFT partners pick up the vehicle, manage the hazardous material, harvest and recondition recyclable parts, and prepare the vehicle hulk for further recycling. The engine, though retired as a whole unit, can be disassembled for parts harvesting in order to get the most use out of already manufactured products.
Both Griffith and Bachand emphasized that the program is totally voluntary and doesn’t involve a mandated destruction timeframe like the 2009 government program called the Car Allowance Rebate System. Cash for Clunkers, as it was known colloquially, was controversial for several reasons, including doubts about environmental benefit in that many of the cars weren’t at end of life, and were immediately replaced with new purchases, which also spiked used car prices.
“The government’s not involved, we are not mandated to crush the car within 60 days like Cash for Clunkers, and we’re not destroying any of the parts,” Bachand said. “We cannot sell the motor out of the vehicle because the whole point of the program is reducing carbon footprint and lowering emissions.
“By taking these vehicles in, we’re still promoting the circular economy because, even though it’s a SHiFT car and I can’t sell that motor as a running, driving motor, I can still sell parts of that vehicle, so I can still keep people up and running. There’s still other drive train elements that I can sell off — whereas, with Cash for Clunkers, you were mandated to crush it. They destroyed the motors before we even got them, and that really crippled the auto recycling industry; there were fewer parts available.”
Griffith noted that vehicles can be 90% recyclable when recycled properly. Meanwhile, hybrids in particular are full of rare earth materials, which is a booming industry right now. But in the end, the most significant benefit of SHiFT is its environmental impact.
“We can count the carbon negation from those engines coming off the road. One of the value propositions that we have for fleets is that we can help them meet their internal or sanctioned carbon-counting goals by committing these engines to be retired and doing that accounting for them.”
Recycling businesses benefit as well. “We can increase their increase their net volume just by capturing more vehicles, especially the ones that would be leaving the country and going overseas anyhow,” Griffith added. “The auto recyclers get competitive pricing on these scrap vehicles and can make a fair margin for themselves. But then two good environmental things happen: the vehicle is recycled to a very high degree of sustainability, and the engine is retired.”
Living the Dream
Bachand said his father, Paul, grew up wanting to own a salvage yard, so Westover Auto Salvage, which he opened in Belchertown in 1994, was the culmination of a dream. And even though he earned an accounting degree at Western New England University, joining — and eventually leading — the company has been Brian’s dream as well, if only in that he gets to work every day with his father.
“This was just an open field with 50 cars,” he told BusinessWest as he pointed out the large lot where many of hundreds of cars now sit, at various stages of recycling and parts resale. “We take between six to nine months to see what the car has yielded in terms of profit. If it’s worth saving because of the type of vehicle or the parts still left on it, maybe it’ll sit longer on the lot.
“Once it comes to the end-of-life stage, we pull it out of storage from out back and put it in our holding lot for crushed cars, and that’s when we do the penny pinching,” he went on. “Every piece of wire comes out of it, and we separate those metals accordingly; copper goes in one bin, aluminum in the other, whatever we can sell. We pull the dash out to just try to get that last bit of money off of the car.”
Brian Bachand with his father, Paul Bachand, who started the business 31 years ago.
The market for reselling parts ranges from people repairing fender benders to young people buying their first used car and wanting to save a buck, as well as repair shops, the collision industry, and even yard-to-yard sales. “There’s other recyclers like us that do the same thing. So if they don’t have a part, they’ll buy it from us. And we do the same thing to connect our customers with the proper part.”
Both Bachand and his father serve on the board of directors of Automotive Recyclers of Massachusetts, which advocates for a more sustainable, eco-friendly industry. And the business stays connected to the local community in different ways; for instance, it will host a training exercise for local firefighters this fall by lighting an electric vehicle on fire.
Meanwhile, Westover’s sustainability efforts extend to a planned solar canopy that will one day cover the vast parking area, generating power for a low-income housing project in the planning stages in town.
Westover employs around 25 people, Bachand said, and perhaps his son will one day be among them. “He’s here in the summer. He’s 10 years old, but he wants to pull cars apart, so I’m taking time to train him.
“We’re a small, family-owned business, and that’s what we remind ourselves,” he added. “As big as we want to grow, we still want to take care of each individual person. You’re buying into our experience. We’re here to take care of you.”
