By:- Aksh Chauhan, Co-founder & COO EAZZY
Every home in India has one: a drawer, a shelf, or a dusty corner stacked with phones that no longer switch on, chargers with no matching device, a television that was “upgraded” three years ago but never thrown out. We don’t think of this clutter as waste. We think of it as “someday will deal with it”. That someday is costing the country far more than most of us realise.
India’s e-waste problem has quietly become one of the fastest-growing environmental and economic challenges of this decade. The country generated 6.2 million tonnes of e-waste in FY24, and that number is expected to more than double to 14 million tonnes by 2030. Our formal recycling infrastructure, however, can currently handle only about 2 million tonnes. That leaves a massive and widening gap between what we throw away and what we are actually equipped to process responsibly. The result: barely 1 in 10 discarded electronic items in India ends up in a formal, accountable recycling stream — a fraction of what more mature economies manage.
What makes this gap so painful is the value quietly slipping through it. Nearly a third of the material inside our e-waste is metal, including several critical and precious minerals that industries around the world are scrambling to secure. This is not a system that’s underperforming by accident. It’s a system quietly designed, through years of neglect, to recover only the easiest, most visible fraction of what’s actually there.
Households sit at the centre of this story, and that’s exactly why household-level solutions matter so much. When an old phone or a dead charger goes into the regular dustbin instead of a proper collection channel, it doesn’t just represent a missed opportunity; it becomes an active environmental hazard, leaching heavy metals into soil and water long after we’ve forgotten we ever owned the device.
This is precisely the gap a structured buyback model for household electronics is built to close. Instead of asking consumers to figure out where their old gadgets should go, buyback flips the incentive: it pays people for doing the right thing, and channels devices straight into certified, traceable recycling and refurbishment streams — recovering real value instead of losing it to landfill.
There’s also a larger national momentum behind this shift. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has put the focus on the country’s circular economy focus through Mission LiFE, waste-to-wealth frameworks, and resource-efficiency policies. That vision only becomes real if the last mile, which is the the household drawer, the office storeroom, or the neighbourhood repair shop is actually connected to the formal recycling economy.
This is the work the industry now needs to get serious about. Buyback cannot remain a side feature offered by a handful of players — it needs to become standard infrastructure, built out by recyclers, retailers, manufacturers, and platforms working in concert, so that every discarded device has an obvious, rewarding, and traceable place to go. That means investing in convenient collection networks, being transparent about where recovered materials end up, and making the economics work well enough for ordinary consumers that doing the right thing is also the easy thing. The sector that solves this last-mile problem won’t just be managing waste; it will be building the foundation the circular economy vision depends on, one old phone at a time.
