#59:

This is what I said in my comment #13,

So, correct me if I am wrong, but are we shipping off hazardous waste to the third world (by Asia, I assume that the recycling will happen in India/Bangladesh etc)?

My comment stems from the fact that there are towns in India and Bangladesh where the main source of livelihood are these ship breaking yards where ships are broken down and stripped. From your caustic comment, I get that the idea that the auto recycling industry has nothing in common with ship breaking industry.
So I guess I stand corrected/educated (sort of). Thanks for that.

Gabriel: It's like the Seinfeld episode (the one with the Peterman Reality bus tour) where Elaine has an idea to bake muffins, then slice and sell only the top half. The bottom half would be donated to the homeless, who promptly protest because the muffins are missing their tops.

The rationale was that the cars were bound for the US and they obviously did not want to risk hit with a class action suit, even if they were to donate the cars for charity.

Essentially it was a safety issue. Before donating or selling the cars, they would have had to take apart the cars and essentially put each part of the cars under a microscope and put together the cars again. Even then, without precedence, it would have cost more money to design fool proof tests to re-certify these cars for road use, hence the decision to trash them.

So Mazda was being "socially responsible" or "careful about their finances/image", whichever way you look at it.

Am surprised to get this article in the WSJ now. Looks like the Wired mag feature kinda roused interest in "L'affaire Cougar Ace", more than year and a half after the car carrier flipped on its side.

In a sort of similar incident, a few months ago, close to 500 new BMWs (M3 and 1 series cars) were damaged while being transported on "The Courage". As per this NY Times piece, the value of the totaled cars amounted to $6 million! The difference in this case though was that a good percentage of these cars were "Euro delivery" meaning that customers had paid for their cars, traveled to Munich and taken delivery at the BMW plant itself, driven to the nearest port for shipping (by BMW) to the US. So all BMW had to do is, turn to their insurance company to reimburse the customers or give them new cars. In the case of these now trashed Mazdas, none of those cars had been bought yet by customers.

Another thing that hit me on reading the WSJ times article was this line - Moments later, metal shards -- most no bigger than an ashtray -- sprinkle onto a mountain of scrap near Schnitzer's dock. There, a freighter prepares to take the scrap back to Asia where it will get recycled.

So, correct me if I am wrong, but are we shipping off hazardous waste to the third world (by Asia, I assume that the recycling will happen in India/Bangladesh etc)?