The other day, I opened my cupboard and found it — an old Samsung J7 smartphone I hadn’t used in years. Its screen was cracked, the battery bloated, and yet, for some reason, I’d held onto it. Below it sat tangled charger cords, a broken mouse, and the remote to a television set that we no longer own.

Sound familiar? Most of us have a drawer or a box like this which is no less than a graveyard of gadgets that we can’t bring ourselves to throw away.

We hold on, not out of sentimentality, but because we don’t know what to do with them. And somewhere deep down, we know the kabadiwala (local trash collector) isn’t the answer.

What we often don’t realise is that inside those dead devices lie valuable metals — gold, silver, lithium, cobalt — the very materials powering our phones, electric cars, and solar panels. Yet, almost all of it ends up in landfills, burnt in back alleys, or dumped in toxic heaps.

India, the third-largest producer of e-waste, generates over 3.2 million tonnes annually, and 95 per cent of it is handled informally, which has wide-reaching consequences.

Toxic fumes from lead and mercury contaminate water tables, and the exploitation of workers, including children, defines this hidden system. But what if your discarded gadget could become part of a larger solution? What if the metals inside your mobile phone could reduce our dependence on mining and imports?

That’s the future Attero is working toward — not just as India’s largest electronic waste or e-waste recycler with 5,00,121 mega tonnes of e-waste recycled and 9,998 mega tonnes of lithium-ion batteries recycled, but as a global cleantech pioneer that’s rethinking how we manage, reuse, and restore the resources we already have.

The waste we generate, the gold we ignore

In 2008, when Rohan and Nitin Gupta struggled to find a responsible way to discard their old laptop, the duo recognised a significant gap in the country’s waste management infrastructure. This realisation led to the inception of Attero, with a mission to revolutionise e-waste recycling through innovative, eco-friendly solutions.

At a time when the word e-waste had not penetrated into a country like India, the brothers started to extract metals like gold, silver, copper, tin, aluminium, lithium, cobalt, manganese and nickel out of electronics discarded by people.

© The Better India