No Reset, Just Progress: Shannon Nordstrom on ARA’s Second Year

The ARA president reflects on continuity, catalytic converters, data privacy, and why the auto recycling industry still has plenty of stories left to tell.

Shannon Nordstrom, the new President of the Automotive Recyclers Association, has been patient in taking up the position. The South Dakota-based auto recycler and founder of Nordstrom’s Automotive Inc. has been asked to join the association’s leadership for many years, but now, at 56, he has finally said yes.

Portrait of Shannon Nordstrom, President of the Automotive Recyclers Association, wearing a green polo shirt. — Shannon Nordstrom

The timing had to be right for his family, his business, and his own sense of readiness. “If I had said yes at 40, I wouldn’t have had the experiences I have now to lean into,” he says. That deliberateness is very much on display in how Nordstrom is handling the unexpected extension of his presidential term.

A steady hand at the helm

In what would normally be a role for only one year of the five-year commitment to the ARA Executive Committee (EC), circumstances have Shannon now serving as President for two years, as incoming president Sean Krause has stepped back due to extended family commitments, a decision the executive committee handled with characteristic pragmatism. Nordstrom will serve an additional year as president, Eric Wilbert remains on the EC another year as Past president, and 2^nd Vice President Tom Andre extends his role and serves an extra year as budget committee chair. A new member will still join the committee in the fall, preserving the group’s five-person structure. “Special circumstances,” Nordstrom says. “We don’t want to rock the boat too much.”

It is, he insists, a healthy team. And rather than treating the extended tenure as a setback, Nordstrom sees it as an opportunity to deepen the work already underway. Chief among his priorities is modernizing ARA’s internal infrastructure, a less glamorous but foundational undertaking. The association’s website has been rebuilt and is now integrated with its CRM system at a much deeper level. Meetings are running more efficiently. “We’ve put some work into the infrastructure of ARA right off the bat,” he says. Executive Director Vince Edivan, now entering his second year, has been central to that effort.

Nordstrom is also quick to frame the presidency not as a solo endeavor but as a collective one. “We work as an executive committee, as a concert, not as soloists,” he says, a phrase that captures both his leadership philosophy and his genuine ease with collaborative decision-making, something learned after many years managing his yard.

It is a disposition forged over decades: growing up on a South Dakota farm where dairy, crops, and car salvage coexisted in what he fondly calls “an incubator of wildness”; attending his first ARA convention in Denver in 1996 and finding a community of peers willing to answer every question he asked; and slowly building a business, now employing 80 people, that has become a reference point for the region.

Policy priorities at home and abroad

On the policy front, one issue dominates Nordstrom’s agenda: the legal status of reclaimed catalytic converters in the United States. Under current Environmental Protection Agency guidance, written before the advent of onboard diagnostics, recyclers cannot legally resell used catalytic converters. It is a restriction that Nordstrom views as not only outdated but actively harmful to consumers. “When a customer went to fix their car, it was costing them $5,000 to $7,000, and they couldn’t use a used part they could have gotten for $750,” he says. With OBD-II systems now capable of verifying emissions performance, he believes the regulatory case for the blanket prohibition has collapsed. The vehicles can test themselves with simple on-board diagnostics accessible via a simple scan; the solution is already in the car. He cites companies such as. Getting the rules changed is, he says, something he intends to accomplish before his time in office is done.

Internationally, Nordstrom is engaged and curious. A visit to the UK last year, his first, left an impression, particularly around data privacy practices embedded into the vehicle handover process. In Europe, GDPR has driven manufacturers to build factory reset functions directly into cars, which can be used to wipe data before a part-exchange is complete. In the US, he notes that conversation is only just beginning, as it does in California, with so much automotive regulation. “It starts there, but it’s being talked about,” he says. “That’s getting back to what the trade association does, you’re constantly meeting people, constantly learning.”

That sense of cross-border learning is something Nordstrom wants to amplify during his tenure. He is eyeing a return visit to the UK this autumn and hopes to strengthen the links between ARA and its international counterparts, links that figures like Terry Charlton in the UK helped forge a generation ago. The nomination committee, led by Wilbert, is currently identifying candidates for the new board of directors, with slots spanning regional, international, and at-large representation. The fall convention in Atlanta will be the next milestone.

Changing perceptions of auto recycling

Away from the committee room, Nordstrom has been hosting a nationally syndicated radio show, Under the Hood, since 1990, now reaching around 50,000 podcast downloads a month and expanding onto YouTube. It is a detail that surprises few who have seen him speak: articulate, disarming, and entirely at home in front of an audience. The confidence, he says, traces back to Future Farmers of America contests in high school, where extemporaneous speaking was a competitive sport. “Those tools, I did not realize how valuable they would be as our lives went on.”

For an industry that still battles misconceptions, the junkyard stigma has not entirely disappeared. Nordstrom represents a different kind of ambassador: one who can walk a bank’s board of directors around his facility and leave them saying it is the most impressive operation they have toured in years. The stories matter, he believes, because they change minds. And with another year in the chair, he has more of them still to tell.