Implications of circular economy concept for India economy: an analysis on automobile value chain in India

Abstract

India has set an ambitious goal of becoming a 5 Trillion dollar GDP country by 2024, meaning a 9% compounded annual growth rate. This translates into increased demand for natural resources, especially steel, as infrastructure will become a key investment area to meet the GDP target. In this regard, our project scope was to study the application of the Circular Economy concept, which is the circular use of resources rather than the linear method (take-make-waste). This will reduce our dependency on the extraction of additional natural resources and thereby push for re-use of resources. From our analysis, it can be seen that by applying the concept of circular economy in the entire automobile industry value chain, we able to reduce the amount of iron ore that can be extracted & thus savings millions to our GDP.