Page 5 - BusinessWest July 7, 2025

An end-of-
life vehicle
is prepped
for recycling
under the
SHiFT Vehicle
Retirement
Initiative.
Staff Photo
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 dis-
mantle 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’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 prac-
tices — 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 envi-
ronmental value and not just treating them like refuse.
“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 vehi-
cles 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 net-
work of more than 1,000 recyclers across the country that are committed to recy-
cling 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 car-
bon-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.
Participating SHiFT partners pick up the vehicle, manage the hazardous mate-
rial, harvest and recondition recyclable parts, and prepare the vehicle hulk for fur-
ther recycling. The engine, though retired as a whole unit, can be disassembled for
Julie M. Quink, CPA and Deborah J. Penzias, CPA
Richard F. Burkhart, CPA and Salvatore J. Pizzanelli, CPA, JD, PFS
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