How to bury our vehicles?

Every year in India, well over 10 million vehicles are sold. Out of these only 300,000, or less than three per cent, are taken of the road every year, that too at unorganised junkyards spread all over the country.

Though the Central Motor Vehicle Act stipulates that all vehicles need to retire at a certain age, which many vehicle owners do not comply. Old city vehicles find their way into villages and tracing them become a strenuous task. Thus, there are no reliable estimates on such vehicles plying on the country's roads.

Unlike mature automobile markets like the US, the UK or even South Korea, India does not have proper end of vehicle life norms. This, say environmentalists, has profound implications on the environment.

Despite the admirable culture of recycling in the country where every part of a discarded vehicle is reused, a significant portion of automobile waste finds its way into landfills and water bodies every year.

This includes old paints and engine oils, lead and corrosive acids from aged batteries, chemicals like mercury and cadmium found in automotive light bulbs, old tyres that release carcinogenic substances, asbestos linings, burnt plastic wires (after the copper is extracted) etc.

The chemical leaching from aged auto parts poison the aquifers beneath the ground and also contaminate the soil that has lasting health implications on the people.

"Old battery packs are just tossed into open spaces or landfills," explains Nalin Sinha, programme director of the Initiative for Transportation and Development Programmes.

In countries like the UK, the US and Japan, guidelines to shred older cars are stringent. As older passenger cars in Japan attract a higher incidence of taxation, the number of cars retired from roads and sent to the shredding centres is large.

And that has prompted the Japanese government to formulate the Automobile Recycling Law of 2005, which stipulates Japanese automakers to produce eco-friendly cars whose parts can be recycled up to 95 per cent.

Car majors in Japan currently incorporate a recycling fee at the point of purchase of new vehicles. Depending on the size of the car and the number of airbags it deploys, car owners pay between 7,000 yen and 18,000 yen ($65 to $166) to shred a car.

With ever shrinking landfills available for dumping of automobile waste, a bulk of the retired Japanese cars, barely four years old, are sold at attractive prices to countries like Sri Lanka where environmental norms aren't as stringent.

A proposal detailing a similar set of norms for scrapping of old vehicles was submitted by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) way back in 2005 to the different ministries overseeing the auto industry in the country. The study