Reforming E-Waste Economics Through EPR and Urban Mining

Gist The rapid digitization of the economy has transformed electronic waste into a massive, untapped reservoir of critical minerals, necessitating a shift toward "urban mining." Currently, public and private procurement policies prioritize immediate financial returns—choosing the cheapest disposal or highest resale value—over strategic material recovery and environmental safety. Aspirants must understand this required shift from simple cost-accounting to "life-cycle costing," as it directly dictates India's import dependence, data security, and the actual success of compliance frameworks like Extended Producer Responsibility EPR . Background India's traditional public procurement and disposal mechanisms have heavily relied on the lowest-price principle to ensure fiscal discipline and transparency. When IT equipment reaches the end of its life, organizations typically auction it to vendors offering the highest resale value or the lowest processing fee. This conventional approach ignores urban mining —the process of recovering valuable and strategic raw materials from discarded products rather than extracting them anew from the earth. Furthermore, under the Extended Producer Responsibility EPR framework, producers are mandated to ensure the recycling of their products. However, when compliance is judged solely on acquiring…