Attero Recycling: Mining the wastes

In 2007, when Nitin Gupta, an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business and engineering degree holder from IIT-Delhi came to India from the US ending his association with some technology start-ups, what he had with him was an idea. An idea that came out of his personal as well as societal requirement to have a proper mechanism to dispose of obsolete electronic goods. He captured that idea through PowerPoint presentation and some Excel sheets. Along with younger brother Rohan, a BTech in Chemical Engineering from REC, Jaipur, who was working with SAP Labs at that time, he started his dream venture Attero Recycling.

Attero, which means ‘waste’ in Latin, thus, took birth with initial funding from NEA-IndoUS Venture. But to address an unorganised sector like e-waste management where a vast majority of the recycling is still done by the unorganised players was not an easy task. Gupta knew that given the enormous amount of electronic waste India was expected to produce with the growth of the economy, there were bound to be a huge space created for organised players. He started working to fill that vacuum.

Today, the company has a capacity of recycling 36,000 tonnes of electronic waste per annum. It has an integrated e-waste recycling facility in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, with more than 200 clients, which include Wipro, HCL, Tata Tele Services, LG, Visa, Qualcomm and Google. The firm raised $6.3 million from venture capital firms IndoUS Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Series A in 2008. In 2010, Attero raised $8.3 million in Series B funding from International Finance Corporation, Granite Hill Capital Ventures and the existing investors.

In India, the electronic industries have emerged as the fastest growing segment in terms of production, internal consumption, and export. Computer waste is generated not only from individual households, but from government, public and private sectors and computer retailers and manufacturers. The biggest source of PC scrap are foreign countries that export huge quantities of computer waste in the form of monitors, printers, keyboards, CPUs, typewriters and PVC wires.

Due to the lack of awareness, more than 95 per cent of those are processed by the unorganised sector in a harmful way. Among the organised players, Attero claims to be the only company in India which has got end-to-end recycling capability starting from collection of hazardous e-waste to disassembly, mechanical separation of complex materials and metallurgical treatment. “We have developed indigenous metallurgical processing technology in-house, which is in the process of getting patented. This means, if you process any electronic waste in our plant, you can extract metal used in those such as gold, nickel, zinc, copper and lead with 99.99 per cent purity,” says Gupta. The beauty of Attero’s facility is that the entire operation is recorded on a closed-circuit camera so that clients can verify if their waste have been properly recycled or not. After extracting the non-ferrous composition, the leftovers are then sent to government-approved landfill for safe disposal.

“I think being on the platform of WEF programme will help us increase awareness about e-waste management and sourcing of e-waste,” he adds.

Nitin Gupta
Founder and CEO, Attero Recycling