Buried in Plain Sight: Why India’s critical minerals lie not only in mines but also in landfills 

mineral

By Rohan Gupta

As India races to build electric vehicles and achieve new heights in renewable energy capacity, its need for minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earths is exploding by the day. However, it is a well-known fact that India has virtually no operational lithium or cobalt mining and imports nearly all such materials. At the same time, every year Indian cities generate massive e-waste, which is an urban “mine” of valuable metals.

Walk through any scrapyard or back alley in a major Indian city, and you will see a quiet goldmine, old computers, broken smartphones, discarded chargers and tangled wires. What looks like junk, is actually packed with valuable metals. Yet most of it slips through our fingers.

In FY24, India generated a staggering 4 million metric tonnes of electronic waste. That’s the equivalent of 192 Eiffel Towers made entirely of broken gadgets. But here’s the real problem: the bulk of this waste ends up in landfills or is handled by the informal sector, where metals are often burned out using crude, unsafe methods. Globally, only about 22% of e-waste is properly recycled. In India, the formal recycling sector is making progress, expected to grow at a strong 17%  compound annual growth rate (CAGR) by FY35 but even then, it will cover just 40% of our total e-waste.

The rest? It either pollutes the environment or fuels a parallel economy that works without safety standards or accountability. Recognizing the scale of this missed opportunity, the government has committed Rs 34,300 crore ($4.1 billion) under the National Critical Mineral Mission (NCMM), including Rs. 1500 crore in incentives to promote scientific recycling. But if India wants to unlock the full potential of its “urban mines,” more needs to be done.

These numbers hint at a huge opportunity. What looks like trash is actually dense in metals. For example, one tonne of computer circuit boards can contain more gold than 17 tonnes of mined ore and a discarded smartphone has 5–10× more gold per tonne than typical ore. In short, even recycling a small share of India’s e-waste would yield vast amounts of gold, silver, copper and critical battery metals at a fraction of the cost and environmental impact of mining new ore.

Bridging the gap: recycling technology and policy

Turning that “urban mine” into supply requires formal systems. India’s E-Waste (Management) Rules, 2022 impose Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) on over 100 categories of electronics, and a separate battery EPR rule took effect in 2022. The government has also started financial incentives: in early 2025 it waived customs duties on imported waste and scrap containing critical minerals and committed funds to subsidize new recycling plants. These steps will help, but capacity remains scarce today.

Currently, India currently recovers usable materials from just 1% of its discarded lithium-ion batteries, a drop in the bucket given fast-growing EV and battery use. According to a report by the India Cellular and Electronics Association (ICEA) and Accenture, India’s lithium-ion battery demand is expected to hit 115 gigawatt hours (GWh) by 2030, driven largely by electric vehicles, with EV battery consumption projected to grow at a 48% CAGR. In other words, without dramatic expansion, millions of batteries, and their contained minerals, could end up wasting away in dumps.

The road ahead: role of recycling

Treating e-waste as a resource aligns with national strategy. Every tonne of recycled electronics offsets a tonne of ore or concentrate India would otherwise need to import. That strengthens supply security and eases import bills. It also sharply cuts environmental damage: recycling metals consumes far less energy than mining. For example, extracting copper or nickel from recycled batteries emits far fewer CO₂ emissions than smelting new ore, and it avoids toxic runoff that can leach from landfills into soil and water.

Momentum is building in this direction. Startups and labs are developing ways to recover even rare elements, for example, separating neodymium and other rare earths from old magnets, or refining lithium from spent battery cells. On policy, India’s recent budget and missions explicitly back recycling infrastructure and innovation. Internationally, the urgency is clear: the UN’s 2024 Global E-waste Monitor notes that raising the world’s recycling rate to 60% by 2030 could yield over $38 billion in net benefits (from lower pollution and resource security).

Formalizing recycling also pays social dividends. Today, thousands of informal workers sort and burn e-waste in unsafe conditions, recovering maybe ~30% of a battery’s cobalt. Bringing these jobs into certified facilities means safer work and higher yields, advanced recycling can recover over 98% of battery metals. In this way, economic opportunity and environmental protection go hand in hand, as hazardous informal practices give way to efficient, regulated industry.

India’s critical minerals for a clean-energy future really are buried in plain sight; in the smartphones, laptops and batteries we discard every day. Unlocking them is not optional, it is strategic. By scaling up high-quality recycling, we turn a looming waste problem into a domestic resource stream. With the right technology and policies, each old gadget can become a building block for our next generation of industry. India’s next big sources of lithium, cobalt, copper and rare metals could very well be the piles of e-waste around us, if we act now to harvest what’s been “buried” all along.

(Rohan Gupta, Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, Attero.) 

Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.