Steel Scrap Recycling Policy

Imagine an enormous number of Indian steel plants, 47 electric arc furnaces and 1,128 induction furnaces as of the policy's 2019 baseline, all depending heavily on scrap metal as raw material, yet with no organised, safety-regulated national scrap collection and processing system, mirroring exactly the kind of informal, unregulated collection challenge covered under the kabadiwala waste paper network elsewhere on this site, but for steel scrap rather than paper. The Steel Scrap Recycling Policy, issued by the Ministry of Steel in November 2019, exists specifically to formalise exactly this scrap collection and processing chain.

The policy specifically promotes establishing organised metal scrapping centres for scientific processing and recycling of ferrous scrap collected from vehicles, machinery, construction demolition and other sources, converting what had often been informal, sometimes hazardous scrap dismantling into a genuinely regulated, safety-compliant industrial process.

This policy connects directly to the Vehicle Scrappage Policy covered under Automobiles: Four-Wheelers and Two-Wheelers elsewhere on this site, and to the Registered Vehicle Scrapping Facilities, RVSFs, covered elsewhere on this site, both feed directly into this same steel scrap supply chain, an end-of-life vehicle dismantled at an RVSF generates genuine scrap steel that, if properly processed under this policy's framework, can flow directly back into electric arc and induction furnace steel production.

The genuine goal underlying this policy is reducing India's steel industry's dependence on both imported scrap and the raw material inputs, iron ore and coking coal, that DRI and blast furnace production require, covered elsewhere on this site, a domestically sourced, well-organised scrap supply chain represents a genuinely lower-emissions, lower-import-dependence pathway to steel production, exactly the kind of circular economy approach increasingly central to the broader green steel transition covered elsewhere on this site.