RECYKAL TIMESIntelligence for the circular economyArchive search
Electronics giants challenge CPCB price controls in court as statutory recycling targets climb to 70 percent.
Rising can shell costs and Middle East supply chain disruptions force beverage brands to reallocate volume to PET and glass ahead of the festive season.
Major supplying regions are taking regulatory and tariff actions to keep copper scrap for local processing, putting pressure on import supply.
Importers face competing petitions as recyclers push to abolish the 2.5% customs duty while primary producers demand a hike to 7.5% on lower grades.
New processing capacities chase a domestic waste pool governed by escalating recovery mandates.
The Cabinet capital subsidy funds four mega-refineries, but lithium guidelines mandate ores and concentrates over recycled feeds.
Relaxed quality norms allowed overseas coil imports to spike while domestic stainless flat production dropped 9%.
Relaxed quality control orders and cheap overseas coil reduce domestic mill output, reshaping raw material demand across Indian ports.
Notification G.S.R. 237(E) establishes mandatory recycled plastic content targets for packaging while restricting imported credit claims.
Trade data published on 7 November 2026 shows India's imports of finished stainless flat products rose 33% to 8.69 lakh tonnes in January to August 2026. In the same months, India's own mills cut finished flat output by 9%. Nobody has joined those two numbers to the thing that follows from them, which is that the furnaces buying your stainless scrap have a smaller order book than they did a year ago.
On 4 November 2026 the Union Cabinet put ₹2,814 crore behind four plants that will refine lithium and nickel, the exact step India's battery recyclers have been missing. At the briefing that followed, the minister said the money would take material from mining or recycling alike. The Cabinet's own written order says lithium ores and concentrates. The official note issued the next day is narrower still. If you shred batteries for a living, that gap is the whole story.
On 1 November 2026, three CBIC notifications changed how plastic waste and scrap is taxed. Buy from an unregistered supplier and you now pay the GST yourself, in cash, at 18%. Buy from a registered one and you deduct 2% at source instead. From 1 January 2027 every purchase from an unregistered supplier also needs an e-invoiced self-invoice. The paperwork, not the rate, is what will reshape who sells plastic scrap in India.
On 9 November 2026, Europe's hazardous-waste code for black mass starts to apply, closing its export for recovery to countries outside the OECD. The US and India have already put gates of their own on the same powder. India's critical mineral recycling scheme pays for the metals that are extracted, not for black mass alone, while payables for the powder sit near the low end of their range for the twelve months to 5 November 2026. Shredding is the half of battery recycling that India has built. Refining is the half that decides who gets paid.
For years, the weak spot in e-waste EPR was the certificate nobody could trace. A CPCB direction dated 7 July 2026 closes that gap. On the E-Waste EPR Portal, a recycling certificate now stands only if a GST e-invoice backs the sale of the recovered metal. If it does not, CPCB calls it a false certificate. For a producer who buys certificates to meet an EPR target, this is the best protection handed to you in a long time.
For decades, the price a furnace in Mandi Gobindgarh paid for scrap was really decided somewhere else, in a port in the United States, a yard in Europe, on a ship crossing the Red Sea. In the year to March 2026, that quietly ended. India's mills bought a fifth less imported scrap, home-grown scrap undercut the imported grade by thousands of rupees a tonne, and a global price agency began publishing a daily Indian scrap benchmark for the first time. The feedstock India once had to go abroad for is now cheaper in its own backyard.
Beverage makers are switching some products to PET bottles as aluminium can supplies tighten. Recykal Times’ internal price intelligence shows that bottle bale prices vary by state, while demand for new packaging does not automatically raise demand for recycled material.
Dated market indications for 3 November show lower Raipur rebar and Mandi HMS scrap, while Mumbai rebar was unchanged. The snapshot suggests the pre-festive market is not moving in one direction.
On 15 October 2026, Loop Industries told investors it had shrunk the planned capacity of India's first large-scale PET depolymerisation plant from 70,000 to 45,000 tonnes a year, a 36% cut. Construction has not started. The company's board has formed a committee to weigh a sale. Mechanical recyclers are running ahead, but they cannot eat the coloured, contaminated PET that chemical recycling was supposed to handle. That waste stream just lost its most visible exit.
India's copper demand hit a record 2,100 thousand tonnes in 2025-26, and its copper scrap imports jumped about 51% to ₹30,353 crore to help feed it. But the three suppliers that send India the most copper scrap, the Gulf, the United States and the European Union, have each taken steps in 2026 to hold that scrap inside their own borders. For copper and brass recyclers, the message is the same from three directions: the imported tonne is getting harder to count on.
The Mines Minister says recycling can deliver critical minerals years before a new mine opens. India's authorised e-waste recyclers can process close to three times what they actually handled in 2023-24. And most of the material still sits with the people who collect it. That gap is a business, and the people standing in it are not the ones the headlines usually talk about.