-
CENTRES
Progammes & Centres
Location
After COP30, India’s push for circularity in waste-to-feedstock, aluminium, and MSMEs will decide if growth, jobs, and SDGs progress together
As COP30 in Belém draws to a close, the politics of climate change have clearly shifted from headline targets to the mechanics of implementation. The Belém Declaration on global green industrialisation, launched during the conference, underlines how questions of trade, industrial competitiveness, and material use now sit at the heart of climate diplomacy rather than at its margins. For India, this shift is particularly salient. A fast-growing economy, an expanding manufacturing base, and ambitious net-zero commitments mean that the country’s long-term trajectory will be judged less by the number of solar panels installed and more by how efficiently it uses steel, cement, aluminium, plastics, and other materials that underpin growth.
This is where secondary manufacturing and circular-economy systems move from being a peripheral environmental agenda to a core development and industrial-policy question. India generates an estimated 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste each year; approximately 82 percent is collected, of which only about 28 percent is treated, with the remaining portion disposed of through open dumping. Projections suggest that annual waste generation could rise to around 165 million tonnes by 2030 and more than 400 million tonnes by mid-century if current patterns continue. At the same time, the Government of India now frames circularity as a macroeconomic opportunity: official estimates suggest that a circular-economy transition could generate more than US$2 trillion in market value and close to ten million jobs by 2050, with substantial gains by 2030 itself.
Secondary manufacturing and circularity are therefore central to India’s pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to its broader growth strategy. By definition, secondary manufacturing relies on recovered materials—scrap metals, recycled plastics, reprocessed aggregates—rather than virgin inputs, turning what would otherwise be waste into industrial feedstock. This makes it the practical bridge between waste management and industrial policy by lowering the material and energy intensity of production, reducing dependence on imported raw materials, and creating labour-intensive activities in collection, sorting, repair, and remanufacturing.
Secondary manufacturing and circularity are therefore central to India’s pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to its broader growth strategy.
In SDG terms, more efficient material use and high-quality recycling are directly linked to SDG 12 on responsible consumption and production. Still, they also reinforce SDG 8 on decent work, SDG 9 on industry, innovation, and infrastructure, SDG 11 on sustainable cities, and SDG 13 on climate action. NITI Aayog’s study on resource efficiency explicitly recognises this cross-cutting role and positions resource productivity as a lever not only for SDG 12, but also for goals related to energy, water, urbanisation, and ecosystem resilience.
The aluminium sector illustrates these dynamics with unusual clarity. Global data from the International Aluminium Institute indicate that producing primary aluminium from bauxite requires roughly 186 gigajoules of energy per tonne, whereas recycled aluminium requires only about 8.3 gigajoules. The result is an energy saving of approximately 95.5 percent per tonne of metal produced via secondary routes. In India, where much of the smelting capacity is still tied to fossil-based power, this gap in energy intensity translates almost directly into a gap in carbon intensity.
Domestic industry developments reinforce this picture. Recent industry estimates suggest that secondary aluminium now accounts for nearly 40 percent of India’s total aluminium supply, and that recycling aluminium uses 95 percent less energy and emits over 90 percent less CO₂ than primary smelting. This aligns neatly with the emerging emphasis on green industrialisation and low-emission materials, where embodied carbon will increasingly influence access to high-value export markets.
Secondary manufacturing offers similar advantages in other sectors. NITI Aayog’s sectoral circular-economy action plans for e-waste, steel, plastics, and construction all highlight the potential to reduce reliance on raw materials, lower energy use, and improve competitiveness. Hence, circular-economy interventions are not simply about end-of-pipe waste diversion. They are upstream industrial strategies that lower the material and energy intensity of growth and increase resilience to global commodity price volatility.
India’s current edge in aluminium is built on abundant bauxite, integrated refineries, and captive power, which have made it a relatively low-cost producer and a net exporter. However, this edge rests on coal: energy accounts for roughly a third of smelting costs, and most primary metal is produced by coal-fired captive plants, leading to very high emissions per tonne of aluminium. As carbon border measures such as the European Union’s (EU) Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) start to put a price on the carbon content of imports, high-carbon aluminium will face rising costs and pressure in key markets. For primary and downstream producers, and for the secondary manufacturers who rely on them, shifting power supply towards renewables and steadily adopting cleaner process technologies such as inert anodes and carbon capture is therefore not only about the environment; it is now central to staying competitive, protecting jobs, and keeping India’s aluminium value chain aligned with its climate commitments.
If policy is designed carefully, circularity can therefore support more geographically distributed employment, greater opportunities for low- and mid-skill workers, and the upgrading of informal livelihoods into more formal, safer, and better-paid jobs.
A “fair ecosystem” for materials such as aluminium requires that all segments of the value chain—primary, downstream, and secondary—can operate on predictable and equitable terms. Primary producers need secure, environmentally responsible access to bauxite, energy, and logistics; downstream manufacturers and Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) need reliable, transparently priced access to primary metal and scrap; and secondary producers need stable scrap supplies alongside clear rules on duties, standards, and compliance.
Rather than privileging one segment, policy should strengthen enabling conditions across the chain: rigorous upstream frameworks for mining and community benefit-sharing; rational, predictable pricing and market access midstream; and supportive downstream scrap-import regimes, quality standards, and collection infrastructure. The central task is not to choose between primary and secondary producers, but to design an ecosystem in which resource efficiency, climate mitigation, and domestic value addition advance together.
Any serious assessment of the future of green jobs in India must start with the structure of its enterprise base. Data indicates that the MSME sector in India contributes about 29 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), more than 40 percent of exports, comprises over 63 million enterprises, and employs approximately 111 million people. Many of these enterprises sit exactly where circular-economy activity takes place: scrap-based foundries, small re-rollers, repair workshops, component remanufacturers, plastics recyclers, and firms converting construction and demolition waste into usable inputs.
Globally, the waste and recycling industry employs an estimated 6.9 million people, representing 0.2 percent of total global employment. Against this backdrop, Indian projections that circular practices could create roughly 14 million jobs in the medium term and up to ten million additional green jobs by 2050 are broadly consistent with international experience. Secondary manufacturing and circular-economy measures have a distinctive profile: they are often more labour-intensive per unit of material processed than large-scale primary extraction and smelting, and they tend to be spatially dispersed across cities and industrial clusters. If policy is designed carefully, circularity can therefore support more geographically distributed employment, greater opportunities for low- and mid-skill workers, and the upgrading of informal livelihoods into more formal, safer and better-paid jobs; conversely, if circular-economy strategies are built predominantly around a small number of highly automated facilities, the environmental gains will be realised but the employment dividend will be sharply reduced.
A post-COP30 strategy that views secondary manufacturing through a “job–carbon dividend” lens—evaluating each tonne shifted from primary to secondary routes in terms of both emissions reductions and employment gains—offers India a coherent way to align its green industrial ambitions, MSME dynamism, and SDG commitments within a single policy framework.
These labour-market dynamics intersect directly with the political messages emerging from Belém. COP30 is already being cast as an “implementation COP”, with major actors stressing that the focus must shift from announcing new targets to delivering existing commitments through concrete sectoral transitions. For India, an implementation-focused approach to secondary manufacturing and circularity would rest less on new declarations and more on aligning existing instruments with low-emission materials and green jobs. In practical terms, this implies that regulatory and fiscal frameworks should reward low-carbon production and the use of such materials. Public procurement norms and infrastructure programmes can recognise secondary metals, recycled plastics, and low-carbon aggregates as preferred materials, creating predictable demand for firms that invest in cleaner technologies.
Operationalising sectoral circular-economy plans for metals, plastics, construction, and e-waste will require explicit targets for domestic scrap collection, recycling capacity, and minimum recycled-content thresholds across major value chains, alongside MSME-focused instruments—credit guarantees, concessional finance, cluster infrastructure, and technology-upgradation schemes—that enable small firms to invest in modern recycling, compliance, and product innovation rather than remaining stuck in low-margin, high-pollution niches. At the same time, integrating the informal workforce of waste pickers, small scrap dealers, and unregistered recyclers into cooperatives, producer organisations, and social-enterprise models is essential to ensure that circularity delivers a just transition. Taken together, a post-COP30 strategy that views secondary manufacturing through a “job–carbon dividend” lens—evaluating each tonne shifted from primary to secondary routes in terms of both emissions reductions and employment gains—offers India a coherent way to align its green-industrial ambitions, MSME dynamism, and SDG commitments within a single policy frame.
Soumya Bhowmick is a Fellow and Lead, World Economies and Sustainability at the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy (CNED) at Observer Research Foundation (ORF).
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
Dr. Soumya Bhowmick is a Fellow and Lead for World Economies and Sustainability at the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy (CNED) at the Observer Research ...
Read More +
PREV
