India withdraws new rules for metal scrap imports

The regulations, which came into force in April 2007, said imports of unshredded scrap were only permitted from suppliers who had been registered by the government of India via the Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT).

But the rules were scrapped on September 27, 2007 Nathani said. “The DGFT and the customs took a bold and courageous decision to scrap the regulation altogether. This means you can freely export scrap to India,” he told the Bureau of International Recycling conference in Warsaw.

The regulations were introduced to safeguard workers dealing with metal recycling in India, underlining that the country would not accept second-rate material.

Indian imports of metal scrap are worth over $1 billion per year. In September 2006, Indian authorities seized a container of live ammunition from the United States, which had guns and grenades mixed in with the scrap.

However, the process put in place to remedy the problem of dangerous material was not only difficult to implement by the government, it also confused exporters, Nathani said. “Many of the companies found it very difficult to provide all the financial data (required by the regulation) and they didn’t want to share it,” he said. The government of India extended the deadline for approval three times as they had found it difficult to interpret the information given by the exporters.