Urban Mining in India: Where the Gold in E-Waste Really Is
SRF Capital Studio Research DeskFunding Intelligence, SRF Capital StudioIndia imports almost all its gold while about 2 million tonnes of electronics are thrown away each year. Urban mining is real, but the money for small firms is in collection and sorting, not in refining.
Summary
- India generates roughly 2 million tonnes of e-waste a year and imported $72 billion of gold in FY26, so recovering metal from old devices has an obvious appeal.
- The gold is concentrated in circuit boards and phones; mixed e-waste is mostly plastic, glass and steel, and treating it as uniformly rich is the common mistake to avoid.
- For an MSME the viable entry is collection, dismantling and compliance under the EPR rules, feeding certified refiners, rather than building a refinery.
Why this matters now
India mines only a tonne or two of gold a year and imports the rest. In FY26 that import bill reached a record $71.98 billion, which is why the government asked households to buy less and raised the duty to 15%, as we set out in why Modi asked Indians to stop buying gold.
There are two stocks of gold already inside the country. One is the roughly 25,000 tonnes the World Gold Council estimates households hold, which people are reluctant to sell. The other is the metal locked inside discarded phones, laptops, servers and circuit boards. Getting it back is what urban mining means.
The idea is not new. Researchers at Tohoku University described the "urban mine" in the 1980s, and Japan's National Institute for Materials Science later estimated that about 6,800 tonnes of gold sat in the country's used electronics. That is an estimate of what exists, not of what was recovered, a distinction worth holding on to.
Where the gold actually is
Most headlines about urban mining say e-waste is far richer than ore. That is true of the right e-waste. A primary gold mine typically works ore at a few grams per tonne. Phone boards and computer motherboards can carry a couple of hundred grams per tonne or more. A tonne of mixed household e-waste, which includes fridge casings, cables, screens and plastic, carries far less.
The US Environmental Protection Agency's figure makes the scale concrete: recycling a million phones yields about 34 kg of gold, or roughly one gram for every 29 handsets. The value is real, but it only appears once the boards are separated from everything else.
Gold concentration varies enormously by stream
| Stream | Gold content | What it means for a recycler |
|---|---|---|
| Primary gold ore | Typically a few grams per tonne | The benchmark urban mining is compared with |
| Phone and computer circuit boards | Often hundreds of grams per tonne | The stream worth sorting for |
| Mobile phones, whole | About 34 kg per million phones (EPA) | High value per tonne, small volume per unit |
| Mixed household e-waste | Far lower; mostly plastic, glass, steel | Needs dismantling before it is worth refining |
The gold is real, but it only appears once the boards are separated from everything else.
India's position
India is the world's third-largest e-waste generator, at roughly 2 million tonnes a year, and most of it still moves through informal hands: small dealers, dismantlers and acid-bath recovery that loses much of the metal and harms the people doing it. Globally, the Global E-waste Monitor 2024 found only 22.3% of the 62 million tonnes generated in 2022 was documented as formally collected and recycled, leaving about $62 billion of recoverable resources unaccounted for.
The regulatory base is now in place. The E-Waste (Management) Rules 2022, in force from April 2023, put extended producer responsibility on brands: producers must meet recycling targets by buying certificates generated by registered recyclers. Battery rules do the same for batteries. That turns compliance into a paid service, which is the most important fact in this article for a small firm.
Formal players such as Attero already run recovery at industrial scale. The gap is upstream. Refiners need clean, sorted, documented feed, and most of India's waste reaches them late, mixed or not at all.
Why e-waste beats jewellery as feedstock
Household gold is the larger stock, but it comes with family history. People sell jewellery reluctantly and slowly, which is part of why recycling in India fell to an eleven-quarter low in Q2 2026 even at record prices, according to the WGC.
A dead laptop has no such weight. Offices, schools and housing societies want old devices gone, preferably with proof that data was destroyed. The supply problem in urban mining is logistics and trust, not sentiment, and logistics is a problem small businesses solve every day.
Four ways in for an MSME
The capital figures below are indicative ranges from our research desk's working estimates. Real quotes vary with city, scale and the level of certification, so treat them as a starting point for a plan, not a budget.
- Registered collector and aggregator. Register under the 2022 rules, sign up brands that need to meet EPR targets, and run collection from offices, societies and schools. Indicative capital: ₹15 to 30 lakh for a vehicle, storage and registration. Income comes from service fees and selling sorted lots to registered recyclers.
- Dismantling unit. Buy bulk e-waste and separate it into boards, copper, plastics and glass. Sorted boards sell for far more than mixed scrap, and the spread is the business. Indicative capital: ₹50 lakh to ₹1.5 crore.
- EV battery pre-processing. Collect end-of-life packs from fleets and manufacturers, discharge and dismantle them safely, and sell sorted material to battery recyclers. Volumes are still small but rise as early EVs retire. Indicative capital: ₹1 to 3 crore, with safety systems the largest line.
- Recycling as a service for corporates. Combine certified data destruction with responsible recycling for IT teams, and charge for the certificate trail as much as for the pickup. Indicative capital: ₹20 to 50 lakh.
In each case the moat is paperwork: registration, chain of custody, weighbridge records and certificates that a brand's auditor will accept. A firm that can prove where every tonne went is worth more to a producer than one that is simply cheaper.
The risks that get skipped
- Price exposure. Board values move with gold, copper and palladium prices. A collector holding stock through a price fall absorbs the loss.
- Certificate prices. EPR income depends on how the certificate market clears, which regulators can change.
- Safety and liability. Batteries catch fire, and informal acid processing is illegal. Insurance and trained staff are not optional.
- Working capital. Buying waste is cash out today; certificates and sales can take months. This is where debt structured around receivables matters.
A first year that holds up
Most small recyclers that fail do so on volume, not on price. They buy a vehicle and a shed, then discover that waste arrives in small, irregular lots. The order of work matters more than the equipment.
- Sign supply before spending. Two or three anchor sources, such as an office park, a hospital group or a government department, give a base load to plan around.
- Sign one buyer for each stream. Know who takes boards, copper and plastics, at what grade and on what payment terms, before the first tonne arrives.
- Register early. Registration and the certificate trail take time, and producers will not sign without them.
- Keep the books by stream. Tonnes in, tonnes out and value by stream each month is the record a lender or investor will ask for first.
What SRF would tell an investor
Back the firms that control sorted, documented supply. Refining is capital heavy and has incumbents; collection is fragmented and becoming regulated, which is where consolidation usually creates value. Ask for tonnage records by stream, certificate revenue as a share of income, and customer concentration among brands.
For founders in manufacturing, treat your own scrap and retired equipment as a stream to sell, not a cost to clear. For jewellers, the adjacent opportunity in household gold recycling is covered in our MSME guide to the gold business, and the refining end of the chain in India's gold refineries and GIFT City.
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About the author
SRF Capital Studio Research Desk
Funding Intelligence, SRF Capital Studio
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