By: Manikumar Uppala, Co-Founder and Chief of Industrial Engineering at Metastable Materials
The modern narrative of India’s industrial rise is frequently visualised through high-tech assembly lines, automotive manufacturing and sprawling infrastructure projects. The strength of any advanced manufacturing nation is determined by its foundational metallurgy. Without this metallurgical and chemical processing capacity, “Make in India” becomes a shallow model of assembling imported components, capturing minimal profit margins while remaining exposed to global supply shocks.
What Indian Manufacturing Actually Needs
Let’s consider the most critical structural backbone of Indian manufacturing: steel. India is scaling up steelmaking with Jindal Stainless Limited (JSL), one of the nation’s leading stainless steel manufacturers, which recorded a consolidated annual turnover of INR 40,182 crore in FY25 and is also expanding its facilities to reach 4.2 million tonnes of annual melt capacity by FY27. That is a massive planned scale-up. But where will the critical alloying metals required by that industrial base come from?
Nickel is a particularly important example. Speciality steels need precise nickel alloying to achieve market standards for corrosion resistance, high ductility, and high-temperature mechanical strength required for railways, aerospace engines, chemical processing vessels and other strategic defence projects. India has limited domestic production of primary nickel and remains heavily dependent on imported nickel-bearing feedstocks and refined products. India’s demand for refined nickel is projected to rise from 85 kilotonnes to 170 kilotonnes within five years. This creates a structural vulnerability, and India can expand its manufacturing capacity, but the metals required to operate that capacity are exposed to global supply chains. The import pipeline is also highly concentrated as Chinese state-backed enterprises control up to 75% of the active nickel refining capacity in Indonesia. Any geopolitical shock or maritime trade disruption immediately exposes India’s industrial core to price volatility and supply shocks.
To secure India’s manufacturing future, building primary mining and refining capacity domestically is essential but it’s a long-term proposition. Here’s where battery recycling offers a complementary proposition. End-of-life batteries are a stock of nickel, cobalt, lithium, manganese, copper and other materials that have already been mined and processed once. The opportunity is to recover those materials domestically and return them to industrial supply chains.
Reclaiming the Industrial Backbone Across Essential Supply Chains
Advanced battery recycling can serve as a versatile metallurgical engine. By processing spent battery chemistries, recyclers extract high-value metals at high purities. These metals have multiple use cases across crucial industries.
1. Specialty Metallurgy and Aerospace Alloys:
Recycling can recover nickel into concentrated intermediates or refined products. With appropriate metallurgical processing, these secondary metals can be redirected into manufacturing stainless steels and superalloys for engine turbine blades, anti-corrosive piping used in navy, defence and so on.
2. Cement and Green Construction
Processing of battery waste generates major secondary material streams with applications in construction materials:
– Ferric Slag in Clinker Production: Some smelting processes yield iron-rich slags that can be used as raw materials or fluxing agents in cement production. It can reduce the clinkerization temperature inside cement kilns, significantly cutting coal energy costs while producing cement with great mineralogical properties and compressive strength.
– Lithium Slag as supplementary cementitious material: Lithium bearing industrial slag which contains active aluminosilicates, exhibits highly reactive pozzolanic properties. According to a 2025 study, using a percentage of lithium slag instead of Portland cement can increase concrete’s compressive strength by 10% to 12.7%, splitting tensile strength and flexural strength. This “upcycled” concrete dramatically lowers the embodied carbon footprint of construction projects and provides an eco-friendly substitute for rapidly depleting coal fly ash.
3. Industrial ceramics and glassmaking
Lithium-bearing materials can also have potential applications as fluxes in ceramics and glass manufacturing, where suitable compositions can help reduce firing temperatures and energy requirements. This can reduce thermal energy costs and extend the operating life of industrial kilns.
Literal Fueling of Indian Manufacturing
While battery recycling can help heavy industries, it can literally fuel India’s clean energy manufacturing sector. Under the landmark ₹18,100 crore Advanced Chemistry Cell (ACC) Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, the Ministry of Heavy Industries is supporting the creation of 50 GWh of domestic cell manufacturing capacity. But the reality is that only 1.4GWh has been commissioned, as of October 2025. This is because cell manufacturing, along with huge capital, also requires a secure supply of highly specialised materials.
The scheme requires beneficiaries to achieve at least 25% domestic value addition and raise this to 60% within five years. Battery recycling can become an important part of that localisation strategy. Instead of relying entirely on newly mined and imported lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese, India can increasingly recover these materials from the growing stock of end-of-life batteries and manufacturing scrap. This creates a secondary domestic resource stream that can feed back into the battery-material supply chain.
According to NITI Aayog, India’s annual demand for lithium-ion batteries is projected to soar from 40 GWh in 2025 to 210 GWh by 2030. As the installed base grows, the material available for recovery in the future also grows.
The objective, therefore, should not be simply to manufacture batteries but also localise the materials that make those batteries possible; and battery recycling provides one route to doing so without relying only on new primary mineral extraction.
Plugging the National Resource Leak
Despite the potential of battery recycling, India has limited domestic refining capacity for recovered battery materials. Domestic recyclers have often focussed on the basic “pre-processing” mechanical stage, exporting black mass for downstream refining. This practice effectively drains India’s critical mineral wealth, forcing the country to export its raw “urban ore” only to import it back as finished, high-value cells. This black mass leakage drains hundreds of crores in potential refining margins annually from the domestic supply chain.
Conclusion: Battery Recycling IS Critical Metals Manufacturing
The industrial strategy of a sovereign India cannot rely on a fragile bridge of imported primary metals or unrefined foreign scrap. To fuel the next decade of industrial growth, we must reframe our perception of battery recycling. It is not an environmental clean-up service or a waste-disposal utility; battery recycling is advanced critical metals manufacturing. By processing “urban mines” directly within our borders, battery refiners act as primary suppliers of high-purity chemical intermediates and structural alloys, and urban mining can be India’s fastest, cleanest, and most secure pathway to metallurgical sovereignty and advanced manufacturing leadership.