Whenever we see garbage collectors, we will pity and be sad about them. We see them searching with huge bags and dogs barking around them. The current scrap business has high potential, but we see it as useless or unworthy of looking. The reality is far different from the real world. People look for glamorous businesses which look trendy. The reality is, scrap business looks dirty and ugly but has huge margins.
According to the estimated price per month in India, 18,000 crore business happens in scrap. Every day the scrap prices increase and decrease based on the market value. The real income comes from segregation of the raw material collected from garbage. When you arrange everything in an appropriate structure, the demand increases even more than before. The process begins with garbage collectors from your homes and streets, then it goes to local shop holders and eventually a bigger business owner buys the scrap. Finally, it reaches industries and factories, where all the scrap turns into new material.
The materials like paper, plastic bottles, iron, copper, chairs, steel, everything has value but real money and market margins arise. When you sell iron and E- waste, most of the demand comes from here. The government has strict and stringent rules and regulations for both materials. Circuit boards have higher demand and have a margin of 20 to 40% and in iron 10 to 30% based on quality and material.
As per local estimation, the local garbage collectors make around 20,000 to 40,000 a month. The garbage shop owner earns around 50,000 to 1 lakh rupees based on size and volume. The real margin comes from the top of the pyramid, where things are recycled and created into new products. This business requires hard work, and it is not an air-conditioned or sitting business. It requires high energy to organise the material and sell it on the markets. According to a few reports, India has 6 crore tons of scrap and India even imports scrap from other nations and recycles the garbage, making it one of the greatest assets.
The scrap sector is highly unorganised and new age generations have started tech-based systems like kabadiwala and scrap app, where directly from your home the scrap is collected and paid immediately.
We have only seen positive sides to the business, where this business includes highly fraudulent activities. While weighting the scrap, the shop owners try to manipulate and try paying lower prices to local garbage collectors. The prices and markets keep changing based on situations. It is a hard work-based profession along with many people who started as garbage collectors, eventually rise to the positions of local show owners within 3 to 4 years and within 10 to 20 years they become factory owners and recyclers. Maintaining a huge sum of raw material collection, recycling and reusing precious materials which we think are useless and turning them into gold.
