Airbag explosives in steel mill shredding

Brief example of why you can't simply shred automobiles for scrap. Workers have been injured by airbag explosives going off during shredding. ## Cases referenced briefly

Fifteen years ago people were trying to get lead out of solder, and they're still trying to get lead out of solder. I'd go to these conferences and they'd say, we've developed this bismuth alloy. I said that's great — so you're going to start putting pounds of bismuth in every automobile, which means we will no longer be able to recycle steel automobiles. That was dead on arrival, but these metallurgists working on solder didn't know anything about steel making. They didn't realize nobody was going to put bismuth alloys into the soldering on an automobile, because you can't — you'd have to separate the scrap. You can't just shred up the automobile and dump it into the furnace, you'd have to separate it out. We do separate some things — we take out the airbag explosive, because that has killed people in the steel mills when they're shredding and all of a sudden a piece of shrapnel goes through someone's arm. They do some things, but you can't start ripping all the wires out — you couldn't afford to recycle the steel.

---