“The world is becoming more electronic by the day. Every new AI model, every new connected device, every electric vehicle on the road adds to a mountain of e-waste that is growing faster than our capacity to handle it responsibly. On this World Environment Day, I urge every Indian to take a simple but profound pledge: to never let an old phone, a spent battery or a discarded appliance end up in a landfill or with an informal scrap dealer. These are not just waste. They are concentrated deposits of lithium, cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements, minerals that are fundamental to our nation’s energy security, our digital infrastructure and our industrial future,” Mr. Gupta said.

Mr. Gupta, whose company operates one of India’s largest lithium-ion battery recycling facilities with technology that achieves over 95 percent recovery efficiency and 98 percent purity in extracted materials, pointed to the enormous strategic opportunity embedded in the country’s waste stream. “When we irresponsibly discard e-waste, we are not just harming the planet, we are throwing away the very building blocks of nation building. The critical minerals locked inside old batteries and circuit boards can reduce our dependence on imports, strengthen our manufacturing base and power our green transition. But when they are burnt in open yards or dissolved in acid by unregulated operators, they poison our soil, contaminate our groundwater and enter our food chain. The damage is irreparable and cumulative,” he warned.

Addressing India’s youth directly, Mr. Gupta made a case for redirecting entrepreneurial energy towards hard industries. “Our young generation is extraordinarily talented, but too much of that talent flows into software, apps and services. We need builders. We need young Indians to look at critical mineral recycling, sustainable mining and electronics manufacturing not as legacy industries but as the frontiers of the next economy. These are sectors where intellectual challenge meets national purpose. A venture that figures out how to extract battery-grade lithium from black mass at scale is solving a problem as complex and as valuable as anything in Silicon Valley,” he said.

The imperative for formalising and scaling the e-waste recycling sector has never been more urgent. India generates over 1.7 million tonnes of e-waste annually, a figure that is projected to cross 5 million tonnes by 2030 as digital penetration deepens and device lifecycles shorten. Yet barely 30 percent of this volume is processed through formal, environmentally sound channels. The remainder flows into the informal sector, where crude extraction methods recover only a small fraction of valuable materials while releasing toxic heavy metals into the environment. The Union Cabinet’s Rs 1,500 crore incentive scheme under the National Critical Mineral Mission is designed to change this equation, but policy alone cannot solve the collection challenge. Without a cultural shift in how citizens dispose of their electronics, the most sophisticated recycling plants will run dry of feedstock while the waste continues to poison the land.

“World Environment Day is not a celebration. It is a reminder that the planet’s patience is finite. The age of AI and ubiquitous electronics is not something that is coming. It is already here. Every Indian who owns a phone, a laptop, an EV is part of this story. The only question is whether we will be responsible authors of it or careless spectators to the damage it leaves behind. The pledge to recycle responsibly is among the most consequential commitments a citizen can make in 2026,” Mr. Gupta concluded.