Trash to Tin

Visits to metal scrapyards and refining facilities as an exchange student to the US and the UK got Yash Gupta interested in metal recycling and refining.

- -Monica Bathija

Yash Gupta (27)

Founder & managing director, Rikayaa Greentech

Back home in 2020, he set up Rikayaa Enterprises and began by recycling copper and PVC from cable scrap. In its first year, the company was also involved in trading, importing tin ingots and selling them to dealers in India.

It was during this phase that he saw a gap—most of the tin used in India is imported, primarily from Malaysia and Indonesia. Along with a team of metallurgists and chemical refiners, he began researching how to refine tin from scrap. Gupta wanted to produce 99.9 percent pure tin, traditionally achieved only through tin ore and concentrate processing, and eventually developed a proprietary green process involving hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical refining.