You should see some of the things I see
at the "car shredding" place where I bring a trailer full of dead HVAC units & scrap ductwork after we've accumulated enough for a "dump run" at our shop. I've seen what looks like brand-new fridges, stoves and dishwashers in the scrap piles. Looks like an appliance showroom hit by a tornado. A couple of "dump runs" ago I've seen one of those Samsung fridges that have the window/LCD screen that lets you see what's inside. Those haven't been out for more than a couple years and it was sitting there waiting for the giant claw to scoop it up and put it on the conveyor to be shredded up. A bit further away from where loose/"small" scrap is unloaded (appliances, sheetmetal, structural scrap, etc), you can see all the crushed cars. I've seen cars that could't have been more than five years old in those piles.
Then there's the shredder machine right next to the car pile. It pulverizes scrap metal into baseball-sized chunks, even engines, transmissions, frames and axles. From there the steel fragments are loaded onto a barge and taken to a steel mill (since I'm near the coast in WA, probably somewhere in China) to be melted down. Amazingly, the shredder is pretty quiet considering its massive power and the job it's doing. There's more noise coming from all the cranes, trucks backing up, etc. I have heard that there is considerable noise if something explosive goes through (i.e., a car didn't have its gas emptied out of the tank, a stray propane tank, maybe an airbag) but haven't been around long enough to experience it yet.
