E-Waste Management: New Age Recycling

'Everybody saw waste ...they saw Potential'

This is what differentiates our new age Hi tech E-Junkies, Nitin and Rohan Gupta, co-founders, Attero Recycling . Attero E-cycles and gives the obsolete electricals a new life and a new function - that of saving the Earth.

With fast developments in technology and innovations taking place everyday, people hardly take time in discarding old electronic products and gadgets. Be it cell phones, laptops, desktops or anyother electronic item, their life span has shorten drastically and they are discarded pretty soon. So the milion dollar question that comes to my mind is where do these millions of computers, mobile phones and electronic items go, after been discarded.

It comes to this Hi-Tech junkyard based at Roorkee in India. In a country like India where recycling waste is totally an unorganised sector, Rohan Gupta saw a huge opprtunity in organising this activity.

Attero Recycling was founded by Rohan Gupta and Nitin Gupta in the year 2007 with an objective of providing an environmentally friendly solution to the problem of e-waste. Attero Recycling, an integrated end-to-end electronic waste (e-waste) recycling company. At Attero, they look at e-waste not just as waste, but as an important resource that can be made useful instead of shunning it as a social and environmental burden. With their fully automated facility for e-waste recycling at Roorkee, a first of its kind metallurgical process and a close technical collaboration with a leading US company, they have not only handled the complete processing of waste but also provided client friendly solutions like pickup of e-waste from the premises and complete data security.

Their project has been funded by VC firms, NEA-Indo US Venture and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. They have developed the technology for recycling non-reusable plastic as well as their own metallurgical process. Attero conducts regular audits to ensure compliance with the Health Environment and Safety standards. They believe that every contribution can make a difference in reducing the e-burden on society and protect nature from the growing E-Waste menace.

Attero’s plant is equipped to extract 98% of materials such as copper, lead, nickel, zinc, plastic, iron, silver and even gold to an extent. Attero has tied up with LG for a mobile ‘takeback’ campaign with drop boxes at 50 LG centres. The company has collected 300-400 tonnes of e-waste and plans to do about 1,000 tonnes a month initially and reach 3,000 tonnes a month in the next 4-5 years. It has also tied up with corporates such as LG, Perot Systems, KPMG, Visa and Tata DIESL to collect e-waste and in turn plants saplings for free within their campuses for each computer they pick up.

Founders of Attero:

Nitin Gupta graduated with an MBA degree from NYU Stern School of Business and a B.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Rohan Gupta was the co-founder and COO at Cinesprite Pvt. Ltd (a leader in online movie entertainment in India). He has previously worked at blue chip companies like SAP Labs. Rohan graduated with a B.E degree in Chemical engineering from REC Jaipur and is a man with innovative and intelligent strategies, which have the potential to take Attero to newer heights.

For more details, kindly check out: Attero Recycling

Photo Courtesy: Ashwani Nagpal, Economic Times.