VietNamNet Bridge – Ever wonder where old motorbikes go to die?

Well, one “popular” spot is in the Quang Ung Cau commune of Ung Hoa District in Hanoi. There, the inhabitants of Xa Cau village have become masters of squeezing every last bit of value out of decayed, rusted, broken down two-wheelers.

Bikes are collected from everywhere and brought to the village, where they undergo “major surgery” before being turned into scrap iron.

“The motorbikes you see here are priced at no higher than VND1.1 million,” said Binh, owner of a “motorbike surgery” workshop, while disassembling an old Chinese-made motorbike.

Binh, like many others in Xa Cau village, has discovered that the vocation he began pursuing several years ago is a lucrative one. Many of the inhabitants have also prospered.

They buy old motorbikes from different sources, dismantle them, and extract the useful parts and accessories to resell to recycle workshops. The remaining parts, no longer useful, are shredded and sold as scrap iron.

Dinh, an old motorbike dealer, said Xa Cau in the past was a craft village famous for its incense sticks. However, that traditional career can no longer support local people and their families, which accounts for the big shift to the new business. Now, Xa Cau is the “go-to” destination for old, useless, broken motorbikes.

Dinh has been working at this job for the last 10 years, and says he cannot remember how many motorbikes he has “operated on”. It now takes him about 30 minutes to do a complete job on a bike.

“Operating on a motorbike is easier than slaughtering a pig,” he says. Rims, spokes, steel frames and engine blocks are sold to recycle workshops, while plastic products are bought by people from the plastic recycling villages.

Pointing to a newly admitted “patient”, Dinh said, “I bought this motorbike for VND500,000. But the engine is still okay. After repairing the engine parts, I think that I can sell them for VND500,000.” Everything remaining would be pure profit.

That said, the majority of the motorbikes in Xa Cau village are too old to have good parts left. Most of them can be sold as scrap iron only. Dinh said he typically earns a profit of VND200,000-300,000 from every motorbike  that arrives in his shop.

There are times, though, that villagers “hit the jackpot”, when they find that they can satisfy the needs of someone hunting for original accessories. Most of the motorbikes gathered in Xa Cau were made decades ago. But their old parts are often valuable, because they are original parts which are even more prized than brand new products.

Xa Cau’s people are most definitely prospering thanks to their new careers. But that prosperity does have a price.

“Xa Cau people now have to live and sleep with ‘motorbike bodies’,” laments Thu, an old woman of the village. “The place is now called the waste village”.

One young man complained that the dream of getting rich has been poisoning local people. “A lot of people have fallen seriously ill because of the hazardous waste,” he said, adding that no special equipment or protective measures are taken during the motorbike disassembly.

Waste from the bikes, which includes iron rust and oil, has been discarded directly into the environment. Despite the concerns of some, no one seems to think that the recycling needs to be done in a professional and safe way.

K. Chi