Hidden in plain sight in the Pinelands, Wade’s Salvage in Atco is no ordinary junkyard. It’s where the grittiness of recycling converges with the glamour of filmmaking.  

A longstanding waste management facility, the yard is an essential South Jersey service. It’s the place not too far off major roads where you can get rid of trash unfit for the recycling bins, like old appliances, wrecked cars and bundles of tangled electronic wire. 

Wade’s has supplied props used to make the most riveting and scary scenes of alien invasions, post-apocalyptic zombie encounters and car crashes.

While much of the junk eventually gets recycled or scrapped, some of it may have an entirely different fate. It could turn up as the perfect scene-stealing prop in a movie or TV show.

“Anytime anyone wants to film a crash scene on the East Coast they contact us,” says Gregory Sharp, Wade’s facilities manager and nephew of owner Andy Wade. “We’re the only place you can get aircraft or pretty much any vehicles, probably east of Arizona.”

It’s much more than the hundred-plus decommissioned Air Force bombers, jets and helicopters that make Wade’s indispensable to New Jersey’s growing film industry. Since it first took a star turn in the 1983 movie “Eddie and the Cruisers,” Wade’s has supplied props used to make the most riveting and scary scenes of alien invasions, post-apocalyptic zombie encounters and car crashes, including  2007’s “The Invasion” and 2009’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” Recently, that list has grown to include airplane parts for NBC’s “Manifest” and “The Blacklist,” cars for “The Penguin,” an upcoming TV series based on the DC Universe villain, as well as a whole variety of metallic waste for the recently released spinoff “The Walking Dead: Dead City.”

The ever-growing inventory of cast-away junk includes hundreds of non-functioning automobiles, buses, tractors and subway cars. It’s all in varying stages of decay with weeds growing around and through it. Spread amidst the more run-of-the-mill trash, the effect of all the grounded motorized vehicles is both beautiful and eerie. Wade’s is a favorite spot for photographers to take artsy shots, although the business itself does not have a website or Instagram account where you can easily find them. 

The most significant shooting in recent years was for the soon-to-be-released first season of a post-apocalyptic Amazon Prime series “Fallout,” which is based on the popular role-playing video game. Although producers initially contacted Wade’s with the intention of shipping props to its upstate New York studio, after scouting out the yard and seeing all it had to offer, they ultimately decided to move the entire production to the salvage yard for 3 days of filming last summer. 

But even before that could happen, a crew spent about a month on the grounds constructing an intricate tunnel hideout made almost entirely with existing junk. “They basically built a huge frame with heavy wire and then placed a lot of junk on top,” says Sharp.

The tunnel is still there, left completely intact, he notes. However, the opening was sealed off and covered with a tarp. 

“We’re not supposed to reveal it until the show comes out,” he says, noting that the game plan is for the film crew to return to shoot future seasons of the show. 

For this latest production, trailers lined up for 3 blocks along Jackson Avenue, he says, effectively shutting it down over the 3 days. Drones as big as helicopters shot footage from overhead while hundreds of people milled around the grounds, including actors, production crews and extras. The film brought in $2.6 million of business to the area, according to Steven Gorelick, executive director of the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission, which helps promote movie making in the state.

It was the first of many times Gorelick has visited Wade’s to help with filming and thought that the yard would be a fascinating subject for a film or series. It’s not just the rags-to-movie-riches storyline that’s intriguing, says Gorlick. The way Wade’s evolved from junk collection and disposal into an indispensable stop for movie props, the sheer size and scope of junk collection and even the day-to-day business of junk removal plays out like a TV or film script, he says. 

“I have always told Andy he needs to have his own reality show,” says Gorelick. 

To spend any time with Sharp, Wade, his Aunt Pearl (also in the business) and others in their element is to see how any reality scripts would easily write themselves. There would have to be an episode about how Wade’s, started by Andy’s grandfather Edward, evolved from a gas station and auto repair garage in the post-World War II era into a bustling salvage yard in the 1970s.

As Andy Wade tells it, he was still in high school when he convinced his father to branch into military contracts for decommissioned aircrafts. For about $40, the two bought the first of hundreds of military vehicles at the then-operating Naval Air Station. After winning the bid, they figured out how to transport the massive crafts to the 12-acre property.

“I just got intrigued by buying scrap airplanes,” says Wade, currently the deputy mayor of Waterford Township, noting some of the gems in the collection include an F-86 Sabre jet from the Korean War and other relics from World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars. 

“One time I bought 10 airplanes at one time,” Wade says. “It was like taking home an entire parking lot of decommissioned airplanes. It took us 9 months to chop them up and bring them back here to unload. That was intense.”

Filmmaker Michael DeRocher is among the people who have heard their fair share of stories about the aircrafts, how they were acquired and adventures in shipping them to movie sets. The filmmaker got his fill while working as a production manager for “Fallout,” and was at the yard every day during the construction of the junk tunnel. 

In June, he returned to Wade’s with his own camera crew to interview Wade, Sharp and the rest of the cast of characters. His plan is to use the footage to sell producers on the idea of making a reality TV show about Wade’s world.

“It’s very current in the sense that we all have concerns about the environment and see the effects of climate change,” DeRocher says. “Here is this interesting family that can help us reimage trash and how it can be reused. They’re dealing with all the stuff we throw away.”