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E-wasting away in India
Raja M
4/8/2004
With 1,150 information technology (IT) companies near Bangalore alone generating 6,000 tonnes of lethal electronic waste annually, India's silicon dream is unleashing an unforeseen nightmare. Non-governmental organizations such as the New Delhi-based Toxics Links are ringing the warning bells about India becoming the world's biggest electronic junkyard, with e-waste being illegally sneaked in from the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Belgium and the Middle East.
In a report released in March, Toxics Links said that India produced e-waste worth US$1.5 billion last year. "The pressure from overseas is getting bigger, after China has banned imports of e-waste," Kishore Wankhade, senior program officer of Toxics Links, told Asia Times Online. India, domestically, expects to see 2 million personal computers below the Pentium 1 grade junked within the next three years. It's a conservative figure, given the government's plans to spread computer literacy and the quantity of cheaper computers hitting the market.
"The e-waste recycling business is organized in a disorganized way," says Wankhade, whose colleagues are probing the extent of the problem in Indian cities like Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai. "Definitely good profits are being made, that's why people are engaged in this risky business." Cheap labor costs and weak environmental control feed an outsourcing industry India can do without. According to Toxics Links, recycling a computer in India costs about $4, against $20 in the US.
This largely unmonitored and unsafe electronic waste recycling industry poisons air, water, land and Indians with toxins such as mercury, lead and arsenic. It threatens to turn the government's chest-thumping "India Shining" campaign to "India Choking" in the next few years if the situation continues as it has.
Some Indian environmental activists already compare the emerging e-waste threat in south India with that of the Chinese village of Guiyu, located in Guangdong province near Hong Kong. Guiyu was a quiet rice village five years ago, before truckloads of e-waste arrived for the locals - including four-year old girls - to recycle for about a $1 per day in wages. Guiyu now lies wasted with undrinkable water, poisoned land, sick children, and as a global signpost to the e-waste threat. One report claimed that, among other miseries, Guiyu villagers suffered from permanently blackened teeth.
A national workshop in New Delhi on e-waste management has woken up the Indian government. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) announced it had formed a task force to compile a rapid assessment survey in Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore within the next six months. In Delhi, the CPCB had discovered two truckloads of e-waste arrive daily, 300 days a year.
The bigger threat is from imports. Computer waste is being shipped in as "mixed electronic computer scrap", or as second-hand charitable gifts, through ports such as Chennai. The Basel Convention has been given the heave ho, enforced from 1992 and ratified by 159 countries, to prevent "transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal". But in keeping with its usual disregard for international environmental agreements, the US, the world's biggest producer and exporter of e-waste, refuses to sign the Basel Convention.
At the same time, the Washington-based National Safety Council expects American e-waste in the next few years to create more than 2 billion kilograms of plastic, 0.5 billion kg of lead, 1 million kg of cadmium, 0.5 million kg of chromium, and nearly 200,000 kg of mercury. How much of this will make its way onto Indian land, water, air and bodies worries activists. "Traders and dismantlers in Delhi say that one container lands in Seelampur every third day," says Wankhade, "but this statement is also difficult to substantiate with data. We have only begun to study the problem."
Random sting operations show the volume of data waiting to be unearthed. Earlier this year, Western journalists posing as an Irish computer shop found US firms eager to dodge Basel regulations. Brokers told a BBC crew that they stick $100 bills inside the shipping container to give customs officials ready-made bribes. "In the customs, data is recorded both in manual format as well as computerized format," says Wankhade. "Our investigations in the Chennai port revealed that the traders prefer the manual way of clearance, and bribes could be a reason for it."
"It is a myth that e-waste can be fully recycled," says the Toxics Links report. "Only 10 percent of parts can be reused. The rest is melted down for metal recovery. Wires are burnt for copper recovery, but it would take the dismantling of six computers to generate one kilo of copper." Each computer contains two or three kilos of unusable lead. The human cost includes the threat of mercury entering the skin and harming the kidneys; lead intake can damage respiratory organs and the central nervous system.
Indian activists are angry at multinationals adopting double standards, of toeing environmental concerns in the West but ignoring safety norms in Asia. Some healing balm comes in joint ventures like the Advisory Services in Environmental Management, a partnership between the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests and the German Agency for Technical Cooperation to focus on urban and industrial environmental management.
More promising is the Indian collaboration with entities like the Swiss Association for the Information, Communication and Organizational Technologies, reputed to be world leader in safely recycling e-waste. Local companies,, too, are unfolding future plans. E-Parirara declared its intention to establish a scientifically managed e-waste recycling plant at Dobbespet, 50 kilometers from Bangalore, with the capacity to treat one tonne of e-waste daily.
The anti-e-waste brigade hopes that the long-term solution will involve electronic companies offering "buy back" schemes, and better technological alternatives like liquid crystallized displays. "At the moment," says Wankhade bluntly, "It is a certain lose-lose situation for all."
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Asia Times Online
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