About us

History

Brown’s Auto Salvage was started in 1976 by Mark and Joan Brown in Bomoseen, Vermont with a mission of providing high quality OEM used auto parts to New England and the U.S. The uniquely self sufficient, hard working and environmentally conscious culture of Vermont has shaped us into the largest and most technologically advanced auto salvage facilities in the state.

Brown’s Auto Salvage has joined PRP Northeast

PRP stands for Premium Recycled Parts, and is based on the idea that the ability to share resources among members would provide a major improvement in how we serve our customers.

Each night we meet and exchange orders with 15 other top salvage yards at a regional concentration location who we have combined inventories with. This allows us to bring you immediate part availability from yards as far as 6.5 hours from our location in Bomoseen.

Each member business adheres to the same high quality and consistent business practices, but members remain individual to guarantee competitive pricing.

Business Practices

To succeed in a competitive field, we needed to differentiate ourselves from the competition. After experiencing the poor service and quality found at the stereotypical junk yard or scrap yard, we realized that there was a high demand for used car parts with the service and quality found at new auto part supply stores. Understanding that more than just price affects a customer’s loyalty, we set out to ensure that the used part buying experience at Brown’s Auto Salvage is easier, more reliable, and a better deal than the experience you would find at a dealership or another salvage yard. How do we do this?

The Vermont Governors Award for Environmental Excellence in Pollution Prevention – Read more on our award.

People

We ensure that our staff’s knowledge goes beyond the automotive and computer expertise needed to find and ship used auto parts nation-wide. They understand how essential a vehicle is to the day to day life of the customers we serve. To ensure customer satisfaction, we strive to apply the practices we used on eBay to achieve 100% positive feedback to all of our customers. This means not only finding the correct year, make and model used part for each customer, but ensuring that we find the correct used part in terms of cost, conditions, and earliest available delivery date for each individual situation.

Used Parts

Service and warranties aside, when you’re buying used auto parts you need to know that the used part you’re buying is of the highest quality. We only seek out late model, low mileage vehicles for parts cars. When vehicles make it to the dismantling process, we ensure all dismantlers have been trained in the proper techniques to remove and clean all used parts. Once removed, all used auto parts are inspected for quality. Body parts such as fenders, hoods, and trunk lids are inspected for dings and dents while mechanical parts such as starter motors, AC compressors and alternators are tested for full functionality. We only allow for unbolted parts on our shelves, no cutoff metal brackets. Finally, when a used auto part is sold, we clean and inspect it again before delivery. Once you have your used part, all parts sold come guaranteed for 90 days.

Environmental Commitment

Auto recycling becomes a very environmentally friendly industry when “green” management practices are employed. When one considers the tremendous volume of vehicles retired each year (more than five million End of Life Vehicles (ELV’s) produced in the United States annually) the need for well managed auto salvage yards becomes clear. For more information on industry-wide practices, what gets recycled, and where the materials go, click here.

At Brown’s Auto Salvage, we utilize a number of practices to protect our local environment. Starting when vehicles arrive at our facility, it is a general rule to report and immediately drain any leaking vehicle. Further on in the process, we make a point to only move vehicles once (to our indoor dismantling facility) before they are drained. This ensures that no accident could cause a fluid spill.

By weight, 75% of a vehicle is recycled, making motor vehicles the most recyclable complex, mass-produced product on earth. When a car is dismantled, we reuse fluids such as windshield washer fluid and anti-freeze. Motor oil is used for heating our facility. Soft interior products like carpeting, rubber, and plastic are recycled into other products such as soda bottles or even the carpeting in your house. Any mechanical parts such as wheel hubs, power steering pumps and axles that do not meet our quality standards are sold to companies that remanufacture them for future resale. Finally, any other metals such as the car body, car doors and wheels are melted down to be used in new metal.

Finally, the way we process and deliver used parts produces as small of an impact on the environment as possible. When the application allows, we use water rather than parts cleaner to wash used parts. To filter the water, it runs through a live bacteria culture designed to feed off the hydrocarbons and other residue. After the bacteria have their fill, clean clear water is pumped back into our system.

Later, in the delivery process, we use recycled packing materials for our shippable used auto parts. If you are within our delivery range, the truck that brings you your used part will even be running on recovered gasoline from ELV’s. At every step of the way, we do our best to reduce the size of our carbon footprint and take every opportunity to do better.