What's not to love about a machine that can chew up a Camry and spit it out as metal confetti in less than two minutes? The largest mega-shredder ever — located in Newport, Wales — can digest 450 cars an hour. At its heart is a 9,200-hp motor driving a gauntlet of rollers and hammers that swallow 3,000 tons of metal a day. All that scrap gets shipped to steelworks, where it's reincarnated as SUVs or stoves or shopping carts. The recycling operation saves enough energy in steel production to power about 82,000 UK households. Here's how the breakdown process breaks down.

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Scan Some 4,000 trucks and 200 railcars deliver vehicles and other metal objects to the shredder each month. At the entrance, each load passes through a series of RadComm RC2000 scanners to check for radioactivity. Dismantle Workers remove tires, batteries, plastic bumpers, and catalytic converters by hand and deploy airbags with remote-control detonators. Drain The vehicles are then raised on a hydraulic lift and manually drained of oil and engine coolant. Workers puncture the gas tank with a brass-tipped punch (spark-resistant!) to empty it of fuel.

Shred Twenty half-ton hammers, attached to an axle spinning at around 425 rpm, pulverize the flattened metal into softball-sized bits. Flatten At the end of the belt, the cars are fed between two 10-foot-wide ribbed steel rollers that crush and flatten the bodies. Deliver A crane places the stripped carcasses onto a 144-foot inclined conveyor belt, which carries them up to the mouth of the shredder.

Sort Nine-foot-wide drum magnets grab the steel, while centrifugal fans weed out foam, cloth, and rubber. An alternating magnetic field kicks nonferrous metals out of the debris. Pick The steel scrap continues along to the picking shed, where workers remove any remaining nonferrous metals (mainly copper wiring wrapped around electric motor armatures). Ship Small cranes load railcars and trucks, while a massive 600-ton gantry crane fills cargo ships — some with 30,000-ton capacities — bound for steelworks around the world.

Illustration: Thomas Porostocky