Extracting gold and silver from e-waste now possible with Indian recycling tech: Masood Mallick, MD, Re Sustainability

Nowadays, there is a fundamental change in the definition of waste in the sector. Industry pundits now do not see it as waste, as a problem that needs to be solved somehow, but see it as a resource, as a feedstock and this has led to the trend towards newer waste-to-wealth and waste-to-worth interventions. Now the focus has turned to what value we can get from this ‘waste’ rather than putting it in, say a landfill, and hoping it would go away.

Even in waste, there is a hierarchy, based on what can be recovered. The lowest in the hierarchy is the construction and demolition waste, which is a huge problem across India and now there is tech to convert and recycle this waste into material that could be used in construction again. The highest in the waste hierarchy is electronic waste which is becoming a huge issue in India, and we have the only plant in India to recover precious metals from e-waste.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: On e-waste, what are the issues, challenges and opportunities for India? What role does the informal sector play in recycling?

Masood Mallick: The rate of growth of e-waste in India is mind boggling. Globally it is growing at three times the growth of population. You must understand that we in India are at the early stage of a consumerist lifestyle and with a growing economy and rising incomes, the problem is likely to grow exponentially. Earlier, we had radios or watches which worked for 30 years. Nowadays, electronics are being designed for a low lifespan. The average lifespan of electronic products and gadgets has declined and it is being designed for early obsolescence. Now, batteries cannot be removed from many gadgets, neither can they be replaced and hence all of it adds to the devices being thrown away. You might fondly remember your old Nokia phones where one could remove the battery with ease.

Re Sustainability has a global footprint, operating over 95 locations spread across India, Singapore, USA, and the Middle East.

And what is inside this e-waste? Metals and minerals like copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium which we import at huge cost and then throw away with the e-waste. It is such a huge foreign currency loss. And then we say we are recycling, but what we are doing is that we are downcycling, that is taking something which is worth Rs 100 and then recycling it to something that is worth Rs 50. Ideally, what we should do is upcycling, increasing its value, say from Rs 100 to Rs 150.

There is a huge informal sector in recycling and in due course they need to be integrated into the formal recycling network considering the safety and tech aspects. They should be made part of the larger value chain and should be made part of the circularity framework.

Right now, 80 per cent of the e-waste collection is from the informal sector while 20 per cent is from the formal sector. Here too there are players who claim to be part of the formal structure of recycling, but they too finally rely on the informal sector. The conditions of recycling in the informal sector are horrible and quite unhealthy.

It could be surprising for you, but until last year, to get precious metals from e-waste, we needed to send the waste to Germany or Japan or Belgium. Just imagine sending such work to such high cost economies and centres.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Tell us about your efforts at precious metal recovery from e-waste?

Masood Mallick: Our plant in Hyderabad is in its first year of operation and we hope to recover precious metals like gold and silver from e-waste. We wanted to demonstrate that a world class plant could be built with this tech and sustained in India. After a great effort of recycling gold, silver or copper from e-waste, we need to sell it in the open market at the same price as metals and minerals which are mined with a huge cost to the environment. We consider it as green gold and green silver, but we are unable to sell it at a premium. However, regulations are coming on extended producer responsibility (ERP) which would make this sector more profitable. We are also awaiting the monetisation opportunities that carbon credits and trading would offer.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: One hears about legislation on the Right to Repair. Is it likely to work and would it lead to lesser e-waste?

Masood Mallick: As part of the National Circular Economy Framework (NCEF), there is a voluntary roadmap by industry, looking at product design, repairability and the overall principle of Reduce, Repair and Reuse. There are various recommendations for policy changes including green credits. It has been received well by the government.

What we find with gadget manufacturers is that there is a ‘performance throttling’ of gadgets, so that it starts to perform poorly as it ages. They are also designing for redundancy; it is designed in such a way that consumers would be forced to replace it at a certain point in time, and this replacement time is getting shorter and shorter.

There are discussions in the ecosystem about a repairability index, recycling of materials and the larger circular economy ecosystem. The recent iPhone claims to have 30 per cent recycled content is surely a good thing. The recent case of Apple saying that it will be switching to USB-C from the lightning port is a huge win for the circular economy. There is a European Union mandate for all mobile device makers to adopt this technology, and such interventions are helping.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: How much of sustainability initiatives at companies and factories are real and how much of it is greenwashing?

Masood Mallick: For many of them, sustainability is a marketing gimmick and they do that because they want to join the sustainability bandwagon. There is a huge gap between their intentions and what gets done on the ground. Many companies also produce voluminous reports on environment and sustainability, but there is a gap between what is written in the report and what the real conditions are.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: How is the incentive structure for waste-to-energy plants? Does it make more sense to have smaller plants than larger ones?

Masood Mallick: The government has begun giving a lot of incentives and there are concessions on import duties for certain kinds of components, there are subsidies which are made available from Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA) and other agencies. However, what would work in the long run are market-based incentives like carbon credits, green credits, differential energy credits for energy recycled from waste, and higher tariffs for energy received from waste-to-energy plants.

For some type of resource recovery to happen, we need to have bigger plants. There are some who are enamoured of smaller plants, but in some of our waste-to-energy power plants, the pollution control equipment takes up two-thirds of the infrastructure, while the power plant takes up the remaining one-third. Smaller plants are just not viable, and I am telling it from 30 years of experience. I was associated with the first waste-to-energy plant in Delhi, which was to generate a mere one MW, and which did not take off. Some kinds of tech can be decentralised and some cannot. All waste-to-energy plants have a minimum scale, and in Indian conditions five MW is the minimum plant size, otherwise we would be compromising on quality and environmental factors.

That does not mean we should not experiment with various technologies. We are now experimenting with compressed biogas plants, with two totally different technologies.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you talk about interesting startups in the waste collection/segregation/conversion space.

Masood Mallick: We have mentored quite a few startups and are working with Jagruth Tech which converts waste to green coal. We in India burn a billion tonnes of coal every year to generate energy and these startups work on producing a higher calorific solid fuel from waste. We use coal in many sectors, apart from generating power. The issue is you cannot blend waste directly with coal, and the challenge is to create a solid fuel which can be directly fed into a power plant, as if it was coal. It should have a higher calorific value and also have the physical characteristics of coal. This is what the startup is doing. It was a winner in one of our startup competitions in the sector.

We also work with organisations like Marico Innovation Foundation on a novel tech for recycling plastics, so that plastics of a particular quality are graded together and recycled, avoiding mixing of various kinds of plastic, which leads to reduction in the overall quality. We are also working with startups which use AI to identify and sort waste. They have cameras which use AI to look at a stream of waste and sort it out.

We also work with startups in the medical waste space and are integrating them into our work on sorting of medical waste. We have 25 such medical waste plants in operation and we service thousands of hospitals in disposing of their medical waste. Some medical waste plants need incineration and to avoid manual handling, we modified robots used in the automotive industry and are integrating them into our activities.

Venkatesh Kannaiah: Can you tell us how AI might be used in the waste-to-wealth sector going forward?

Masood Mallick: For the waste-to-energy industry, AI can be used in a variety of ways, starting from sorting or segregating of waste.

We at Re Sustainability use it for identifying trends in garbage disposal in cities and municipalities and help our garbage collection trucks follow optimised route planning. It is based on predictive analytics based on large amounts of data.

We also use AI across all our plants to enhance safety. We use visual analytics to identify if someone is going towards a secure area without a helmet. It immediately alerts our control centres and preventive action is taken. We have 65 plants across the country where we use some kind of AI for safety purposes. At our plants in Singapore, we have already begun using robots and autonomous vehicles for transporting material within the plant. It is permitted there, and learnings from that can be used in other plants when regulations ease. In Dubai, we use AI and ML and have a robotic sorting system, and it can even sort by colour, apart from finding out different kinds of plastics.