Hindustan Zinc’s Board approved the setting up the plant last month with an outlay of ₹3,823 crore. It will have a 10 million tonnes annual capacity.
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REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
Hindustan Zinc Limited (HZL), India’s largest zinc-lead-silver producer, will recover zinc and silver from historic tailings and transform them for clear energy and infrastructure development.
This will be done through the country’s first large-scale zinc tailing reprocessing plant that HZL is setting up at Rampura Agucha in Rajasthan. Historic tailings are waste minerals that remain after valuable components are extracted from mined ore.
The board of the Vedanta group-owned firm approved the setting up the plant last month with an outlay of ₹3,823 crore. It will have a 10 million tonnes annual capacity.
HZL CEO Arun Mishra said in a statement: “For a mineral-rich country like India, mining waste is not an end-point. It is the next frontier.”
Lowering imports
Zinc is a critical enabler of steel, infrastructure, and clean energy technologies. “But if India systematically recovers copper, cadmium, cobalt, and rare earths from mine tailings, we could drastically cut import dependence, secure raw materials for Make in India, and even emerge as an exporter,” said the company’s CEO said.
Mishra said the development was not just about company balance sheets. {It is about building national resilience in the age of clean energy and technology competition. “Mining waste is no longer waste. It is a resource waiting to be unlocked,” he said.
Experts, pointing to research and emerging initiatives, say India could be close to critical mineral self-reliance if it begins harnessing the untapped potential of mining waste.
Demand for zinc, silver, copper, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths is projected to increase manifold in the years to come as the clean energy transition accelerates.
With hundreds of millions of tonnes of mining waste generated every year, large quantities of these minerals may already lie in tailings and overburden that are currently treated as discard.
‘Next frontier’
Critical minerals are in demand for electric vehicles, battery storage, solar panels, semiconductors, high-speed rail, and defence manufacturing. However, India is heavily dependent on imports. Over 90 per cent of lithium is imported, mostly from Australia and South America, while cobalt and rare earths come almost entirely from abroad, often indirectly through China. Over the next 5 years, the import bill for critical minerals is expected to be in the range of $15-20 billion annually.
Reprocessing tailings, finely ground remnants of ore processing, is seen as mining’s “next frontier.” Advances in regrinding, flotation, hydrometallurgy, and high-temperature processing now allow recoveries of residual zinc, lead, and silver, while liberating critical byproducts such as indium, cadmium, germanium, and cobalt, say experts
Recovering even modest fractions of these metals can convert environmental liabilities into latent inventory, while reducing India’s dependence on volatile global supply chains.
According to experts, tailing reprocessing can also extend the shelf life of mines in the country.
Published on September 21, 2025