Informal sector is worth Rs 2,000cr

Our Mountain of E-TRASH

Electronic waste is hazardous to us and our planet. But there are no laws to curb this fast-growing, unregulated sector

Atul Sethi | TNN

Nazaqat Ali works with a scrap yard dealer in Delhi. Every day, he sorts out piles of junk brought in by kabaadiwaalas, separating re-usable components for re-sale and dismantling waste. The instructions from Ali’s boss are precise – recover whatever can be sold and dump the rest. Accordingly, he goes about his job with mechanical precision. Wires are burnt out in the open air in order to extract metal. Computer monitors are broken manually to recover glass. Circuit boards are heated or dipped in acid to get at the metal within. The residue is dumped in a landfill. Chemicals are often flushed into municipal drains. Ali says he’s just doing his job. But, what he and others like him involved in recycling waste don’t realize is that they’re contributing to a huge and growing problem – careless disposal of electronic or e-waste.
Today, e-waste is the fastest growing component of municipal waste. That’s because people now upgrade mobile phones, computers and televisions more frequently than before. If they are not properly recycled, they became a health and environmental hazard.
In India, more than 95% of e-waste recycling is carried out in slums dotted around Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and other big cities. “All the activities in these recycling hubs involve the use of bare hands and poor work practices,” says Jeevesh Kumar of e-waste management company Greenspace. The risks are many. Burnt cable wires means water contamination. Inhaling toxic elements in ewaste components can cause respiratory, carcinogenic and neural disorders.
What is especially worrying is the rate at which ewaste piles up. According to a study by the Manufacturer’s Association of Information Technology (MAIT), a forum of Indian IT products’ manufacturers, 380,000 tonnes of ewaste were generated across the country in 2007. The consumption of electronics items continues to grow apace and e-waste is consequently expected to exceed 470,000 tonnes by 2011. “If corrective action is not taken soon, this could snowball into a significant environmental concern for India,” says MAIT’s executive director Vinnie Mehta.
What’s more, many countries are using India as a dumping ground for e-trash. According to one recent estimate, more than 50,000 metric tonnes of e-waste is dumped in India every year, sometimes in the guise of charity. Most of it ends up in informal recycling yards. “Thanks to complex, ambiguous definitions of secondhand electronic items, customs department finds it difficult to identify and stop this illegal in-flow of e-waste,” says Abhishek Pratap of activist group Greenpeace.
The flip side is that ewaste means good money for recyclers. In Delhi alone, the informal recycling business is estimated to be worth Rs 2,000 cr., generated mostly from the resale of old computers and metal extracted from chips and PC motherboards. “Around 30,000 people are involved in e-waste recycling in India, of which about 5,000 are in the Delhi alone,” says Priti Mahesh of Toxics Link, a Delhi NGO.
Only a fraction of India’s ewaste gets to recycling companies in the organized sector. Recently, major Indian stakeholders in e-waste management came together to draft a set of rules for good management of e-waste. The rules have been submitted to the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Mehta of MAIT insists the “challenge that the problem poses is huge.” But, so are the consequences of inaction, since the e-waste time bomb is ticking away fast.
NEW DAWN IN WASTELAND
Asif Pasha’s story offers hope. He was one of 200 recyclers working in the informal sector in Gowripalya in Bangalore. He worked without protective gear, recycling toxic metals like mercury, lead, and cadmium. But NGOs such as GTZ and Sahaas managed to change Asif’s perspective. He converted to the formal sector, receiving certification a few months ago from the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board. One of the reasons for the change is a new strictness enforced by major IT companies about waste recycling in the informal sector. They asked for CFE (consent for establishment) and CFO (consent for operation) certificates, forcing many informal dismantlers to assume formal practice. “Most big companies like Dell, IBM, HP and others were asking for CFE and CFO. I realized that to work with more companies, it was better to convert.”^TNN
Risky Proposition
20-50 mn tonnes of electronic products are discarded globally every year. If the estimated e-waste generated annually is put into containers on a train, it could go once around the world
80% of e-waste generated in the US is exported to India, China and Pakistan
30 mn computers are trashed annually in the US alone
1,000 different toxic materials are generated from domestic e-waste