At the World Sustainable Development Summit in New Delhi last month, a session organized by the Energy and Resources Institute and the Ashoka Center for People-Centric Energy Transition brought together government officials, researchers, and industry representatives to work through exactly how fragile that supply picture is. The findings were candid.
India needs a ninefold increase in lithium supply and a fivefold increase in copper to meet its net zero target by 2070, according to research presented jointly by Ashoka University and NITI Aayog. Those are not projections for some distant future. They represent materials that need to start moving through supply chains now, given the lead times involved in exploration, processing, and manufacturing scale-up.
The problem is that global supply chains for most of these materials remain concentrated and geopolitically exposed. Rare earth processing runs predominantly through China. Lithium extraction in Latin America is drawing increasing local opposition over environmental damage. India ships rare earth chlorides to China and Japan for separation because domestic processing capacity does not yet exist at scale. Former CPCB chairman J. Moscar put it plainly at the session: without disruptive processing technologies and domestic coordination, the circular economy aspirations that everyone agrees on will not translate into the supply resilience anyone actually needs.
The demand for critical minerals is concentrated in wealthy, high-tech economies. Roughly 90% of the resources are in the global south. That geographic mismatch is not new, but it is becoming operationally urgent as corporate clean energy timelines compress and procurement teams discover that the materials underpinning their supplier commitments are not actually secured.
Recyclers at the session noted that India currently recovers 22 elements from e-waste, compared to a global norm of 10 to 12, and achieves extraction efficiencies above 98% on several materials. That technical capability exists. What does not exist is the policy and commercial infrastructure to scale it. Historically, extended producer responsibility (EPR) frameworks have prioritized only four metals. Formal recyclers compete against informal processors who undercut on price by skipping environmental and worker protections. Investment flows to the players doing it right have not followed the rhetoric.
The 3C-SET Consortium, launched at the session, is an attempt to bridge the coordination gap through shared data systems, joint research, and cross-sector dialogue. Whether it moves fast enough to matter against the timelines involved is an open question.
For procurement and sustainability professionals tracking critical mineral exposure in their own supply chains, the practical takeaway is this: the secondary recovery infrastructure that would reduce concentration risk is technically achievable and severely underfunded. That gap is a supply chain vulnerability for every organization whose clean energy strategy assumes these materials will be available when needed.
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