Recovery of resources from end-of-life passenger cars in the informal sector in India

Sustainable management of vehicles at their end-of-life stage (ELVs) offers a significant potential for resource recovery by closing the material loop and thus contributes to dealing with scarcity of resources. Although ELVs till date in countries like India are considered as waste and not as secondary resource material (SRM), but, if used judiciously, may obviate the extraction of primary or virgin materials. Although policymakers have focused on ways to ensure higher resource efficiency in the automobile sector, research on the role of the informal sector in recovering useful materials and parts from ELVs is limited. The present study examines the current situation of ELV processing at Mayapuri scrap market, one of the largest informal markets for ELVs in Asia wherein, mass-balance approach is used to examine how hatchback cars are disposed. A conceptual framework depicting process flow and the interactions between the multiple stakeholders involved in this sector has been developed. Further, approximately 7% of aluminium and 76% of iron, by weight, were recovered from the sampled hatchback cars. These results were used for estimating the potential to recycle and to recover useful materials from ELVs that are processed by the informal sector in India. Under the business-as-usual scenario, the estimates show that the sector can recover about 0.34 million tonnes of aluminium and 4.03 million tonnes of iron by 2030. These figures indicate the huge potential of this sector in a circular economy and highlight the need to make operations in this sector more formal and to include informal players in the value chain to address the scarcity of these resource. (c) 2020 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.