Scrap Cars and Junk Car Removal Blog News

Retire Your Ride Redux

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Canada’s national Retire Your Ride program was a qualified success in ridding our nation of more than 130,000 junk cars, surpassing their stated goals of 50,000 cars annually.  This equated to the reduction of 4700 tons of harmful particulate emissions, a major contributor of global warming.  Operating just over two years, the program has been credited with removing many 1995 and older vehicles, which generate nearly 20 times the pollutants than 2004 or newer cars.  Stricter controls and government regulations were enacted in 1996 and further tightened in 2004 to meet emissions standards.   Therefore it was logical to set the cut-off date for vehicle eligibility to 1995 and older, to maximize clean air benefits.

Once a vehicle was registered in the scrap car program, they were sent to a Retire Your Ride recycler.  They followed strict environmental protocols to ensure that the maximum amount of scrap metals and fluids could be reclaimed.  Not only was negative impact to our air and water resources minimized, but it also reduced our need to produce new car parts.

Just because the program ended, it does not mean that we cannot continue to scrap junk cars in a responsible manner.  This is particularly important in high population city centres, where cars, buses and trucks remain the number one source of smog pollution.  Ensuring that our cars do not languish in landfills and contaminants from being leached into the ground, water and air will provide our future generations with a healthy environment.

Here are the results of the Retire Your Ride Program, running from January 2009 to March 2011:

We can see that Ontario's scrap car removal accounted for 37% of the national total.