Nagamma, a cog in India’s 900-million strong unorganized labour force, starts her day at the crack of dawn in a nondescript neighbourhood right off Pantheon Road in Egmore, Chennai. She spends the morning adeptly sorting out modern gadgetry for her stall. Having been at it for a quarter of a century now, she and her fellow workers are Chennai’s only answer to its yearly creation of e-waste.

These goods and devices are called e- waste and e-scrap which include used electronic items intended for re-use, re-sale, salvaging, re-cycling, or disposal. Most of them contain hazardous substances like mercury, sulphur, lead, cadmium, beryllium oxide and brominated flame retardants. Their unsafe and improper disposal can cause serious pollution and health problems.

Chennai has over 10,000 tonnes of e-waste annually, not including the “charity” that the Chennai Port receives from the West. Fast becoming the world’s preferred dumping ground after China banned the import of e-waste, India welcomes over 50,000 tonnes of e-waste every year.

While the Basel Convention tried to address the problem, in the absence of the US’s ratification, the legislation is hobbled and vested interests make sure it remains vague. The US alone exports 80 per cent of its e-waste to India and Pakistan.

Recently legislation didn’t make much of a dent, with loopholes allowing secondhand, “workable” goods to enter the country.

“The Pollution Control Board and Customs authorities should control this,” said Professor Kurian Joseph, from the Anna University Centre for Environmental Studies. “But this becomes difficult as it the manufacturer cannot guarantee how long an electronic product will work. This makes differentiating between workable and waste goods more difficult.”

In the last decade, with a booming economy and proliferation of IT firms, corporate firms have become the primary source of e-waste. The Manufacturing Association for Information Technology (MAIT) has reported that there is an effort recently to set up an industry-wide mechanism. However, as indicated in a recent Greeenpeace survey of Indian IT firms, there is still deficient industry-wide compliance, with only Wipro coming anywhere close to global standards.

The absence of segregation of solid waste is a primary hurdle. A recent IIT-Madras study showed that despite the Municipal Corporation’s claims to the contrary, there is zero segregation at the municipal dumping ground. This has led to the metals percolating down to the groundwater.

The city is also home to two sectors of waste management. The formal sector comprising large companies hire recognised organisations to help them dispose their e-waste properly. The informal sector consists of kabadiwallas who buy the electronic products at nominal rates and sell them to scrap dealers.

However, since the formal and informal sectors are not integrated, people often tend to turn to the informal sector to dispose their e-waste as they give more money in return. This results in poor disposal techniques that have enormous impact on the environment.

As of May 2012, the law was amended to include Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), where the producers of the goods take full responsibility for the safe disposal of their products. Producers can collect a fee from the consumer at the time of purchase and return this when they come back to dispose the product. Alternatively, a producer can offer a discount to the consumer when they exchange their old electronic equipment for new.

When contacted, several companies, such as Nokia, Dell and Samsung, reported practising this “take-back” policy. Experts say the market can decide the fee to be collected or the discount to be given. However, this still doesn’t account for a uniquely Indian problem: “orphaned products”.

“There are a number of orphaned/assembled products, where the different parts are manufactured separately and then assembled together. These components may be branded but the product as a whole is not. In this case it becomes difficult to determine whose responsibility such products become. Perhaps it can be determined through market share,” said Professor Kurian.

So how do we tackle this problem of e-waste?

Proper awareness is the first step. There have been campaigns in other cities such as Bangalore where kabadiwallahs were taught why and how they should dispose e-waste properly.

“E waste is not a known idea so campaigns should percolate down to the consumer. The regulations will take at least five years to come into effect fully. Currently the focus is on the corporate sector, the scope should also be widened to include domestic consumers,” said Professor Kurian.

Experts stress on indigenous capacity-building instead of merely sub-letting contracts to private firms. The unorganised industry, with its expertise in waste collection, needs to be integrated into the management’s scheme to ensure that thousands don’t lose their livelihoods.

Chennai is blissfully unaware that it is sitting on an e-time-bomb.

(Jyotsna and Dhruba are students of ACJ, Chennai.)

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