Audi fights premature recycling of electronic waste in India

The Audi Environmental Foundation is supporting the nonprofit start-up company Nunam of German-Indian founder Prodip Chatterjee to prevent the premature recycling of electronic waste in India.

Nunam buys discarded laptop batteries from scrap dealers in the Indian state of Karnataka and uses their battery cells for stationary energy storage systems. The resulting power banks can supply electricity to items that consume small amounts of power such as smartphones, fans or lamps, and can serve as a power source for people in rural areas of India. Nunam has so far found that old laptop batteries have an average remaining capacity of approximately two-thirds.

The Audi Environmental Foundation is funding the pilot phase of the project, during which Nunam plans to develop the new power banks to production maturity. To date, around 5,000 battery cells from 1,000 laptop battery packs have been disassembled and tested. In the long term, Nunam plans to set up a small-scale production facility and transfer the findings to other sources in order to develop additional power sources.