The number of plants involved in car recycling in Russia is currently unknown due to the current rules for maintaining state registers. This was announced by the head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation, Anton Alikhanov.
The minister referred to a government decree from the end of 2020, which regulates the formation and maintenance of a register of licenses covering waste management activities, but does not provide for sampling for car recycling plants.
As a result, government agencies do not have information on exactly where the deregistered cars go, the minister noted. A similar situation, Alikhanov added, has developed with the state register of facilities that have a negative impact on the environment (NVOOS).
The current rules for maintaining it also do not provide for the inclusion of information that would allow individual NVOOS facilities to be reliably identified as car recycling plants. As a result, government agencies do not actually have the tools to count such enterprises.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, which the Ministry of Industry and Trade refers to, 38,781 vehicles were deregistered in 2024 after recycling. There is no centralized data for 2025 yet.