Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade

by Adam Minter

Meanwhile, up in Detroit, Henry Ford too saw commercial opportunities in abandoned cars. But rather than set up a large-scale burning operation, Ford tried to replicate the success he had with assembly lines by establishing a large-scale disassembly line. The idea was that economies of scale would take care of the profitability issue. So, for example, the seat stuffing from one Ford Model T might be a worthless nuisance, but the stuffing from hundreds might be something that could be sold, or reused in new Model Ts. Ford’s 1934 biographer, Robert Graves, referred to the operation as the “Reincarnation Department,” and during its short life it was apparently a sight to behold: hundreds of men deconstructed hundreds of automobiles per day into their components. There was only one problem: the Reincarnation Department lost lots and lots of money. The economies of scale were real, but so was the cost involved in paying hundreds of men to achieve them. And so, over the course of the 1930s, the Reincarnation Department was slowly laid to rest, piece by piece, line by line, as the business was reclaimed by the scrapyards.