Over the next five years, Delhi-NCR-headquartered Attero Recycling, one of India’s largest electronic waste management companies, expects to invest close to $1 billion in expanding their electronic waste recycling facilities. More than 70% of it is for setting up operations in Europe, the United States and Indonesia to recycle lithium-ion batteries premised on the increasing share of electric vehicles in the years ahead. Nitin Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of the company says that while lithium batteries may be the future for the company, the present is hinged on the growing number of electronic waste that his factory in Roorkee is processing. Credit, he says, is due to the mandatory recycling targets that electronics-goods makers have been set under the Electronic Waste Management Rules, 2016. From 30% of sales in 2018, companies are expected to recycle 70% of their sales by 2023.
“Prior to the EPR regime, recyclers like us had to pay to procure e-waste. We extract the precious metals and sell them. The informal recyclers use hazardous methods and therefore were able to do this at a lower cost. Even if their recovery (of metals) was low, their costs were low and so profitable, Now with the EPR regime, it’s Original Equipment Manufacturers who are paying for recycling and a lot more is collected in the formal sector,” said Gupta.
The slew of technological processes deployed at his organisation helped extract nearly 98% of valuable copper, gold, tin, lithium, palladium, nickel, cobalt within electronic devices. “We have developed these technologies in-house and have close to 20 patents on these processes. The increasing emphasis on the formalisation of the recycling means that India, in the years ahead, can reduce dependence on imports of precious metals that otherwise could only be mined from foreign countries.”
