India’s vehicle usage is on an exponential rise, and by the end of 2025, the vehicles over the streets of India would attain a gargantuan count of 20 million.
Under such pressing circumstances, especially in the context of the emission of polluting gases from vehicles running on fossil fuels, the government is desperately seeking to pull out vehicles such as commercial vehicles older than 15 years and passenger vehicles that are more than 20 years old, through its recently announced Vehicle Scrappage Policy, under which these vehicles are mandated to go through fitness and emission tests, failing of which the vehicles will end into the scrap yard for recycling.
Subjecting the old vehicles to recycling offers numerous in terms of financial and environmental perspectives.
One of the immediate benefits of scrapping old vehicles is making a significant reduction in the import of raw materials required in automobile production. As per Forbes (India), in the FY19, India’s domestic supply of metal raw materials was just around 30-35%, the remaining material supply volume was met through import.
In FY2019, India imported nearly 7 million tons of ferrous scrap material. And the import volume will increase 2 fold by the FY2025. Thus, recycling old, unfit vehicles till the end of 2025 will generate enough metal scrap to reduce India’s dependency on metal raw material produce by nearly 5 million tons.
Benefits to consumers
Consumers willing to get their old vehicles recycled can enjoy incentive benefits of around 4-5% on their new vehicle purchase, with the only condition being that the vehicles should be scrapped from a registered scrapping center, and must present the scrapping certificate when making the purchase.
Additionally, the consumers will be offered a rebate of 15-25% over road tax from the respective state governments, and zero charges for new vehicle registration.
Environmental Benefits
India’s National Capital Region records one of the largest landfill spaces, or to be more precise, garbage dumping sites in the world. The beginning of this decade marked the exponential rise of the waste generation capacity in India.
According to the MoHUA's ‘Swachata Sandesh Newsletter,’ around 1.47 lakh metric tons (MT) of solid waste is produced per day as of January 2020, a capacity that would simply double by the end of 2021.
With such whooping figures in place, it is certain that by the end of 2025 we would expand the consumption of land spaces for creating landfill sites by nearly four to fivefold. But here is a way out! By recycling not just metal scrap but almost all types of waste by up to 90%, we can reduce the formation of new landfill sites to a great extent.
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