Editor’s PickCompliance·29 Oct 2026·6 min·Plastic, PET
India's 2026 plastic rules now force brands to put 40% recycled content in rigid packaging this financial year, rising to 60% by 2028-29. That is a standing order to buy your recycled plastic. But the system meant to verify those claims, registered auditors and a CPCB guideline that was due around September 2026, has not fully arrived, which makes auditable, standard-grade recycled output the thing worth paying for.
Editor’s PickCompliance·29 Oct 2026·11 min·Battery, Lithium-ion, Lead Acid
India has one national EPR system for waste batteries, but it does not have one functioning certificate market. A 29 October 2026 snapshot of CPCB’s public dashboard shows a deep pool of lead credits and a remarkably small pool of lithium credits. For battery brands, the compliance question is no longer simply whether certificates exist, but whether the correct metal-specific certificate exists when it is needed.
Editor’s PickGovernment·26 Oct 2026·6 min·Metal, Non-Ferrous, Aluminium
Aluminium scrap is the only major base-metal scrap India still charges an import duty on, after copper, zinc and lead went to nil. Two industry bodies now want that 2.5% changed in opposite directions, and the decision lands at the February 2027 Budget. If you import, trade or remelt aluminium scrap, this fight sets your landed cost for the next year.
Editor’s PickCompliance·26 Oct 2026·6 min·Battery, Lithium-ion, Lead Acid
CPCB's 2026 battery recycling guidelines do two things that change who gets to stay in the trade. They put manual acid-battery breaking on a hard clock, and they sort lithium recyclers into licensed tiers around "black mass", the halfway product that is quietly becoming the industry's new unit of value.
Editor’s PickIndustry Trends·25 Oct 2026·7 min·Biomass & Crop Residue
From 2025-26, every city-gas company in India must blend compressed biogas (CBG) into the CNG and cooking gas it sells, starting at 1%, rising to 3% in 2026-27 and 5% by 2028-29. That demand is law, not hope. But only about 217 CBG plants are running against a target of 5,000, and the government's own reading is blunt: the thing holding CBG back is feedstock aggregation. Big money is now rushing in, Petronet LNG just put ₹1,200 crore into ten new plants, and every one of those plants will live or die on a steady supply of the crop residue, cattle dung, press mud and wet market waste that you handle. For once, the scarce link in the chain is not the buyer. It is the supplier.
Editor’s PickCompliance·24 Oct 2026·7 min·E-Waste
The government fixed a floor price for e-waste recycling certificates, 30% of the environmental compensation for dodging the rule, which works out to ₹22 a kg for consumer electronics and ₹10 to ₹41 across other categories. That floor is what lets a registered recycler pay a real rate for your old TV or laptop instead of a race-to-the-bottom price. On 22 October 2026 the Environment Minister called for "coordination between producers and recyclers." In e-waste, that coordination is a court fight: Samsung, LG, Havells, Daikin and Voltas have asked the Delhi High Court to strike the floor down and let the market set the price. For the collector and the recycler, the whole economics of doing it the legal way rests on how that case ends.
Editor’s PickIndustry Trends·22 Oct 2026·8 min·Plastic
Multi-layered plastic, the foil-lined sachets and pouches that hold shampoo, ketchup, gutka and milk powder, is about 21% of India's plastic waste by the government's own composition data, yet it is the one stream the scrap market barely touches. A collector earns almost nothing for it, because the layers cannot be cleanly separated and the money recovered hardly covers the cost of picking, moving and sorting it. A fresh survey shows the squeeze: Indians say they would pay more for sustainable packaging, the most willing of any country, but at the shop the cheapest sachet still wins. What is changing is not the scrap value. It is who pays, and the answer, increasingly, is the brand, through EPR.
Editor’s PickGovernment·21 Oct 2026·12 min·Ferrous, Steel, Aluminium, Copper
A DGFT notice dated 21 October 2026 lets certificate-free scrap from six safe regions enter India through 11 ports instead of 8, and be cleared at inland container depots. Official trade data show those six regions supplied about half of India's ₹1.17 lakh crore metal scrap import bill in 2025-26. The European Union, about a third of that flow, has proposed stopping metal scrap exports to India from 21 May 2027, and its final list is due by 21 November 2026.
Editor’s PickIndustry Trends·20 Oct 2026·5 min
National heavy melting scrap (HMS) fell 3.9% on our price page from 5 to 19 October 2026, from ₹38.60 to ₹37.10 a kg, and a public market report shows Mandi falling 3.8% in the week to 16 October. Diwali is on Sunday 8 November. We went back through public trade reports for the three earlier festivals. In each, prices were soft in the weeks before Diwali. What came after was different every time: a strong rebound in 2024, a weak one in 2025 and none in 2023. Four festivals are too few to call a rule, but they show what a yard can and cannot count on.
Editor’s PickIndustry Trends·19 Oct 2026·8 min·E-Waste
On 19 October 2026, the government said its office clean-up campaign had earned ₹491.28 crore from scrap since 2 October. The figure was ₹304.72 crore at the same point in 2025. Of that, ₹425.06 crore came from the Ministry of Railways, about 86% by our estimate. Railways also sells scrap all year. It reported more than ₹6,700 crore for 2025-26, which is more than the ₹5,102.91 crore the campaign has reported across five years and all ministries. The lots include cut rail, old sleepers, locomotives, coaches, wagons and a small amount of e-waste. This is what is being sold, how the sales work, and where to find open lots on our Auctions page.
