Can India clean up its e-waste recycling sector?

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology's impact outside the West.

In the dead of a cold December night in 2023, at a dump near Delhi, hundreds of men huddled around small bonfires, clutching paper cups of tea. They tossed plastic bags into the flames as they waited for a fleet of trucks to arrive.

The trucks rolled in one by one, full of electronic marvels now reduced to e-waste: Nokia, Itel, and Samsung smartphones; Sony and LG LCD screens; Tata air conditioners; Canon and Epson printers.

As the trailer gates opened at the back of one truck, Rashid Khan and Mohammad Iqrar, both in their early 30s, rushed inside. “Hand me a flashlight!” Khan shouted, frustrated as he tried to keep his balance atop a mound of appliances. Iqrar's phone flashlight went on, illuminating the heaps of broken and used electronics.

It took the two men 90 minutes to unload the container. On average, e-waste traders pay workers like Iqrar and Khan about Rs 250 ($3), the two men told me, to offload a single truck.

Located in Mustafabad, a residential area of Delhi, this dusty site called Khatta is one node in a vast network of informal e-waste recycling facilities across India. It is roughly the size of half a football field.

Here, the electronics of the world's most populous country come to die – and to maybe be reborn. Workers comb through massive piles of gadgets and devices, picking out items to load onto smaller carts. Then, using bicycles, motorbikes, and horses, they shuttle material to nearby warehouses for dismantling and processing.

India is the world's third-largest producer of e-waste, having generated approximately 1.75 million metric tonnes in the fiscal year ending 2024, an increase of nearly 75% over the last five years. Close to 60% of e-waste in the country remains unrecycled – which represents both an environmental concern and a financial opportunity.

In addition to domestic e-waste, the country is also a magnet for e-waste from countries such as Yemen, the United States, and the Dominican Republic, making India the third-largest importer of it in the world, from both legal and illegal sources.

Used electronics contain a treasure trove of recoverable raw materials including gold, silver, copper, and rare earth elements. These can be reused in new electronic devices or repurposed entirely. Thanks to government regulation, there's also money to be made in just processing the recycled materials. Altogether, that adds up to a $1.56 billion industry, according to one 2023 measure by an Indian market analytics firm.

A small fraction of those who work in e-waste recycling in India are employed within the country's regulated industry. In shiny facilities owned by companies like Attero, Ecoreco, and Recyclekaro, workers often have the benefit of well-managed operations that implement protective measures.

But nearly 95% of those working in the e-waste industry – at least a million people, by some estimates – are in the informal sector. These include big traders, dismantlers, smelters, and small-time refurbishers.

The lawless conditions of India's e-waste recycling industry have given rise to a complex economy, which includes shadowy organisations that call the shots, recycling dons who control swaths of the network, and workers like Khan and Iqrar.

With new government regulations pushing the industry to formalise, this decades-old network is under pressure to modernise. If it succeeds, India could offer a road map for large-scale e-waste recycling in a world that, in 2022, produced 82% more of the stuff than it did in 2010. And that number climbs by roughly 2 million metric tonnes every year. If it fails, India's chaotic e-waste industry could be a harbinger for an increasingly unsustainable level of gadget consumption.

The first time Asif Malik saw a computer in person was as a young child, combing through a landfill in 1990. “I was fascinated by the machine at the first look,” he told me when we met in Khatta. “All I thought was, What was it made of?”

In late 2023, when I visited the dumpsite, he was nearly 40 years old and 6 feet tall, with a rogue beard and a straight back. He cut a striking figure standing next to a garbage truck, surrounded by a group of distant relations. Locals referred to him as the “Monitor King” of Khatta for his control on the recycling economy there.

The Malik community ran four storage facilities in Khatta, and research conducted in 2021 and 2022 found that members managed more than 83% of the e-waste market in nearby recycling hot spot Seelampur. They owned the businesses, rented out the warehouses, and contracted collectors and laborers to gather materials, Malik told me.

“Without the permission of Maliks, not even a bird can dare to flap its wings here,” he said.

“Our forefathers did this. … No one else can do it,” he continued. “If someone tried, he will be beaten black and blue.” Malik claimed his extended family earned nearly Rs 2.5 million ($24,000) per week.

Malik's father used to pull a rickshaw in this same market, ferrying waste for other traders, and the younger Malik had been working here since he was a teenager.

The Malik community descends from a historical group known as the Teli, named after the profession of oil pressing. As manual oil pressing became obsolete in the 1950s and '60s, the community turned toward scrap collection and developed a network for gathering and reselling plastic, paper, and metal. Eventually, that evolved to include appliances such as refrigerators, landline phones, and a growing ecosystem of electronics.

Thanks to a series of policy changes, India's economy liberalised in the 1990s, laying the groundwork for a consumer electronics boom. By the 2000s, Nokia and Samsung phones, alongside ACs and fridges from Indian brands like Godrej and Voltas, became essentials for the country's growing middle class. In just five years – from 2004 to 2009 – the Indian electronics market grew nearly threefold, from $11.5 billion to $32 billion, according to research from India's Parliament.

As consumption surged, so did the problem of e-waste. In addition to India's self-generated e-waste, the country became a destination for the material from abroad. Old appliances flowed in from the US and other wealthier countries, matching a global phenomenon: By 2005, developed countries were shipping nearly a quarter of their domestic e-waste to lower-income countries. By 2009, India generated 5.9 million metric tonnes of hazardous waste domestically and imported 6.4 million metric tonnes more.

For decades, most of those materials have ended up in waste sites like Khatta, where families like the Maliks oversee the sorting, dismantling, and reselling of raw materials. Although the informal economy is profitable for those in power, it's a dirty and difficult job for those who work on its lower rung.

The land on which Khatta sits was once used by a farming community. Now, it's one of the poorest areas of the capital and part of a corridor of neighborhoods sometimes referred to as the country's “toxic sink.” The area, which often smells of sewage, is made up of countless narrow lanes lined with small shops, overflowing with e-waste leftovers, backed by a soundtrack of hammering metal. Behind tall iron gates, workers use indoor ovens to melt down materials. Thousands of people live here, stepping over the clogged drain channels and refuse every day.

Women in the recycling market are employed only in the lowest-paying roles. Noor, who spoke under a pseudonym, as she feared backlash from her employer, was 19 when she was married off to a dismantler. She soon learned the basics of recycling: sorting and identifying transmitters, circuit boards, and printed circuit boards. And, most important, plucking copper wires.

Noor's hands, covered in deep scars, spoke to the 15 years she spent separating copper wires from transmitters and crushing circuit boards. When I visited her workspace, the walls were smoked black from the fire she used both to see her work and keep warm.

Noor made 50 cents for picking through 10 kilograms of e-waste, which can take eight hours. She pays $120 a month to rent a flat next door for her family of five. Her son, 15, works at another trader's warehouse in the next alley.

“He also joined work because it was easily accessible, and his income comes in handy for us in the household,” Noor said. But, she added, she was worried about her children's future. “Nothing has changed for all these years here,” she said. “I put on a bandage [on my hand] every week, but I continue out of compulsion. I do not know anything else.”

Roughly 1,200 kilometers away from the somber alleyways of Khatta, a fresh asphalt road winds its way through the coastal region of western Maharashtra, which overlooks the Arabian Sea. The road is wide enough for the six-wheeled trucks that come here from across India, carrying tonnes of broken laptops, TVs, and batteries toward their final destination: Recyclekaro, one of India's leading e-waste recycling companies.

Prassann Daphal, the CEO of Recyclekaro, gave me a tour of the 73,000-square-meter (18-acre) property in a business suit, pointing out workers wearing face masks, helmets, and thick gloves as they dismantled e-waste. His soft voice was sometimes hard to hear over the crushers and shredders.

Born and raised in Mumbai, Daphal met Rajesh Gupta, Recyclekaro's founder, in college. They spent semesters repairing broken computers and hardware for extra pocket money.

“There were many old computers, which we were reselling. So from that came the idea of recycling,” Daphal said.

In the late 2000s, Indian recycling companies like Attero and Recyclekaro were just emerging, taking advantage of the country's growing e-waste problem, the lack of formal infrastructure, and an impending regulatory shift. These companies established themselves as pioneers that could address both market demand and a government push toward industry formalisation.

In 2011, the government introduced a law that required manufacturers to dispose of their e-waste strictly with authorised dismantlers and collection centers, encouraging formal companies to emerge and effectively outlawing the informal industry.

The law had a minimal impact, and in 2016, the government followed up with a framework that created new business opportunities for formal recyclers. Gadget and appliance manufacturers in India were now required to collect and channel a mandated proportion of their electronic waste, initially 30%, to formal recyclers.

Recyclekaro's warehouse looks like an electronics graveyard, but it's tidy and relatively clean: great piles of Acer laptops, hard disks stacked atop each other like a Lego fort, and wires hanging out from a heap of keyboards. At one table, a group of women — wearing eye masks and thick hand gloves — dismantled circuit boards carefully.

The majority of the factory workers are from nearby villages. Much of the e-waste comes directly from large companies disposing of their old and retired equipment.

Recyclekaro and the rest of the organised e-waste recycling sector are just a fraction of the industry, but these shaded buildings, tucked away in towns miles from crowded cities, represent the progress the government is pushing for.

At the end of 2022, India passed new rules aimed at further formalising the e-waste economy. They mandated that appliance producers pay a minimum of Rs 22 (26 cents) per kilogram to certified recyclers for the environmentally sound disposal of electronic appliances, such as air conditioners, TVs, and refrigerators. The new rules also implemented a tradable system, akin to carbon credits, that allows producers to buy certificates from recyclers to meet their quotas.

Tech manufacturers are currently pushing back on the legislation. Global electronics firms like Daikin, Hitachi, Samsung, and LG have taken the policy to court. Companies complain it has significantly increased their compliance costs, and their lawsuits question the policy's constitutionality and its impact on business operations. ​The government is defending the policy.

The new policies have largely benefited companies like Recyclekaro. According to company figures, Recyclekaro made $25 million in sales in the fiscal year ending April 2025. The company's earnings come from selling precious extracted metals, such as gold, silver, platinum, palladium, neodymium, and critical minerals used in manufacturing, like lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and manganese.

Although the facility processes plenty of materials from sources like corporate offices, personal items, such as monitors and gadgets, still go directly into the informal recycling economy. A lot of real e-waste does not reach recyclers in the formal sector, according to Daphal. “The solution for that is to start collecting from the source where it is generated,” he said, and to create policies that push individual customers to recycle their electronics. “It will take a lot of time,” Daphal said.

Rohan Massey, the business head for e-waste at Saahas Zero Waste, a Bengaluru-based waste management company that focuses on sustainability, said India's informal recycling sector plays a critical role in the recycling economy. Recycling exclusively through the formal sector would be financially unrealistic, Massey added.

According to Massey, the formal recycler often struggles to cover the cost of operations, including paying minimum wages. In that scenario, he said, “If there is not enough money provided, there will be no recycling happening.” Until recycling becomes lucrative for producers and recyclers, “there is going to be a lot of informal and unethical practices,” he said.

Meanwhile, informal players seem to have little incentive to adhere to the new regulations. If they moved into the formal sector, they would be required to pay the 18% tax levied on e-waste and other industrial byproducts.

When Rest of World visited Malik at Khatta at the end of 2023, Delhi's regulatory efforts felt distant, drowned out by the clatter of trucks unloading appliances and pickers sorting materials.

At the time, Malik seemed largely disinterested in the machinations of Delhi or the efforts to bring his industry into the modern era. “This regulation or that,” Malik said, looking out over a stack of broken, abandoned monitors at one of his warehouses, “our business will continue like it has for decades.”

But in the summer of 2025, the scene had changed. A monsoon had just passed through, and the dusty ground had turned into sludge. A legal battle hung over the site.

The ability for workers to continue operations on the site was under dispute, and on July 25, the police cleared it out. Once swarming with workers and trucks, Khatta was shut down. Traders sat idle outside their shops, some reading a newspaper, while others scrolled on their phones. It seemed as if everyone was killing time, hopeful that one day soon, business would return to usual.

Satish Sinha, the associate director of Toxics Link, an environmental justice nonprofit in Delhi whose work includes twenty years of research in the area of Khatta, said that the closure was most likely temporary.

Although he said that the impact on the families in the area is “very huge,” Khatta will reopen, he argued – or simply shift to a new location.

“A prolonged shutdown of Khatta can lead to migration of these families to another similar place, wherever this business pops up,” Sinha told me. “It has to. [Where else] will the waste go?”

Photographs by Chinky Shukla for Rest of World.

Yashraj Sharma is a reporter based in India.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology's impact outside the West.

Source: Scroll
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