Wrecking yard
place for storage and dismantling of used vehicles

A wrecking yard (Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian English) known as a scrapyard (Irish, British, and South African English) or junkyard (American English), is a business that dismantles wrecked or decommissioned vehicles. Its usable parts are sold for vehicle repairs, while unusable metal parts are sold to recycling companies. Other terms include wreck yard, wrecker's yard, salvage yard, breaker's yard, dismantler, and scrapheap. In the UK, Ireland and South Africa, car salvage yards are called car breakers, and motorcycle salvage yards are called bike breakers. In Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, they are often referred to as wreckers.
Types of wreck yards
Automobile wreck yards are the most common type, but junkyards for motorcycles, bicycles, trucks, buses, small airplanes, boats, and trains also exist.
Scrapyard
A scrapyard is a recycling center that buys and sells various types of scrap metal, including iron, steel, stainless steel, brass, copper, aluminum, zinc, nickel, and lead. They may also purchase electronics, appliances, and metal vehicles. Scrapyards sell their metal accumulations to refineries or larger scrap brokers. Metal theft is a common issue, as thieves may steal valuable metals like copper to sell to scrapyards.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Wrecking yard” as place for storage and dismantling of used vehicles. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as place for storage and dismantling of used vehicles. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1230600. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wrecking yard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.