Disposal of electronic waste has not received the kind of attention that it deserves in our country. Kerala is the only state to have put in place a law on the subject. Elsewhere, the law-makers are too busy to attend to such �trivial� matters

“Recently Greenpeace organised a protest at Zenith’s factory in Zuarinagar, Vasco, Goa, by installing a big snail and asking the company to start ‘clean’ production. This was part of our ongoing campaign to mobilise and motivate IT companies to phase out toxic chemicals and metals from their products, take back their discarded products for responsible recycling and lobby for an e-waste law in India,” said an official of Greenpeace.


In Goa, Toxics Links and Greenpeace have been exerting pressure on the stakeholders and government to bring in a legislation to take care of the electronic waste generated in Goa but nothing has happened so far. In the past, Toxics and Greenpeace have been quite successful in campaigning against polluting industries and getting India’s big companies like Wipro, Samsung, HCL and Acer to take care of their electronic waste. Discarded computers, printers, fax machines, phones, TVs and refrigerators end up today with illegal recyclers. They end with people like Abdul Basit. His nimble 13-year-old fingers rip them open as he begins to process the waste, using unsafe and crude techniques (like using an open fire) to extract valuable metals. He uses no protective equipment as he inhales the deadly vapour. Eventually, the little Bihar-born, Mumbai-based boy could die of poisoning – but he does not know that. Greenpeace and other environmentalists say illegal e-waste recycling is dangerous because it emits toxic gases and harms the health of the workers involved. As sale of consumer electronics soars in India, the country faces a twin-boom in electronic waste. Domestic e-waste could reach 1.6 million tonnes a year by 2012, up from the current 330,000 tonnes, says the New Delhi-based research firm International Resource Group. Industry groups estimate that the number of mobile phones in India will more than double - from 286 million today to 559 million by 2011; computers will more than quadruple from 16 million to 75 million by 2010; and TV sets will triple from 78 million to 234 million by 2015.

Greenpeace is now working with the Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT) to propose a draft e-waste law that will make electronic companies financially accountable for ensuring the take-back and recycling of their products. “It’s high time we took corrective actions to contain the problem,” says Vinnie Mehta, Executive Director of MAIT. For the law to work, India will have to improve its e-waste recycling infrastructure. The country has only three licensed and ill-equipped recyclers. Persuading the consumers will also be a challenge - Indian households prefer to sell their discarded electronics to scrap dealers for cash, rather than take the products back to the manufacturers for recycling. Till then the electronics brands in India will face an uphill task in ensuring that their products are safely recycled.