Attero, an e-waste and lithium-ion battery recycling company, plans to significantly expand its rare earth element (REE) recycling capacity, targeting a scale-up from 300 tonnes to 30,000 tonnes per year within the next 12 to 24 months. This expansion will require an investment of INR 1 billion.
Rare earth elements such as Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr), and Dysprosium (Dy) are critical components in electric vehicles, wind energy systems, and electronic devices. Attero’s recycling processes extract REEs from discarded items like hard drives, laptops, and earphones, which typically contain elements including Nd, Pr, Cerium (Ce), Gadolinium (Gd), and Dy.
“We have patented processes that enable us to recover rare earths from e-waste with over 98 percent efficiency and 99.9 percent purity,” said Nitin Gupta, CEO and Co-founder of Attero. The company aims to increase its processing capacity from 1 tonne per day to 100 tonnes per day.
Attero also recovers valuable materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese by processing black mass from used lithium-ion batteries. In FY25, the company processed over 150,000 tonnes of e-waste and 15,000 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries. It plans to expand this to 415,000 tonnes of e-waste and 50,000 tonnes of battery recycling capacity annually, along with extending operations to Europe and the US.
The company holds more than 46 global patents, with recent approvals in India, China, Taiwan, and several countries in the Middle East. It has also introduced Selsmart, a consumer e-waste collection platform, aiming to handle 140,000 metric tonnes of e-waste and recover five million electronic units over three years.
Established in 2008, Attero is an Indian company engaged in e-waste and lithium-ion battery recycling, currently operating across six countries.
