e-waste – Chasing Tales

I’ve worked for a couple of projects on e-waste and e-waste recycling, and I wanted to revise that and see what’s going on in the space, so here is a series of posts about these topics.

In 2022, the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste. Only 22.3% of that waste was properly recycled. By 2030, we’re on track to hit 82 million tonnes annually—while our recycling rate is projected to drop to 20%.¹ ² The gap between what we’re throwing away and what we’re recovering isn’t just an environmental problem. It’s an economic disaster not even bothering to hide, and yet few pay attention. That 62 million tonnes of waste contains an estimated $62 billion worth of recoverable materials—gold, silver, copper, rare earth metals—currently rotting in landfills or being processed in unsafe conditions.²

EEE
E-waste, according to the European Union’s WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) Directive, is “equipment which is dependent on electric currents or electromagnetic fields in order to work properly”.³ India’s E-Waste Management Rules 2022 define it as “electrical and electronic equipment, whole or in part discarded as waste by the consumer or bulk consumer as well as rejects from manufacturing, refurbishment and repair processes”.⁴ The US Environmental Protection Agency divides e-waste into ten broad categories:⁵

Large household appliances: refrigerators, air conditioners, washing machines
Small household appliances: toasters, coffee makers, vacuum cleaners
IT equipment: computers, laptops, monitors, printers
Consumer electronics: televisions, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles
Lamps and luminaires: LED bulbs, fluorescent tubes
Toys: electronic games, remote-controlled cars
Tools: power drills, electric saws
Medical devices: blood pressure monitors, glucose meters
Monitoring and control instruments: thermostats, smoke detectors
Automatic dispensers: vending machines, ATMs

And critically, this includes batteries of all types:⁶

Alkaline and zinc-carbon batteries: the everyday AA, AAA batteries we use in remotes and toys
Lithium-Ion batteries (Li-ion): found in smartphones, laptops, electric vehicles—these have high energy density and long life, but are highly reactive and flammable
Lead-acid batteries: used in vehicles and industrial applications—low cost but heavy and toxic
Nickel-cadmium batteries (NiCd): known for consistent performance but containing toxic cadmium

Why should we recycle e-waste?
Why not? Electronics contain both valuable materials and dangerous ones, and throwing them away is economically silly and environmentally irresponsible. For one, recovering gold produces 80% less carbon emissions than primary mining.⁷ Recycling lithium-ion batteries instead of mining new metals reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 58-81%, water use by 72-88%, and energy consumption by 77-89%.⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ If we extend the lifespan of existing devices—through repair, reuse, and high-quality refurbishment—we drastically reduce the need to manufacture new ones.

Hazard
Electronic devices are chemical cocktails. Circuit boards, batteries, and screens contain an array of hazardous substances:¹¹ ¹² ¹³

Lead: damages the nervous system, kidneys, and reproductive system. Particularly harmful to children’s developing brains. Found in cathode ray tubes (those old bulky TVs and monitors) and soldering materials.
Mercury: a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in the body, causing neurological and developmental issues. Present in flat-screen displays, fluorescent lamps, and some batteries.
Cadmium: linked to kidney damage, lung cancer, and bone disease. Found in rechargeable NiCd batteries, old CRT screens, and printer drums.
Chromium (specifically hexavalent chromium): a recognized carcinogen that can cause lung cancer, respiratory issues, and skin irritation. Extremely soluble, so it easily contaminates groundwater.
Brominated flame retardants: used in plastic components to prevent fires, but they release toxic dioxins when burned or heated. These cause hormonal disorders.
Beryllium: found in power supply boxes. Exposure can cause chronic lung disease.

The World Health Organization has identified e-waste as one of the fastest-growing solid waste streams posing serious health risks.¹⁴ When e-waste is dumped in landfills, these toxic materials leach into soil and groundwater. When it’s burned—as happens in much of the informal recycling sector—they’re released into the air as poisonous gases. Studies in communities near informal e-waste recycling sites show elevated rates of respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular problems, neurological disorders, and cancers. Children and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable.¹⁵ ¹⁶

Urban Mining
Electronics are concentrated sources of valuable materials—far more concentrated than their natural ore deposits:¹⁷ ¹⁸ ¹⁹

Gold: one tonne of circuit boards contains approximately 350 grams of gold. To put that in perspective, the gold content in circuit boards is 800 times higher than in natural gold ore. Mining one tonne of gold ore might yield just 5 grams of gold; circuit boards yield 350 grams.
Silver: that same tonne contains about 2 kilograms of silver.
Copper: 120 kilograms per tonne of circuit boards.
Other precious metals: aluminum, platinum, cobalt, palladium, rare earth elements.

To make this concrete: recycling one million cell phones can yield approximately 35,000 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, and 75 pounds of gold. The total value of recoverable materials from global e-waste in 2022 was estimated at $62 billion.¹⁹This is what researchers call “urban mining”—recovering valuable materials from discarded electronics rather than extracting them from the earth.²⁰

If e-waste is valuable, dangerous, and growing, why is it still handled so badly? The answer isn’t technology or awareness. It’s incentives—and the policy instrument meant to fix this problem may be quietly making it worse. In the next post, I’ll unpack EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) — the policy tool we’ve pinned our hopes on, and why it’s not delivering what it promises yet.

Sources

Remanufacturing is a structured industrial process where a used product (the “core”) is disassembled, cleaned, inspected, repaired or upgraded, and reassembled to at least “as‑new” performance, often with a new warranty. It differs from simple repair (which restores function) and recycling (which recovers materials) by preserving the value embedded in complex components like housings, castings, and precision parts.¹

In circular economy terms, remanufacturing is one of the highest‑value loops because it keeps products in use with minimal additional material and energy input. That makes it strategically attractive in sectors where products are capital intensive, long‑lived, and technically durable—think engines, industrial equipment, medical devices, and high‑end electronics.²

Remanufacturing reduces exposure to volatile raw material prices and supply disruptions, a growing concern highlighted in circular economy policy discussions by conserving the bulk of materials in complex products³ and reports indicate that remanufacturing can cut greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds or more compared with producing new parts, making it economically attractive for firms facing carbon constraints or reporting obligations.⁴ This is why policies that push producers to take responsibility for products at end‑of‑life (through take‑back schemes or design requirements) naturally encourage remanufacturing models as they can extract more value from returned goods.⁴ ⁵

Economics
The economics is all about the margins for organisations:

Cost side

Production cost savings: Many empirical and industry studies show remanufacturing can reduce unit production costs by roughly 40–65% compared with making a new product, mainly by reusing major components and cutting material and energy demand. Industry examples like Caterpillar’s “Cat Reman” report remanufactured parts costing 45–85% less to produce than brand‑new equivalents while meeting the same specifications.⁶
Customer price level: Remanufactured products are typically sold at 60–80% of the price of new products, attractive enough to win price‑sensitive customers while still leaving room for solid margins.⁷
Resource and energy savings: Preserving existing components means far less raw material and process energy; some studies and industrial programs report 65–87% cuts in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions relative to new manufacture.⁸

Cost Structures

Predictable core supply, stable technical yield, and cost‑efficient operations are the most important factors in any business working in the remanufacturing sector. These can be divided into three main factors, which are then further subdivided as shown in the list below:

Core acquisition and collection: Remanufacturers must get used products back, through buy‑back programs, deposits, leasing, or authorised channels (approved distribution or collection pathways), which adds logistics, handling, and sometimes incentives to the cost base.⁹ Economic models and case studies show that profitability is highly sensitive to the “core return rate”: low or erratic returns undermine capacity utilisation and can drive up unit costs.¹⁰ Interestingly, research on “seeding” (deliberately placing additional new units into the field to increase future cores) finds that active management of core flows can increase total remanufacturing profits by around 20–40%¹⁰ in some product lines: this means the business depends on both- active new sales, and a specific life of the products which are being sold.
- From an economic perspective, the supply of cores is not an exogenous input but an intertemporal decision variable. New products placed into the market today become the core inventory available for remanufacturing in the future, linking current sales decisions to future production capacity. Formal models show that firms may rationally increase new product sales, adjust leasing terms, or subsidise returns in order to secure a predictable flow of future cores, even when short-term margins are lower. The profitability of remanufacturing therefore depends on managing a stock of recoverable products over time rather than on one-period cost comparisons. When core returns are volatile or poorly controlled, remanufacturing capacity cannot be fully utilised. Unit costs rise and the apparent economic advantage shrinks, even if average cost savings look attractive on paper.
Core quality and yield: Not all returned products are economically remanufacturable; if too many cores fail inspection or require heavy rework, the effective cost advantage shrinks.¹⁰ Models that combine technical constraints with cost and collection rates show that limited component durability and uncertain core quality can make remanufacturing unprofitable unless screened and priced correctly.¹¹
- A further economic complication is uncertainty. Unlike new manufacturing, where inputs are standardized, remanufacturing faces stochastic variation in both core quality and remanufacturing cost. Inspection and testing therefore act as economic screening investments rather than mere technical steps: firms incur upfront costs to reveal information about whether a core should be remanufactured, downgraded, or scrapped. Economic models frame this as an option-value problem, where remanufacturing decisions are deferred until uncertainty is resolved. Even when average remanufacturing costs are low, high variance in core condition can reduce expected profits and lead firms to reject a substantial share of returns. This helps explain why observed remanufacturing volumes are often lower than simple cost‑savings calculations would predict.
Process Complexity: Disassembly, inspection, testing, and reassembly require specialised skills and flexible processes, which can raise overhead relative to straight‑through new manufacturing.¹²
Overheads: Since remanufacturing has extra process steps (process complexity), overhead is often a larger share of total cost than in straightforward new manufacturing.¹³

Revenue side

Margin structure: If a new product sells for 100 monetary units and costs 70 to make, the margin is 30; a remanufactured equivalent might sell for 70–80 and cost only 30–40, producing a margin in the same range or better.⁶
New customer segments: Lower price points allow firms to address more price‑sensitive markets, geographies with lower purchasing power, or customers who would otherwise buy used or off‑brand products.⁹

A central economic tension in remanufacturing is cannibalisation: every remanufactured unit sold potentially displaces a sale of a new product. Economic models consistently show, however, that remanufacturing can increase total firm profit when it functions as a form of price discrimination rather than simple substitution. By offering a lower-priced remanufactured product, firms can capture demand from customers with lower willingness to pay who would otherwise buy used, grey-market, or competitor products, while preserving higher margins on new products for less price-sensitive customers. In this equilibrium, remanufactured products expand the market rather than erode it, provided the price gap between new and remanufactured goods is carefully managed. This logic explains why OEMs often restrict remanufacturing volumes or channels even when unit margins are attractive: the optimal remanufacturing rate is determined not by production cost alone, but by its interaction with new-product pricing and demand segmentation.

Market Structures
At the moment, remanufacturing markets tend to be fragmented and dominated by many small third‑party firms, with pockets of oligopoly or even monopoly power (A monopoly is a market structure where one firm dominates the entire market supply, and an Oligopoly is a market structure with only a few suppliers in the market rather than many) around strong brands and OEM‑controlled (OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer) take‑back systems. The exact structure depends on who remanufactures (OEM vs independent), how products are collected, and how new and remanufactured products compete in closed‑loop supply chains.¹⁴ ¹⁵

From an industrial-economics standpoint, the persistence of fragmented remanufacturing markets reflects the shape of remanufacturing cost curves. While new manufacturing often exhibits strong economies of scale, remanufacturing benefits from scale only up to a point. Input heterogeneity, variable inspection effort, and the need for flexible processes limit the gains from large-scale standardisation. As volume increases, coordination and screening costs rise, flattening the cost curve and reducing the competitive advantage of very large firms. These structural features help explain why remanufacturing markets tend to support many small and mid-sized firms alongside selective OEM participation, rather than converging toward high concentration.

In remanufacturing, market structure is usually discussed along three dimensions:¹⁶

Industry concentration: how many firms remanufacture a given product, and how large the biggest players are.
Vertical structure in the closed‑loop supply chain: which tiers (OEM, retailer, specialist remanufacturer, collector) perform remanufacturing and who controls access to cores (used products).
Horizontal competition: how new and remanufactured products compete (prices, perceived quality, channels), often modeled with monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly game‑theoretic frameworks.

These structures are shaped by cost savings from remanufacturing, consumer valuation of remanufactured products, regulatory pressure, and how easy it is to access used products (cores).

Empirical industry structures¹⁶
Across sectors such as automotive parts, industrial machinery, electronics and heavy equipment, studies and market reports converge on a broadly fragmented structure with a long tail of small non‑OEM remanufacturers and a smaller number of large OEMs and global service providers.

Key empirical patterns:

Automotive parts: global automotive parts remanufacturing is characterised as fragmented, with many regional and local remanufacturers, plus major OEM programs (e.g., engines, gearboxes, turbochargers).¹⁷
Industrial machinery and heavy equipment: growth is strong, but the market still has many specialised firms; OEMs, dealer networks and third‑party remanufacturers often coexist, sometimes in parallel closed‑loop chains.¹⁸
Overall EU/US picture: an EU‑level study notes a skewed structure with “a significant number of smaller non‑OEMs” and relatively few large OEM‑affiliated remanufacturers.

This leads to typical hybrid structures:

Many small firms competing in price and service quality for commodified parts.
Local monopolies around niche technologies or proprietary know‑how.
Regional oligopolies in popular product lines (e.g. certain automotive components).

What’s happening in India?
India’s remanufacturing story is still nascent and uneven, but it is being pushed forward indirectly by waste‑management laws, Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) rules for e‑waste, plastics and batteries, and the historic strength of the kabadiwala / scrap‑dealer ecosystem. Most circular‑economy action on the ground still looks like repair, reuse and informal recycling rather than full OEM‑style remanufacturing, yet the latest e‑waste rules and their refurbishing‑certificate mechanism create legal hooks that remanufacturing‑type businesses can use.¹⁹ India doesn’t yet have a “Remanufacturing Act”, but multiple waste rules create incentives and legal categories that overlap with remanufacturing.

E‑waste (Management) Rules²⁰

The 2022 Rules:

Put legal responsibility on producers, manufacturers, refurbishers and recyclers of listed electrical and electronic equipment to meet quantified EPR targets for e‑waste, using a central online portal.
Require all these actors (including refurbishers) to register on the CPCB EPR portal, report flows of products and e‑waste, and obtain authorisations before operating.
Explicitly recognise refurbishing as a distinct activity: registered refurbishers can extend the life of products, send any residual e‑waste only to registered recyclers, and generate refurbishing certificates that allow producers to defer part of their EPR obligation into later years.

The 2024 Amendment Rules keep the 2022 structure but tune how the system actually works:

They add a new rule 9A that lets the central government relax timelines for filing returns “in public interest or for effective implementation”, acknowledging practical compliance bottlenecks.
They refine definitions (including “dismantler”) and insert new sub‑rules in rule 15 that allow the government to create platforms for exchange/transfer of EPR certificates and empower CPCB to set floor and ceiling prices for those certificates, tying prices to environmental‑compensation logic.

That last bit is important: it means refurbishing and recycling certificates now sit inside a semi‑regulated compliance market, rather than in a completely opaque bilateral space. For any firm doing serious refurbishment or remanufacturing of electronics, the financial value of each “saved” device is no longer just the resale price; it also includes the value of refurbishing certificates producers will need to meet their EPR targets.

One of my favourite things about waste management in India is the local kabadiwala (waste-person) system, where a person who runs a reverse-logistics business comes to people’s homes and BUYS the waste they wish to remove from their homes. The kabadiwala networks that move e‑waste and scrap in cities haven’t changed because of the 2024 amendment—but the way the state talks about integrating them has become more concrete.

Official statements on the 2022 rules repeatedly say the new EPR regime is meant to “channelize the informal sector to the formal sector”, by making collection and processing possible only via registered producers, refurbishers and recyclers.²¹ Circular‑economy concept notes for municipal waste still highlight that informal workers and kabadiwalas do the heavy lifting of collection and separation, and must be integrated into contracts, data systems and formal infrastructure.²² Case studies on informal e‑waste collectors (kabadiwalas) emphasise that they remain the primary collection channel for household e‑waste, but usually sell to small dismantlers who operate outside the 2022–2024 EPR framework.²³

Against that backdrop, the 2022–2024 e‑waste regime offers two big levers for integration:

Partnerships between registered refurbishers/recyclers and kabadiwala networks: the law doesn’t mention kabadiwalas by name, but nothing stops a registered refurbisher from building sourcing and sharing arrangements with informal collectors, bringing their material into the formal portal system.²⁴
Data and platform logic: the new certificate‑trading platforms and CPCB portals are building a data spine for reverse logistics; if cities and social enterprises plug informal actors into that spine, kabadiwalas become the front‑end of a traceable, compliance‑generating remanufacturing pipeline instead of sitting outside it.²⁵

In practice, though, most of what happens today is still repair, cannibalisation for parts, and low‑value recycling. The regulatory architecture is now sophisticated enough to support high‑value remanufacturing and refurbishment at scale, but the hard work is social and institutional: defining quality standards, building trust in “remanufactured” products, and finding ways to bring kabadiwalas and other informal workers into those new value chains without erasing their livelihoods.

Sources

Tag: e-waste

The E-waste – I: The Problem

The economics of remanufacturing

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