Mohammad Abrar wakes up coughing most mornings. It’s not yet dawn but New Delhi is already blanketed in thick smog when he sets off for work.

By 4am, Abrar, aged 50, reaches Seelampur, a small neighbourhood in the capital’s north-east suburbs, which is home to India’s largest electrical-waste market.

The market’s narrow lanes are lined with small scrapstores overflowing with piles of broken computers, telephones, TVs, microwaves, washing machines, ACs and end-of-life batteries.

Abrar is one of more than 50,000 informal workers, including women and children, who make a living sifting through thrown-out goods to recover valuable materials that can be recycled and eventually reused in modern technologies.

In recent years, Abrar and his peers have become the backbone of a fast-growing network of start-ups seeking to extract energy transition minerals from e-waste in a process known as “urban mining”.

Seelampur’s e-waste market is a vast treasure trove for the highly-coveted metals and minerals the world needs to shift from fossil fuels to clean energy systems and curb climate change.

Charging cables for everyday items contain copper, a conductive metal which is used in virtually all electricity-related technologies. The aluminium in electronic components is needed to manufacture solar panels.

But most sought after still are batteries. The majority of electronics such as mobile phones, laptops and vapes use batteries that contain lithium, cobalt and nickel. The same minerals are used to make batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and storing renewable energy.

 ‘Toxic sink’

Day after day, Abrar fills up his cart with e-waste and transports it to traders, who sell on valuable parts and metals to recycling companies keen to get a share of this largely untapped supply of transition minerals.

Handling the hazardous waste is gruelling and dangerous work for little pay.

Workers in the market open up worn batteries and electrical devices using stones and hammers. Heat is used to extract iron, aluminium and gold, releasing toxic fumes that engulf the market, giving it its nickname of “toxic sink”.

A rag picker sifts through discarded waste in the blocked drain passing through the market

A rag picker sifts through discarded waste in the blocked drain passing through the market

Heavy metals, such as lead, mercury, and cadmium, which are found in electronics, can leak from the disused goods, exposing workers to pollutants that can cause lung cancer and damage vital organs. Pregnant women and children are particularly vulnerable to exposure to these metals, which increases the risk of stillbirths and can lead to neurological disorders.

Like most workers, Abrar does not own any basic protective gear such as gloves and a mask. But the work is a lifeline. “I must do this for my family. The more waste I deliver, the more I earn,” he told Climate Home News.

From e-waste to batteries

Among the companies seeking to capitalise on e-waste as a vast secondary supply of transition minerals is Metastable Materials.

The Bengaluru-based start-up, which is backed by some of India’s biggest venture capital firms, sources lithium-ion batteries from disused electronics at Seelampur’s market to recover minerals including lithium and cobalt that can be used again to make new batteries.

The start-up is part of a nascent industry of small companies seeing e-waste as a ready battery recycling stock. Projections estimate India’s e-waste recycling market to reach $7.5 billion by 2030. And India’s small battery recycling industry is anticipated to grow tenfold to $1 billion by 2030, according to financial services firm Avendus.

“We are working towards creating a circular economy for critical minerals,” Shubham Vishvakarma, Metastable’s co-founder, told Climate Home during an interview at a co-working office in Bengaluru, the heart of India’s tech industry.

Recycling could supply a significant share of the huge amounts of minerals the world needs for manufacturing clean energy technologies without the social and environmental impacts associated with mining.

The International Energy Agency estimates that recycling could reduce the growth in new mining needs by 40 percent for copper and cobalt and by 25 percent for lithium and nickel by 2050. In addition, recycled transition minerals incur on average 80 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than minerals extracted from mining.

“Extracting minerals from traditional mines is very expensive and harms the environment,” Pratibha Sharma, an Indian project analyst working on the circular economy for the UN Development Programme, told Climate Home. “Urban or secondary mining is a great opportunity to improve the circular economy and accelerate the energy transition,” she said.

Metastable has devised a process to recycle end-of-life lithium-ion batteries, which it says is cheaper and cleaner than dominant technologies because it doesn’t use chemicals and is less energy-intensive.

 Operating out of a small warehouse on the outskirts of the south Indian city, the start-up says it is “committed to providing environmentally friendly metal extraction technologies for lithium-ion batteries” and to helping  “accelerate EV adoption”.

But so far, the company is reliant on informal workers like Abrar to source disused batteries for recycling.

Hidden workers

Despite handling hazardous waste of great value to the recycling industry, Abrar earns merely $6-7 a day – below the government-set minimum wage of $8 per day for an unskilled worker in Delhi – and receives no social protection.

Javed, 25, has been working at the market since he was 15 years-old. Every two to three months, he sends money home to his family in the nearby state of Uttar Pradesh but his earnings are not enough for him to change his fortunes. 

 “Urban mining is a potent concept mainly because our resources are finite. The unchecked exploitation of metals through traditional mining is unsustainable,” Siddharth Singh, of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based research organisation, told Climate Home.

But new players in the recycling space should regularise informal workers in the supply chain and provide them with a share of the proceeds, Singh argued.

Recycling companies have previously sourced worn-out goods from e-waste markets in India. But none of them have provided workers sufficient social guarantees, such as a decent wage and health insurance, he added.

Metastable insists the company is committed to sourcing disused batteries in an ethical manner and wants to promote recycling and circular economy principles among consumers.

But regularising the decade-old waste-picking and sorting sector is a huge task – one which the Indian government has so far failed to achieve, let alone a small start-up seeking to scale, company boss Vishvakarma argued.

“The whole EV industry is trying to ensure that the supply chain for batteries remains formal from the beginning, but it’s proving to be a difficult job,” he told Climate Home.

The Indian government didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Urban mining opportunity

Yet, for India, urban mining offers a vast opportunity to shore up supplies of pivotal minerals for its surging electric scooters, bikes and three-wheeler vehicle market.

The world’s most populous country, which is building out its own battery manufacturing industry, is 100 percent dependent on imports for battery minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, including from China, the world’s largest processor of transition minerals.