State of the Art Comes First The most interesting piece of this story is the

amount of planning involved before the center even broke ground. “We all sat down and asked ourselves, ‘In ten years, what will inhibit our ability to do busi- ness in an eco-friendly environ- ment.’ We see the state of Califor- nia crack down on all of our auto recycler customers for one issue or another. Those established fa- cilities can’t afford to turn back time and add filtration systems to their stormwater drainage or put in concrete, like we started with. Sadly, it’s putting some out of business,” says Churchill. Remarkably, this 20-acre facil- ity consists of 16 acres on con-

tained concrete, and two acres of asphalt for cus- tomer parking. That equals 75,000 tons of concrete costing a cool $1 million, and a cutting-edge storm- water system that actually filters the run off before it enters the outlaying evaporation pond. This design

AUTOMOTIVE RECYCLING • January-February 2019

for the future earned Pacific Auto Recycling a rare “stormwater exemption” from the state of California and never needs to be inspected for its environmental impact because the runoff is 100 percent contained and clean water runs into the pond.

“All of these things we put into action before we opened the doors. We knew in the state of California, it is a fight to stay ahead. All these agencies are make things challenging for recy- clers. We wanted a head start to future regulatory impact.”

Automotive Recyclers As for the automotive recycling

business, they dismantle about 1,000 cars and trucks a year, em-

ploying 15 of the 50 overall staff (25 full-time and 25 part-time). The facility specializes in full-service vehi- cles 2005 to current, and self-service vehicles 2005 and below. If it is a premium car (Lexus, Mercedes and the like), they have a special section for those cars.

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