Ashay Anand
Where Computers Go to Die
A locality in East Delhi is the largest electronic scrap market in the country. Photojournalist Garima Jain travels through the bylanes of Seelampur into a surreal, post-apocalyptic world
Approximately 15 km from the centre of Delhi lies a small settlement called Seelampur, reputedly the largest electronics dismantling-recycling-selling market in the country. Residents work every day to extract gold and copper from circuit boards. Some extract metals independently, some work with big traders — most earn about Rs. 200 per day.
E-waste also includes televisions, DVD players and washing machines — most have toxic substances like lead, cadmium and mercury. This detritus of the e-age is growing rapidly given the fast rate of obsolescence of electronic equipment. Companies cunningly plan newer products for bigger profits. But what happens to the discarded stuff? The US says putting them in landfills is expensive and chemical seepage into the ground is an environmental hazard.
A cheaper alternative is to ship the stuff to developing regions like India, China and Africa where environmental laws are lax and labour is cheap. Toxics Link, a Delhi-based NGO, estimates that India
generates about 4 lakh tonnes of electronic waste annually and illegally imports 50,000 tonnes from the US, Europe, South Korea, Australia, among others. Ninety percent of e-waste is recycled in the informal sector, in the bylanes of cities and towns. Walk the streets here through dark passages, then down steps leading to godowns full of dismantled circuit boards strewn around. Computer parts sit stacked in haphazard mountain heaps. Go closer and you see little hands and feet rifling through the scrap piles. They are ripping the keyboards apart, hunting for precious metal slivers. These teens work 10 hours a day in these underground vaults. Praveen, 15, says, “Why should we go to school when we can make up to Rs. 200 every day by segregating copper from plastic using screwdrivers?”
Most trucks arrive at night from all corners of the country, with a majority from Mumbai‟s seaport. Says Ala Dia, a tempo driver, “Transport companies earn 5 per kg. Each truck can ferry about 10 tonnes of waste in one trip.” Dia transports 30 to 40 tonnes of motherboards from Seelampur to Moradabad daily, where copper is salvaged from printed circuit boards with a brew of nitric acid, a toxic chemical that releases copper as well as cancer-causing lead and mercury.
Electronic scrap dealer Rizwan, 20, parrots Seelampur‟s party line when he says, “We only segregate the waste here. Then it is transported to jungles near Lucknow to be burnt so that the metal can be extracted. The smoke is hazardous so we don‟t do it here.” But look around in Seelampur and you see heaps of motherboards burning steadily.
RESHMA, MOTHER OF TWO, segregates the copper from the dust. “My kids are naked ghosts in this pile of trash,” she says. She‟s been doing this for the past 12 years. She came to Delhi from Uttar Pradesh 30 years ago. She earns Rs. 60 per day; her family‟s house rent is Rs. 2,000 a month. She says she has no other work options even as the cost of living rises.
Attero Recycling is the only company licensed to import e-waste into India. Centre for Science and Environment investigations revealed Attero reselling e-waste instead of recycling it. When asked about these findings, Dr Saroj, director, Ministry of Environment and Forests, refused to recognise that imported waste is being resold; she claims only Indian-origin e-waste is getting “refurbished” and denies knowledge of Seelampur‟s activities, pointing to the Central Pollution Control Board as the monitoring body. Vinod Babu, senior environment engineer at the Central Pollution Control Board, says, “We believe there is no burning of motherboards in Seelampur.” He later adds absurdly, “It is happening in Moradabad. We have not done our investigations there, you know. It‟s a very hostile area for government officials. We are aware of the hazardous illegal activities in the unorganised e-waste sector, but we haven‟t prosecuted anyone because that‟s the responsibility of the state pollution board.” And thus the buck passes to hover in mid-air.
Masterji, an electronic scrap specialist in Seelampur, is desperate for more work and asks if we can help him get business with Nokia‟s “huge warehouse” for scrap that is sold for recycling. “The telephone exchange in Varanasi also has huge amounts of electronic scrap,” he smiles. “I‟d like to get the tender for it.”
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 2, Dated January 15, 2011
What happens to the millions of gadgets we discard?
Mishita Mehra & Sunanda Poduwal, ET Bureau Feb 12, 2012
Miraj Malik deals with the after life. His days begin with a casual stroll around the dusty lanes of Seelampur - a Delhi suburb - inspecting the latest cold cargo that's been picked up from across the National Capital Region (NCR) and unloaded by hundreds of trucks the previous night.
Malik dabbles in cadavers of computers and sundry gizmos. He runs 18 shops in Seelampur - one of India's biggest "organised" unorganised market for scrapped electronic devices - where they are dismantled, glass and plastic parts are sifted out from metals, which, in turn, are separated to be sold to metal hubs like Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh.
This, then, is the chaotic and, often, dangerous world of recycling electronic leftovers where the "organised" unorganised set-ups like Seelampur handle around 95% of the millions of refrigerators, computers, mobile phones and television sets discarded everyday.
The Dark Tunnel
The afterlife journey of a dead gizmo is anything but smooth. Given the unorganised nature of India's recycling industry, a device is likely to change four or five hands before it becomes memory. For instance, in the case of a computer, the exterior plastic and metal components are sold to scrap dealers, the glass parts to informal recyclers and the printed circuit board (PCB) or the motherboard will end up in one of the households in the major informal recycling hubs.
THE AFTER LIFE JOURNEY
PCBs are much valued here for the metal components that range from copper to gold. The components are dipped in an acid solution to extract copper and a little bit of gold - the acid solution, still rich in many metals, is thrown out by the informal scrappers for want of any half-decent refining technology. The wires are burnt to extract aluminium and copper.
That's India's e-waste recycling hallmark: inefficiency. A typical PCB will have 19 metals, and out here the luckiest in the informal sector go home with two or three. Compare that to the formal players. Attero, the most sophisticated recycling facility in India, is capable of extracting 13 of them.
Hellfire's Toxic
The everyday wastage of precious metals gets fogged out of the picture by the process itself. The primitive way in which gadgets are processed sets off huge amounts of toxins, endangering both the worker and the larger environment. For instance, electronics industry association Elcina estimates that 1,350 tonnes of toxins are generated every six months from discarded mobile phones alone. Add to it the 3 million washing machines or 6 million refrigerators.
Recyclers like Seelampur's Malik aver that his workers use masks and gloves while on work, but he is an exception: someone who's trying to make that quantum jump from the informal to formal. He is the first trader in Seelampur to go from being an informal trader to a registered recycler. And that, says Malik, was in itself a journey fraught with dejections. He struggled 18 months for a formal licence; his dismantling and recycling factory will open in Manesar in the NCR in a matter of minutes.Well, people like Malik are not making the shift entirely out of free will. There is a larger force at play here.
GoI Wakes Up
After years of feigning ignorance, the Government of India finally woke up last year to the electronic garbage piling around, and notified rules on e-waste management. This will come into effect from May 2012, forcing Malik and his ilk to clean up their act.
The rules, framed along international guidelines, introduced the concept of extended producer responsibility where the main manufacturers will now be primarily responsible for e-waste collection. They are also responsible for ensuring that e-waste is routed to formal recyclers in India. That's easier said than done. The official data itself points to the debris pile up ahead.
For instance, an estimated 8 lakh metric tonnes of e-waste would be generated in 2012, as per the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). Yes, the number of formal recyclers has been increasing at a rapid pace - from a single firm in 2005 to the current 47 - but the total recycling capacity of these authorised facilities is just 2.17 lakh mt per annum. So what will happen to the 5.83 lakh mt is anybody's guess. Worse, even the established facilities are not getting volumes of electronic waste up to their full capacity. For instance, Attero is operating at only 20% of its capacity and the situation is not much different for smaller recyclers.
That points to larger issues. For one, the collection system in the formal sector has to shape up. Two, the government needs to realise that electronic waste is a commodity and the formal sector is no position to match the prices offered by the likes of Seelampur. "While companies have been giving projections, till now, we are not aware of even a single collection centre set up by manufacturers," says an environment ministry official.
E-Waste threat Delhi
Onlinecarbonfinance.com
Delhi has never really bothered about its electronic waste before. The slums at Seelampur, Shastri Park and Geeta Colony, Trukman Gate in Central Delhi, Mundka in the West, and Loni and Mandoli near the interstate order at Ghaziabad are doing unorganized recycling of e-waste in the city.
Discarded computers, monitors and keyboards are reduced to pieces so they can recycle. The unorganized factor involved is big in size of electronic waste. Loni and Mandoli specialize in open burning and acid bath for extraction of metals and so on. Ideally, this job should be carried out in high-tech factories that comply with stringent health and environmental regulations. E-waste contains toxic substances such as lead, cadmium, mercury, plastic, PVC, barium, beryllium and carcinogens such as carbon black and heavy metals. It not recycled properly; this deadly mix can pose health and environmental problems. Currently, Delhi’s civic agencies auction off all their discarded electronic items to scrap dealers.
Delhi’s E-waste fact sheet: 1. According to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the country was standing on a pile of 1,46,180 tonnes of e-waste as “inventory” in 2005. 2. It would grow by 8,00,000 tonnes by 2012. 3. Delhi is producing 15,000 tonnes per year (as per estimates of non-governmental agents; the government is reluctant to put a figure to it), is a major player. 4. Unorganized recycles in Maharashtra, the largest producer of e-waste, send their more hazardous processes to Delhi yards
Finally, a law to govern e-waste
(Reuters) NandiniThilak , Indian Express ( 26 April 2012)
At Old Seelampur, an impoverished neighbourhood in Northeast Delhi, rows of hollowed-out computer monitors line a dingy lane. On another street here, room after room on either side is piled high with dusty keyboards and metallic innards of computers and other electronic goods. Welcome to the wasteland of India‟s urban refuse. Here, heaps of electronic waste — or e-waste as it is more commonly referred to — wait to be dismantled and recycled for anything of value. E-waste has spawned a large informal sector in cities engaged in its refurbishing, dismantling and recycling. Gali No 4 in Old Silampur is one such hub where workers, including children, labour in hazardous conditions to dismantle discarded electronic goods. Spelling the end of unauthorised units handling such refuse, the E-waste (Management and Handling) Rules 2010 — drafted by the the Ministry of Environment and Forests to address the e-waste problem and to regularise the informal sector, which was notified last year — will come into effect across the country, including the Capital, on May 1, 2012. All agencies that handle e-waste on a commercial scale — collection centres, refurbishers, dismantlers — must apply for licenses within three months of the rules coming into effect and comply with pollution standards and labour laws. As per conservative estimates, which exclude e-waste imported from developed countries, India‟s e-waste burden is expected to touch 8 lakh tonnes a year in 2012. The rules are expected to bring relief to workers engaged in handling e-waste, which is an extremely hazardous process. The new rules, which come under the ambit of the Environment Protection Act of 1986, apply to all citizens. Ordinary users as well as large-scale handlers of e-waste risk prosecution if they do not follow norms on disposal. Under the Act, a fine of up to Rs 1 lakh and imprisonment of up to seven years can be awarded to violators. State Pollution Control Boards (PCBs) or Control Committees have been entrusted the task of enforcing the rules. The rules seek to enforce „Extended Producer Responsibility‟, making manufacturers of electronics responsible for the collection of e-waste and proper channelisation through take-back mechanisms like collection centres in their stores. It also makes them responsible for making records of e-waste handled in such centres and appraise the respective PCBs of the same. It also states that companies must strive to reduce the toxic-content of their products. The rules also assign responsibilities to consumers — both bulk and small-scale — who must “ensure that e-waste is deposited with the distributor or at authorised collection centres.” Companies who open collection centres are required under the rules to obtain an authorisation from the PCBs. Along with collection centres, the people involved in the hazardous handling of the waste — dismantlers, refurbishers and recyclers — are also required to get licenses from the state PCBs or risk prosecution. NGOs working in the field hope that the rules will serve as the first step towards addressing the threats of pollution and resultant health hazards posed by unscientific disposal of e-waste. “Government estimates say India‟s e-waste generation will be about 8 lakh tonnes in 2012. The figure is probably much higher. The rules are a result of tremendous pressure on the government to address the issue.... It is an attempt to formalise the large sector dealing with the waste,” said Priti Mahesh of Toxics Link, an environmental NGO. FORMALISING THE SECTOR Formalisation, however, means that thousands of kabadiwalas, who form the base of the e-waste chain, will need to be integrated into the new set up. The rules allow such workers to be organised into companies and open licensed collection centres, which will feed licensed dismantling and recycling units. Units that recycle plastic and metal present in e-waste are considered to be absent within the city limits in Delhi. “The Master Plan allows no such activity within city limits. Around four to five recycling centres function in the NCR region,” said Dr Sandeep Misra, Member Secretary, Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC). COLLECTION CENTRES NGOs are making attempts to integrate kabadiwalas into the formal sector. A group of waste-pickers organised and trained by Chintan, an environmental NGO, have obtained license to open a collection centre. So has Harit Recyclers Association (HRA), a collective of waste pickers. These are the only two collection centres which have obtained licenses so far. “Informal workers are unaware of the health hazards posed by e-waste. We are training them,” said Supriya Bhardwaj of Chintan. Shashi Bhushan Pundit of HRA said integrating ordinary waste pickers would be a challenge. “Around 25,000 people work as waste pickers in Delhi. At HRA, we have formed a company of seven workers to open a licensed collection centre with many more as stakeholders. The government should take steps to organise waste collectors and train them in the scientific handling of e-waste. I also think that refurbishers need more recognition. They are important in a country like India where many can‟t afford new computers,” Pandit said.
Where Computers Go to Die
A locality in East Delhi is the largest electronic scrap market in the country. Photojournalist Garima Jain travels through the bylanes of Seelampur into a surreal, post-apocalyptic world
THE TRUCKS are coming in honking and rattling with old computers, kids are playing gali cricket with computer monitors as wickets, women are boiling pots full of computer parts, children sitting on piles of keyboards are watching a Bollywood film. The streets are filled with entangled wires, destroyed computers, keyboards and cell phones. A scene from a futuristic dystopia? This is the hidden place where people wake up every morning to sort through the electronic trash of the world.
Approximately 15 km from the centre of Delhi lies a small settlement called Seelampur, reputedly the largest electronics dismantling-recycling-selling market in the country. Residents work every day to extract gold and copper from circuit boards. Some extract metals independently, some work with big traders — most earn about Rs. 200 per day.
E-waste also includes televisions, DVD players and washing machines — most have toxic substances like lead, cadmium and mercury. This detritus of the e-age is growing rapidly given the fast rate of obsolescence of electronic equipment. Companies cunningly plan newer products for bigger profits. But what happens to the discarded stuff? The US says putting them in landfills is expensive and chemical seepage into the ground is an environmental hazard.
A cheaper alternative is to ship the stuff to developing regions like India, China and Africa where environmental laws are lax and labour is cheap. Toxics Link, a Delhi-based NGO, estimates that India
generates about 4 lakh tonnes of electronic waste annually and illegally imports 50,000 tonnes from the US, Europe, South Korea, Australia, among others. Ninety percent of e-waste is recycled in the informal sector, in the bylanes of cities and towns. Walk the streets here through dark passages, then down steps leading to godowns full of dismantled circuit boards strewn around. Computer parts sit stacked in haphazard mountain heaps. Go closer and you see little hands and feet rifling through the scrap piles. They are ripping the keyboards apart, hunting for precious metal slivers. These teens work 10 hours a day in these underground vaults. Praveen, 15, says, “Why should we go to school when we can make up to Rs. 200 every day by segregating copper from plastic using screwdrivers?”
Most trucks arrive at night from all corners of the country, with a majority from Mumbai‟s seaport. Says Ala Dia, a tempo driver, “Transport companies earn 5 per kg. Each truck can ferry about 10 tonnes of waste in one trip.” Dia transports 30 to 40 tonnes of motherboards from Seelampur to Moradabad daily, where copper is salvaged from printed circuit boards with a brew of nitric acid, a toxic chemical that releases copper as well as cancer-causing lead and mercury.
Electronic scrap dealer Rizwan, 20, parrots Seelampur‟s party line when he says, “We only segregate the waste here. Then it is transported to jungles near Lucknow to be burnt so that the metal can be extracted. The smoke is hazardous so we don‟t do it here.” But look around in Seelampur and you see heaps of motherboards burning steadily.
RESHMA, MOTHER OF TWO, segregates the copper from the dust. “My kids are naked ghosts in this pile of trash,” she says. She‟s been doing this for the past 12 years. She came to Delhi from Uttar Pradesh 30 years ago. She earns Rs. 60 per day; her family‟s house rent is Rs. 2,000 a month. She says she has no other work options even as the cost of living rises.
Attero Recycling is the only company licensed to import e-waste into India. Centre for Science and Environment investigations revealed Attero reselling e-waste instead of recycling it. When asked about these findings, Dr Saroj, director, Ministry of Environment and Forests, refused to recognise that imported waste is being resold; she claims only Indian-origin e-waste is getting “refurbished” and denies knowledge of Seelampur‟s activities, pointing to the Central Pollution Control Board as the monitoring body. Vinod Babu, senior environment engineer at the Central Pollution Control Board, says, “We believe there is no burning of motherboards in Seelampur.” He later adds absurdly, “It is happening in Moradabad. We have not done our investigations there, you know. It‟s a very hostile area for government officials. We are aware of the hazardous illegal activities in the unorganised e-waste sector, but we haven‟t prosecuted anyone because that‟s the responsibility of the state pollution board.” And thus the buck passes to hover in mid-air.
Masterji, an electronic scrap specialist in Seelampur, is desperate for more work and asks if we can help him get business with Nokia‟s “huge warehouse” for scrap that is sold for recycling. “The telephone exchange in Varanasi also has huge amounts of electronic scrap,” he smiles. “I‟d like to get the tender for it.”
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 2, Dated January 15, 2011
What happens to the millions of gadgets we discard?
Mishita Mehra & Sunanda Poduwal, ET Bureau Feb 12, 2012
Miraj Malik deals with the after life. His days begin with a casual stroll around the dusty lanes of Seelampur - a Delhi suburb - inspecting the latest cold cargo that's been picked up from across the National Capital Region (NCR) and unloaded by hundreds of trucks the previous night.
Malik dabbles in cadavers of computers and sundry gizmos. He runs 18 shops in Seelampur - one of India's biggest "organised" unorganised market for scrapped electronic devices - where they are dismantled, glass and plastic parts are sifted out from metals, which, in turn, are separated to be sold to metal hubs like Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh.
This, then, is the chaotic and, often, dangerous world of recycling electronic leftovers where the "organised" unorganised set-ups like Seelampur handle around 95% of the millions of refrigerators, computers, mobile phones and television sets discarded everyday.
The Dark Tunnel
The afterlife journey of a dead gizmo is anything but smooth. Given the unorganised nature of India's recycling industry, a device is likely to change four or five hands before it becomes memory. For instance, in the case of a computer, the exterior plastic and metal components are sold to scrap dealers, the glass parts to informal recyclers and the printed circuit board (PCB) or the motherboard will end up in one of the households in the major informal recycling hubs.
THE AFTER LIFE JOURNEY
PCBs are much valued here for the metal components that range from copper to gold. The components are dipped in an acid solution to extract copper and a little bit of gold - the acid solution, still rich in many metals, is thrown out by the informal scrappers for want of any half-decent refining technology. The wires are burnt to extract aluminium and copper.
That's India's e-waste recycling hallmark: inefficiency. A typical PCB will have 19 metals, and out here the luckiest in the informal sector go home with two or three. Compare that to the formal players. Attero, the most sophisticated recycling facility in India, is capable of extracting 13 of them.
Hellfire's Toxic
The everyday wastage of precious metals gets fogged out of the picture by the process itself. The primitive way in which gadgets are processed sets off huge amounts of toxins, endangering both the worker and the larger environment. For instance, electronics industry association Elcina estimates that 1,350 tonnes of toxins are generated every six months from discarded mobile phones alone. Add to it the 3 million washing machines or 6 million refrigerators.
Recyclers like Seelampur's Malik aver that his workers use masks and gloves while on work, but he is an exception: someone who's trying to make that quantum jump from the informal to formal. He is the first trader in Seelampur to go from being an informal trader to a registered recycler. And that, says Malik, was in itself a journey fraught with dejections. He struggled 18 months for a formal licence; his dismantling and recycling factory will open in Manesar in the NCR in a matter of minutes.Well, people like Malik are not making the shift entirely out of free will. There is a larger force at play here.
GoI Wakes Up
After years of feigning ignorance, the Government of India finally woke up last year to the electronic garbage piling around, and notified rules on e-waste management. This will come into effect from May 2012, forcing Malik and his ilk to clean up their act.
The rules, framed along international guidelines, introduced the concept of extended producer responsibility where the main manufacturers will now be primarily responsible for e-waste collection. They are also responsible for ensuring that e-waste is routed to formal recyclers in India. That's easier said than done. The official data itself points to the debris pile up ahead.
For instance, an estimated 8 lakh metric tonnes of e-waste would be generated in 2012, as per the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). Yes, the number of formal recyclers has been increasing at a rapid pace - from a single firm in 2005 to the current 47 - but the total recycling capacity of these authorised facilities is just 2.17 lakh mt per annum. So what will happen to the 5.83 lakh mt is anybody's guess. Worse, even the established facilities are not getting volumes of electronic waste up to their full capacity. For instance, Attero is operating at only 20% of its capacity and the situation is not much different for smaller recyclers.
That points to larger issues. For one, the collection system in the formal sector has to shape up. Two, the government needs to realise that electronic waste is a commodity and the formal sector is no position to match the prices offered by the likes of Seelampur. "While companies have been giving projections, till now, we are not aware of even a single collection centre set up by manufacturers," says an environment ministry official.
E-Waste threat Delhi
Onlinecarbonfinance.com
Delhi has never really bothered about its electronic waste before. The slums at Seelampur, Shastri Park and Geeta Colony, Trukman Gate in Central Delhi, Mundka in the West, and Loni and Mandoli near the interstate order at Ghaziabad are doing unorganized recycling of e-waste in the city.
Discarded computers, monitors and keyboards are reduced to pieces so they can recycle. The unorganized factor involved is big in size of electronic waste. Loni and Mandoli specialize in open burning and acid bath for extraction of metals and so on. Ideally, this job should be carried out in high-tech factories that comply with stringent health and environmental regulations. E-waste contains toxic substances such as lead, cadmium, mercury, plastic, PVC, barium, beryllium and carcinogens such as carbon black and heavy metals. It not recycled properly; this deadly mix can pose health and environmental problems. Currently, Delhi’s civic agencies auction off all their discarded electronic items to scrap dealers.
Delhi’s E-waste fact sheet: 1. According to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the country was standing on a pile of 1,46,180 tonnes of e-waste as “inventory” in 2005. 2. It would grow by 8,00,000 tonnes by 2012. 3. Delhi is producing 15,000 tonnes per year (as per estimates of non-governmental agents; the government is reluctant to put a figure to it), is a major player. 4. Unorganized recycles in Maharashtra, the largest producer of e-waste, send their more hazardous processes to Delhi yards
Finally, a law to govern e-waste
(Reuters) NandiniThilak , Indian Express ( 26 April 2012)
At Old Seelampur, an impoverished neighbourhood in Northeast Delhi, rows of hollowed-out computer monitors line a dingy lane. On another street here, room after room on either side is piled high with dusty keyboards and metallic innards of computers and other electronic goods. Welcome to the wasteland of India‟s urban refuse. Here, heaps of electronic waste — or e-waste as it is more commonly referred to — wait to be dismantled and recycled for anything of value. E-waste has spawned a large informal sector in cities engaged in its refurbishing, dismantling and recycling. Gali No 4 in Old Silampur is one such hub where workers, including children, labour in hazardous conditions to dismantle discarded electronic goods. Spelling the end of unauthorised units handling such refuse, the E-waste (Management and Handling) Rules 2010 — drafted by the the Ministry of Environment and Forests to address the e-waste problem and to regularise the informal sector, which was notified last year — will come into effect across the country, including the Capital, on May 1, 2012. All agencies that handle e-waste on a commercial scale — collection centres, refurbishers, dismantlers — must apply for licenses within three months of the rules coming into effect and comply with pollution standards and labour laws. As per conservative estimates, which exclude e-waste imported from developed countries, India‟s e-waste burden is expected to touch 8 lakh tonnes a year in 2012. The rules are expected to bring relief to workers engaged in handling e-waste, which is an extremely hazardous process. The new rules, which come under the ambit of the Environment Protection Act of 1986, apply to all citizens. Ordinary users as well as large-scale handlers of e-waste risk prosecution if they do not follow norms on disposal. Under the Act, a fine of up to Rs 1 lakh and imprisonment of up to seven years can be awarded to violators. State Pollution Control Boards (PCBs) or Control Committees have been entrusted the task of enforcing the rules. The rules seek to enforce „Extended Producer Responsibility‟, making manufacturers of electronics responsible for the collection of e-waste and proper channelisation through take-back mechanisms like collection centres in their stores. It also makes them responsible for making records of e-waste handled in such centres and appraise the respective PCBs of the same. It also states that companies must strive to reduce the toxic-content of their products. The rules also assign responsibilities to consumers — both bulk and small-scale — who must “ensure that e-waste is deposited with the distributor or at authorised collection centres.” Companies who open collection centres are required under the rules to obtain an authorisation from the PCBs. Along with collection centres, the people involved in the hazardous handling of the waste — dismantlers, refurbishers and recyclers — are also required to get licenses from the state PCBs or risk prosecution. NGOs working in the field hope that the rules will serve as the first step towards addressing the threats of pollution and resultant health hazards posed by unscientific disposal of e-waste. “Government estimates say India‟s e-waste generation will be about 8 lakh tonnes in 2012. The figure is probably much higher. The rules are a result of tremendous pressure on the government to address the issue.... It is an attempt to formalise the large sector dealing with the waste,” said Priti Mahesh of Toxics Link, an environmental NGO. FORMALISING THE SECTOR Formalisation, however, means that thousands of kabadiwalas, who form the base of the e-waste chain, will need to be integrated into the new set up. The rules allow such workers to be organised into companies and open licensed collection centres, which will feed licensed dismantling and recycling units. Units that recycle plastic and metal present in e-waste are considered to be absent within the city limits in Delhi. “The Master Plan allows no such activity within city limits. Around four to five recycling centres function in the NCR region,” said Dr Sandeep Misra, Member Secretary, Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC). COLLECTION CENTRES NGOs are making attempts to integrate kabadiwalas into the formal sector. A group of waste-pickers organised and trained by Chintan, an environmental NGO, have obtained license to open a collection centre. So has Harit Recyclers Association (HRA), a collective of waste pickers. These are the only two collection centres which have obtained licenses so far. “Informal workers are unaware of the health hazards posed by e-waste. We are training them,” said Supriya Bhardwaj of Chintan. Shashi Bhushan Pundit of HRA said integrating ordinary waste pickers would be a challenge. “Around 25,000 people work as waste pickers in Delhi. At HRA, we have formed a company of seven workers to open a licensed collection centre with many more as stakeholders. The government should take steps to organise waste collectors and train them in the scientific handling of e-waste. I also think that refurbishers need more recognition. They are important in a country like India where many can‟t afford new computers,” Pandit said.
Thanks for sharing such a very informative post
ReplyDeleteE-waste Management in India
e scrap buyers in india
E-waste collection centers in India