A CITY in China is believed to be home to the world’s biggest car graveyard where mountains of old bangers are binned – among the whopping two million vehicles scrapped in the country every year.
In the city of Hangzhou, hundreds of thousands of cars, motorbikes, and lorries have been left to rot in a giant heap in a bid to cut pollution levels.
Hangzhou’s junkyard has formed an endless sea of metalRex
Mountains of cars have been left to litter the landscapeRex
It has formed a rotting heap that nature has began to grow withinRex
The shocking scrap pile is home to over 100,000 vehicles that didn’t meet the national emissions standard and have since been taken off the road.
The car graveyard, which is believed to potentially be the biggest in the world, is jam-packed with colourful cars as the heap slowly creeps higher into the air.
Statistics show China had 260 million vehicles on the road as of 2019, and according to what is known as the international average scrap ratio, 9.1 million of those vehicles are classed as obsolete, according to Auto Recycling World.
China also reportedly recycled 202,000 junk vehicles in 2019, up 16 percent from the year prior, according to data from the Ministry of Commerce.
The recycled motor vehicles included 171,000 cars and 31,000 motorcycles, according to a statement on the ministry’s website.
During the first five months, China recycled 878,000 scrapped motor vehicles, including 735,000 cars and 143,000 motorbikes.
However, a shocking 1.95 million vehicles were scrapped in 2020.
Electric vehicles (EVs) now make up a growing proportion of car graveyards with at least half a dozen appearing in Chinese cities since 2019.
Haunting images from an EV dump also in Hangzhou shows that some of the cars have been sitting in the heap for so long that plants have begun sprouting from the boots.
Several others have been abandoned in such a hurry that small toys still remain stuck to the dashboards.
There are now around 100 Chinese electric car makers, down from roughly 500 in 2019, Bloomberg reports.
Hundreds of ride-hailing companies were created in the past decade, taking advantage of government incentives.
But when those were cut in 2019, several went under and had to ditch their fleet of vehicles.
According to Wonderful Engineering, there is a car between every two people in the small city of Hangzhou.
And this increasing number of cars has contributed to the number of junkyards popping up across China as well as the rapid rise of China’s EV industry.
As new and better models were quickly being rolled out from several manufacturers, existing vehicles soon became outdated.
Instead of selling the obsolete models into the second-hand market, it was easier to just dump them in an empty field.
Local media reports claim that the government of Hangzhou had vowed to dispose of the cars, which started to accumulate in 2019.
Over 100,000 useless vehicles are piled highRex
Despite promises to clear it, the graveyard continues to growRex
The sheer scale of the abandoned cars is shockingRex