India makes a move to upgrade its car recycling sector

There will be more than 21 million end-of-life cars in India by 2025. The country’s environment ministry is advocating a ‘high focus’ on recycling in the automotive sector. As a first step, it wants to set up a network of 20 official automotive recyclers across the country.
In order to kick-start car recycling in India, the government is proposing a recycling target of 75% to 90% recycling rate for vehicles, depending on the year of manufacture. This is a drastic change considering India’s vehicle recycling sector mostly consists of small off-the-grid players extracting functioning spare parts. As a result, the official recycling rate is less than 30%.
The government’s draft proposal includes a 3-year action plan and implementation strategy across seven major sectors; automotive, plastic packaging, building and construction, electrical and electronic equipment, solar photovoltaic, steel and aluminium.
India extracts 1580 tonnes worth of raw materials per acre annually. This is ‘significantly higher’ than the world average of 450 tonnes per acre, the environment ministry urges.
Its report underlines that material consumption in India increased from 1.18 billion tonnes in 1970 to seven billion tonnes in 2015. This figure is projected to more than double by 2030.