Environment › Waste and circular economy
E-waste, battery and hazardous waste
Electronic, battery and hazardous waste: the rules that make producers pay for recycling, recovering metals from old electronics, biomedical waste, ship breaking and the trade in waste. Prelims has asked which substances are released into the environment when old computers are disposed of carelessly.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2013: chromium and other metals released as e-waste
2 Sep 2026 · Mains
Urban mining
A discarded computer holds metals and critical minerals in concentrations a miner would be pleased with, and they have already been dug out of the ground once. Urban mining is recovering them from electronics at the end of life, which makes the fate of an old machine a resource question before it is a disposal one.
- A tonne of metal recovered here is a tonne not mined from a fresh ore body and not bought from an exporting country.
- How much of it is recovered depends on the process the material reaches, and advanced recycling has not become the default in India.
- The reason lies in how e-waste decisions are costed, on the producer's side and on the buyer's.
- E-waste recycling could meet 25 to 30 per cent of India's critical minerals needs.
See also: Critical minerals from industrial waste
2 Sep 2026 · Mains
Extended Producer Responsibility
The instrument that makes anyone pay for a product once it is thrown away is Extended Producer Responsibility, which moves that cost from the municipality to the producer. A producer is set a recycling target, and how it is allowed to meet that target decides whether the material is really recovered.
- The target is discharged by obtaining certificates from registered recyclers, so the obligation can be settled by the cheapest certificate rather than by the best recovery.
- The opinion piece of 2 September 2026 would have the certificate reward traceability and recovery efficiency instead, so that what a producer buys reflects what was actually recovered.
The Hindu, 2 Sep 2026: The two balance sheets behind every e-waste decision (opens in a new tab)
2 Sep 2026 · Mains
Life cycle costing in procurement
The other half of the argument is on the buying side, where a purchase or a disposal settled on the lowest visible price sends the material to whoever handles it most cheaply. That is rarely whoever handles it best, and the difference does not appear on the invoice.
Financial
- Closes with the transaction
- Rewards the lowest visible cost
- Maximises resale value, minimises processing cost
Strategic
- Stays open
- Resource security and supply chain resilience
- Environmental sustainability and public health
- Costs left off the invoice return as health spending, import dependence and strategic vulnerability
- Life cycle costing prices what a machine will cost to run and to dispose of, not only what it costs to buy.
- Value based procurement lets a buyer weigh that whole life figure against the quoted price, which lowest cost buying does not allow.