Scrapyards adopt new high-tech ways to dismantle cars

Hanging onthe wall in the offices of Charles Trent, a vehicle-recycling company based in Poole on Britain’s south coast, is a black-and-white photograph from the 1920s. It shows rows of old jalopies piled high in the scrapyard. Marc Trent, Charles’s great-grandson and the firm’s current boss, smiles at the photo and remarks: “those days have long gone.”He is referring to a time when motorists usually had a bit of mechanical nous and used scrapyards as repositories of spare parts when their cars broke down. Customers, spanners in hand, would search for a donor car, negotiate a price, then remove the required component themselves.