E-waste situation in India

Electronic waste, abbreviated as e-waste, consists of discarded old computers, TVs, refrigerators, radios – basically any electrical or electronic appliance that has reached its end-of-life. While e-waste contains both valuable materials such as gold, palladium, silver and copper, it also contains harmful substances like lead, cadmium and mercury. In the absence of suitable techniques and protective measures, recycling e-waste can result in toxic emissions to the air, water and soil and pose a serious health and environmental hazard.

In India, e-waste is mostly generated in large cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. In these cities a complex e-waste handling infra-structure has developed mainly based on a long tradition of waste recycling. This is mainly operated by a very entrepreneurial informal sector. Rag pickers and waste dealers found it easy to adapt to the new waste stream, resulting in a large number of new businesses focus-ing on the re-use of components or extraction of secondary raw materials. So far, the e-waste recycling system is purely market driven.
Some of the recycling processes are extremely harmful and have negative impacts on the workers‘ health and the environment. A study on the burning of printed wiring boards that was conducted 2004 showed an alarming concentration of dioxins in the surrounding areas in which open burning was practiced. These toxins cause an increased risk of cancer if inhaled by workers and local residents or by entering the food chain via crops from the surrounding fields.

Watch a short Greenpeace documentary "Where does E-waste end up "...

Initial e-waste situation in India. The e-waste from corporate consumers and households enters a city specific informal e-waste recycling system. The collection and allocation of e-waste is done by middlemen, scrap dealers and rag pickers, also known as «kabadiwalas». The informal recycling system includes acceptable processes such as dismantling and sorting but also very harmful processes such as burning and leaching in order to extract metals from electronic equipment.

Harmful techniques like burning wires are common practice in the informal recycling sectors in big cities in India.