Contested destruction: control, labor, and capital in India’s printed circuit board recycling network

India generates rapidly growing volumes of electronic waste but struggles to regulate these flows. This article traces the contested control of India’s printed circuit board (PCB) destruction network, examining who controls materials, labor, capital, and profits at each stage — from doorstep collection to international end-refining. Drawing on 25 expert interviews (2022–2023) and site visits in Delhi, we combine industrial ecology’s attention to material flows with political ecology’s focus on power and labor relations. We find that India’s PCB destruction network is not a failing system but a functioning one, even if its logic is not captured by the regulatory framework designed to govern it. Collection is controlled by informal networks whose infrastructure outperforms formal alternatives. Dismantling concentrates through skilled manual labor in dense informal communities that regulation has rendered invisible. End-refining is contested between European smelters, Chinese buyers, and India’s ambitions for domestic critical raw material recovery. Three lenses structure the analysis: the interdependence of formal and informal economies, where selective formalization serves the state, formal recyclers, and international smelters while the workers whose labor constitutes the network remain unrecognized; the power relations of labor and capital, in which control over the upstream stages rests on skilled labor organized through petty capital while global capital controls the profitable downstream stage; and geopolitical competition, in which India seeks sovereignty over materials it can neither process domestically nor prevent from leaving informally. We show how the valorization of secondary raw materials is shaped by informal networks, capital relations, and geopolitical interests.