Green Daily

As environmentalists implore you to "ditch the gas guzzler" for a more eco-friendly vehicle, it's important to stop and think about where that gas guzzler goes once you're finished with it. Will you sell it used so someone else can drive it -- or will it wind up hogging space in a junkyard somewhere? Neither sound particularly appealing from an environmental perspective.

But the good news is that, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, once your car has given up the ghost, there's an 95% it will be recycled. This makes automobiles the most recycled product -- more than anything you put out at the curb, including paper and plastic.
In fact, auto manufacturers have figured out how to recycle an impressive 84% of your car -- though the drive to reuse isn't entirely altruistic. While they'll take the good PR during Earth Month, the real reason car makers have built these high-tech recycling centers is because the raw materials used to make vehicles are becoming increasingly hard to find (and therefore more expensive). So now designers worry about a) how to make the car look good, b) how to make it safe, and c) how it easy it'll be to take about 10, 15, or 20 years down the road when no one wants to drive it anymore. The more pieces the manufacturers can salvage, the less they'll have to spend on new ones.

Fingers crossed, one day it'll too expensive to produce cars that run on gasoline, and we'll start to see some real fuel efficiency standards.