With the entire world freaking out over impending shortages in rare earth materials and other resources, what remains of the South Asian government has organized what could only be described as a masterful campaign to amass its own strategic reserve of these vital resources.

Over the last century, millions if not billions of metric tons of e-waste, plastic, and other forms of trash have piled up in dumping sites around the Indian subcontinent. These heaping behemoth piles have accumulated through decades of chronic lack of waste management, India's rapidly growing population and affluence, and sheer scale to measure hundreds of meters high.

Under executive order, the USA government has taken direct control over the existing scrap merchant apparatus based around mining the hundreds of thousands of metric tons of e-waste accumulating in the nation in an effort to gain back some of the crucial resources stored in them (lithium for instance) and tangentially improve the wellbeing of the general populace as well. This e-waste will be processed in massive governmental facilities repurposed from obsolete T-Series Defense factories and defunct derelict bollywood studios. To supplement this effort, all the school-age zoomers living in The Skeld have had one mandatory credit required in "Ecology" to graduate from secondary-school, the ecological principle in question being practical exercises in sustainable recycling.