Highlights

• Industry leaders like Attero are urging India's Finance Minister to treat critical mineral recycling as core infrastructure in Union Budget 2026.
• Recycling is being considered as a strategic economic necessity due to heavy import dependence for lithium, cobalt, and rare earths.
• Attero's ₹150-crore expansion includes five new facilities, such as e-waste plants and an R&D hub.
• The transition from pilot to early industrial scale indicates recycling's growing importance, despite it being more of a complementary hedge than a substitute for mining in the near term.
• As global powers tighten control over upstream rare earth assets, India aims to reduce exposure to external shocks through recycling.
• Challenges persist around feedstock aggregation, yields, and price volatility in the recycling sector.

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As India heads into Union Budget 2026, a familiar hope resurfaces: that critical mineral recycling will finally be treated not as an environmental afterthought, but as core industrial infrastructure. Industry voices—most prominently Attero (opens in a new tab) (Rare Earth Exchanges™ interviewed CEO Nitin Gupta (opens in a new tab))—are urging Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman (opens in a new tab) to hardwire recycling, rare earth processing, and advanced materials recovery into India’s economic strategy. The ask is ambitious. The implications for global rare earth supply chains are non-trivial.

Where the Argument Is Solid Ground

On fundamentals, the case is credible as cited in TheWeek (opens in a new tab). India remains heavily import-dependent for lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements—inputs essential to EVs, grid storage, electronics, and defense. Recycling does offer a partial hedge against that exposure. E-waste, spent batteries, and industrial scrap are real secondary resource pools, not theoretical ones. Estimates of ~3.8 million tonnes of annual e-waste align with international datasets, and the rise in formal processing due to stricter Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) enforcement is well documented.

Attero’s recent ₹150-crore ($16.4m USD) expansion—covering e-waste plants, copper recycling, and an R&D hub—signals that capital is already moving, not merely lobbying. This supports the claim that recycling is transitioning from pilot phase to early industrial scale. Rare Earth Exchanges was impressed with CEO Gupta’s vision and progress (opens in a new tab).

 Nitin Gupta: A Big Vision for India and ROW

Source: LinkedIn

The Leap of Faith Hidden in the Pitch

Still, several assumptions deserve scrutiny. Recycling is framed as a near-term lever for “material security,” yeteven proponents concede it will not substitute mining anytime soon. Volumes recoverable from batteries and e-waste remain modest relative to projected demand growth, especially for magnet rare earths. Fiscal incentives may improve margins, but they do not solve feedstock aggregation, technology yield losses, or price volatility—structural challenges the article underplays.

There is also an implicit optimism that budgetary recognition alone will unlock long-term capital. In reality, recycling economics hinge on stable policy, enforcement, and commodity cycles. Labeling recycling as “core infrastructure” helps—but does not guarantee bankable returns.

What This Signals for the Rare Earth Supply Chain

What’s notable is not that India wants recycling—it’s when and why. As the U.S., EU, and China all tighten control over upstream and midstream assets, India is positioning recycling as a strategic pressure valve. Even incremental domestic recovery reduces exposure to external shocks and price spikes. For global markets, this points to a future where secondary supply plays a larger—but still complementary—role.

The story is not hype, but it is to some extent aspirational. Recycling will not replace mines based on REEx simulations. It may, however, decide who bends least when supply chains tighten. And that certainly matters.

Attero Flagship Facility: Roorkee, Uttarakhand

Source: Business India

Profile

Attero Recycling Pvt. Ltd. is India’s leading e-waste and lithium-ion battery recycler, founded in 2008 by Nitin Gupta and Rohan Gupta, and widely regarded as the country’s largest formal processor of complex electronic waste and end-of-life batteries. The company operates an “urban mining” model built on proprietary hydrometallurgical processes and AI-enabled sorting to recover lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, precious metals, and an emerging slate of rare earth elements, with claimed recovery efficiencies often exceeding 98%. Headquartered around its flagship facility in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, Attero spans formal e-waste collection, battery recycling, and critical-metal recovery, tightly aligned with India’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regime. While Attero has raised undisclosed private capital over its lifecycle (the company has not published a consolidated funding total), it has recently announced a ₹150-crore (≈ US $16 million) expansion to build out five new facilities—including e-waste plants in Pune, Bengaluru, and Faridabad, a copper recycling plant in Rajasthan, and an R&D Centre of Excellence in Greater Noida—aimed at scaling national recycling capacity and advancing rare-earth and advanced-materials recovery.

This expansion positions Attero as a central player in India’s National Critical Mineral Mission, even as challenges around feedstock aggregation, scale, and downstream integration remain inherent to recycling-led supply-chain strategies.

Source: Reporting by Nitin SJ Asariparambil, The Week (Jan 31, 2026)