It’s a nondescript building and yard on the Fraser Highway in Langley Township you’d pass without a second glance but, since 1963, Dharney’s Salvage & Enterprise Ltd. has set the standard for automobile salvage yards in B.C. and beyond.
In the coming month or so, this remarkable family business run by three brothers is set to close its yard doors for good.
“We’re retiring out of the business,” eldest brother Nicol Dharney said. “We’re all healthy and we’re all exiting out while we’re still alive.”
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Nicol Dharney in action at Dharney’s Salvage in Langley, BC. July 12, 2018.
Well-connected
If you think they’re getting out of the salvage business because it’s not viable in the 21st century internet age, you’d be wrong. In fact, the advent of the World Wide Web made scrap yards like Dharney’s more viable and relevant than ever.
There are currently more than 50 such auto salvage yards between Vancouver and Chilliwack, and while some older ones in urban areas have closed down, that’s not due to a changing business environment. Instead, it’s because of the price of land. But the demand for used auto parts isn’t going away any time soon, so salvage yards are still a going concern, if less visible in metropolitan areas.
“As long as you salvage late-model stuff, there’s still a good living to be made,” said Veer Dharney, at age 60 the youngest of the Dharney brothers. He does foresee a time when their property will be swallowed up by encroaching residential development, but that’s still a decade away, he figures. He estimates the current land value of the 3.5-acre property in the $1.5-million per acre ballpark.
Steve Fletcher, managing director of the Automotive Recyclers of Canada, said that because many auto recyclers are second-, third- and even fourth-generation family businesses that urban areas have grown up around, their property value has increased substantially over the years.
“I wouldn’t say that it is a trend that auto recyclers are moving from urban to rural areas, but it is happening,” Fletcher said. “I would say that consolidation is occurring in the industry and the real estate value versus the operational value would be one factor.”
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Satish, Veer and Nicol Dhaney (l-r) with Rick Baird in action at Dharney’s Salvage in Langley, BC. July 12, 2018.
He added that as long as there are cars on the road there will be a need for auto recyclers. There will be fewer auto recyclers in the future, he said, but those left will be stronger, more nimble and smarter.
“Those products need to have a proper reuse and burial and end-of-life,” he said. “The parts on a car are more valuable than in the past, the materials in a car are more valuable, and auto recyclers provide a required service.”
“It’s become very high-tech,” Veer explained. “Right now you can go to car-part.com and it will cover 3,000 auto wrecker yards in North America, including us.
“We’ve got a hundred thousand parts in the warehouse and everyone in North America can look at those parts now.”
Before car-part.com came on the scene, Dharney’s connected with customers across the continent using Teletype machines.
For a so-called “end-of-life” business, the three Dharney brothers and a handful of employees have made tidy work of running a successful automobile salvage company for over half-a-century.
“You buy a car new, you drive it and when you are done with it, it comes to people like us and we are able to sell parts off it,” explained Nicol. “People who own an older car and can’t afford a new one, these parts allow them to continue to drive their car.”
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Rick Baird in action at Dharney’s Salvage in Langley, BC. July 12, 2018. T
So in many ways, Dharney’s Salvage & Enterprise Ltd. was a recycling company before recycling was a thing. It says so right on their business card: “The Original Recyclers.”
It all started back in 1963 when their father, Oam, and their mother, Linda, “started from zero” on the three-and-a-half acres he owned between the Fraser Highway and Old Yale Road.
“My dad just started bringing stuff onto the property,” said Nicol, of the land still used to this day for the business. “We were farmland, there was no zoning. There was just barb-wire fences and cow shit.”
That “stuff” was simply scrap metal from crushed cars.
“We’d load up our truck and take them to places with scales and sold the steel, copper and brass,” Nicol explained. “And they actually carved out a living doing this.”
That business model soon evolved — “there was better money in car parts,” noted Nicol — with father and young sons taking parts off scrapped cars and delivering them to repair shops throughout the Lower Mainland.
“Our dad started us out just as kids, and we’d work seven days a week, seven in the morning to 11 at night for about 10 years or so,” said Nicol. “Somewhere along the way Dad said, ‘Well, let’s take Sunday off.’”
‘Not a Junkyard’
Drive by one of the automobile salvage yards in Metro Vancouver and you might think “environmental nightmare.” But you’d be wrong.
“We’re not the oil-spilling dump-stuff-in-the-ground salvage yard people might associate with this type of business,” said Nicol of that stigma. “And we’re also not a ‘junkyard.’”
Stringent environmental rules for Canadian scrap yards came into effect around the turn of the century, and the brothers admit that many operators had been playing fast and loose with pollution control leading up to that point. But not them.
“The reason that our ground was well-preserved from the day my father started is that we dug our water well back where the cars are,” said Nicol. “(Middle brother) Tish and I hand dug the well 40-feet deep with my dad and we struck the top edge of the Hopington Aquifer. And that’s been our drinking water for 48 years.
“So we didn’t dump stuff in the ground because of that.”
Indeed, walk Dharney’s yard and you’ll be struck out how clean and tidy everything is, from the ground to the neat rows of vehicles. Likewise, the floor-to-ceiling-packed warehouse resembles an Ikea storeroom in its organization.
Not surprisingly, when Environment Canada set out to establish a code of practice for scrapyards, they sought out Dharney’s. Veer served on the Environment Canada board that designed the regulations for automotive recyclers, that have been in place for some 15 years now.
“We remove all the gas, the oil, the Freon, the mercury switches. All 500 cars back there right now are ‘environmentally dry,’” he explains.
The Automotive Recyclers of Canada’s Fletcher noted that the current regulations should help ensure that the land is clean enough for another use outside of auto recycling.
“Those regulatory efforts came out of B.C., so businesses like Dharney’s have been at the forefront in managing their business rather than running like the old days,” he noted.
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Scrap cars at Dharney’s Salvage in Langley, BC. July 12, 2018.
The Science of Salvage
To the average person, the business of a salvage yard seems pretty simple. You buy old vehicles and sell parts off them.
But Nicol, with nearly six decades of experience, reckons there’s a science to the art of salvage.
“It’s nice to buy a car that has been hit on the side, because front-end and rear-end parts are always in demand because of the number of nose to tail accidents. Grilles, bumpers, lights, those are the most popular things. Driver’s sides get hit more, so you sell more left-hand doors than you do right.”
They buy most of the vehicles from ICBC auctions, held three times a week in Abbotsford and Annacis Island, and Veer said the best moneymakers are trucks.
“A truck could be 10 years old but still worth $15,000 to $20,000. So if it gets hit, ICBC will spend money to fix it rather than scrap it.”
Dharney’s deals almost exclusively with domestic vehicles because there are just so many models out there and only space for 500 vehicles in their yard at any given time.
Veer said about 80 per cent of their business is wholesale delivery, meaning Metro Vancouver repair shops will call up in search of a part required to fix a vehicle and Dharney’s will either run it out or the shop will have the part picked up. The remaining 20 per cent is the so-called “one-off” customer who is looking for a specific, most likely hard-to-find, older part for a vehicle they are restoring or keeping on the road.
They’ve never been a “pick-a-part” operation — where a customer is let loose in the back lot with tools in search of a specific part — however they will allow customers, under supervision, to go out and forage a part. Said Veer: “We’ll feel them out and if they seem OK to us we’ll let them do that.”
Parting out the Past
The Dharney patriarch died in 1973, when eldest son Nicol was just 19, so in many ways it was the second generation that established this business into a thriving success through hard work and street smarts.
Oam is the Sanskrit word for God, and he used that symbol on the company trucks.
“Dad was East Indian — I can use that word because I’m half East Indian — and mum was English-Irish-Scottish-Welsh and from the Prairies,” Nicol said proudly. “So we’re a Heinz 57…and we love it.”
Two families have lived and been raised in the house on the property that Oam and his sons built. The brothers have two sisters, but neither of them worked in the family business, opting instead for banking and health care. Likewise, all the brothers’ children have found careers outside the yard.
Veer said that’s by design as the brothers’ plan was always to sell the business to fund their respective retirements, so they discouraged their kids from taking over the business.
They said the only downside of selling is the effect it will have on their longtime employee Rick Baird, who has been with them for 32 years. Said Veer, “He’s just a super loyal guy who treated this place like it was his own.”
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Rick Baird in action at Dharney’s Salvage in Langley, BC. July 12, 2018.
At the height of operation the yard had nine full-time employees, but now it’s just the brothers and Rick, a deliberate downsizing in light of the for sale sign on the business.
“Now that we’re winding down, its just Veer and I out here dismantling the cars,” said the 65-year old Nicol.
Asked how he and his brothers have remained so fit in what is a business that is typically hard on the body, he said, “We’ve all been vegetarians all our lives. Never eaten any meat or eggs.”
As to their pending retirement, Veer and Nicol have some ideas.
“Having your own business it is hard to get away, so I hope to travel,” said Veer, adding driving around Tuscany in a small Fiat is high on the list.
As to Nicol? “I’d like to fly planes a little more. Scuba dive a little more. But the very first thing I’m going to do is walk on the beach and climb the Grouse Grind (which he’s done over 400 times.)
“And I want to study metaphysics more. I’ve been studying it for 40 years and there is so much more to learn.”
Told you this place is worth a second glance.
amccredie@postmedia.com
Automotive recycling facts
• Over 80 per cent of the entire vehicle by weight is reused, re-manufactured or recycled.
• Recycled parts save an estimated 80 million barrels of oil annually that would be required to produce new replacement parts.
• Auto recycling provides about 40 per cent of the ferrous metal for the scrap processing industry across North America.
• There’s enough mercury in one little switch to contaminate a 20-acre lake.
Source: Automotive Recyclers of Canada
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