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Not rubbish! India buys e-garbage by GS Mudur

The Centre has approved the first legally tenable import of electronic waste for responsible recycling, angering environmental groups who say millions of kilograms of domestic e-waste is recycled hazardously.

The environment and forest ministry has approved the import of 8,000 tonnes of e-waste by Attero Recycling, a company that has set up an integrated recycling plant for safe extraction of metals near Roorkee.

India generates nearly 400,000 tonnes of domestic e-waste — discarded TV sets, computer hardware, and mobile phones — each year, according to estimates by environmental groups.

Activists claim more than 90 per cent of India’s e-waste is recycled in informal backyard processing units that pose a threat to the environment and public health.

In such informal units, the innards of electronic hardware are torn, crushed, burnt, and boiled in acids to extract copper for wires and — occasionally — gold for jewels, according to environmental activists who have observed such recycling.

“We don’t understand the rationale for allowing import when there is so much domestic e-waste dismantled and processed in hazardous ways,” said Ravi Agarwal, the director of Toxics Link, a non-government agency in New Delhi.

“The government’s first effort should be to reduce load on our environment, not increase it by allowing the import of waste,” said Agarwal.

Toxics Link, which has tracked the movement of e-waste in India for several years, said the approval to Attero is the first legal permission for import of e-waste. Environment ministry officials were not available for comment.

“We’ve had previous imports. But until now, all e-waste was brought in, illegally, misleadingly labelled as mixed metal scrap,” Agarwal said.

India’s own e-waste — like most other waste — is scattered across its cities and across the country. Most of it is picked up by junk dealers of the kind who knock on household doors on Sunday mornings, and then dismantled locally.

“Imports of e-waste may become the easy way out for recyclers,” said Abhishek Pratap, a campaigner with Greenpeace, the international environmental organisation. “It’s far easier for them to import containers loaded with e-waste than to help establish or strengthen a nationwide mechanism to collect domestic waste,” he said.

A senior Attero official confirmed that the company had received approval but said it had not imported any e-waste yet. “Our commitment is to domestic e-waste,” Rohan Gupta, its chief operating officer, told The Telegraph.

“We have a capacity of processing 36,000 tonnes of e-waste each year. We would be very happy to use this entire capacity for our own domestic waste. We’re making our own efforts to collect waste,” Gupta said. “But we don’t want to keep the plant idle — if the available domestic waste cannot meet the plant’s capacity.”

Environmental groups have argued that informal processing of e-waste releases potentially hazardous materials into the environment, contaminating the neighbourhoods of the processing units.

“The informal sector — the kabadiwallas , the junk dealers, and dismantlers — are critical in collecting e-waste in India. An efficient collection system would need to integrate the formal recycling units and the informal sector,” Pratap said.

Sections of the hardware industry and government have articulated the need for joint action with the public to establish an e-waste collection system. “There’s been a lot of talk, but far too little action,” said Agarwal.