The high-pitched, nasal call of the neighborhood scrap collector is a familiar weekend sound in most Indian neighborhoods. In Noida, a quiet satellite city of Delhi, Ashu Kumar has been collecting old newspapers, phones, computers, digital recorders and refrigerators for the past five years. And for years, at the end of each month, Ashu treks down a dusty road leading to the Seelampur scrap market — the largest graveyard of India’s ever-growing electronic waste — to sell his wares.
In India, yesterday’s electronics are today’s business, and Seelampur, about nine miles outside Delhi, is now the biggest scrap market in the country. On a typical day, visitors here are greeted by piles of the city’s used goods, like the 50-ton mountain of old telephones that Mohammad Arif, a scrap trader, bought for $2500 at an auction one winter morning. By evening, the mound will be dismantled and the parts sold off. A 2008 government survey by the nation’s Central Pollution Control Board said India generated 146,800 tons of e-waste in 2005. According to the environment ministry, that figure is likely to reach 800,000 tons next year.
Most of that waste is bought from Indian consumers by scrap dealers and sold in underground recycling markets like Seelampur. But a 2007 study by the Manufacturer’s Association of Information Technology and GTZ, the German Agency for Technical Cooperation in India, found that an additional 50,000 tons of e-waste is imported to India from developed countries every year, despite the nation’s ban on the dumping and disposal of foreign waste in addition to a separate ban on the import of old computers and their accessories from other countries. According to activists on the ground, importers have long been exploiting a loophole in the bans that allow for imports of used electronics to come in as donations.
A few yards away from Arif’s stall, Seelampur begins in earnest. The bumpy road gives way to narrow shaded lanes, lined on both sides with shops filled with the debris of a particular kind of electronic equipment: digital video recorders, air-conditioners, televisions, computers, phones. The workers dismantle the equipment with a practiced air. Sagir Ahmed, 60, sits surrounded by keyboards and other computer parts outside his shop. “It takes just a minute to dismantle a computer,” he says, bringing down a hammer to break open a monitor. Recyclers like Ahmed keep what they can and recycle it. The rest they sell to small-time recyclers, who in turn retrieve the metals and sell them.
A short distance away, plumes of black, acrid smoke hover over a tract of open land dotted with colorful PVC wires. Men and women in small groups burn the wires, soaking them in open acid baths to retrieve the copper inside. Selling a few kilos of the copper will earn them $3 to $5 a day. Nazeeb, 12, already has a small mound of copper wires at his feet. He has been working since early in the morning. His eyes are hazy, his complexion sooty. He has a nasty cough. Despite their ubiquity, the government has recently come down heavily on the nations’ informal scrapyards for the bad health and environmental effects of their methods of material recovery, making it a loosely clandestine activity. A few men come forward menacingly; they do not like strangers asking questions.
The health and environmental risks of informal recycling are high. Extracting precious metals like copper and gold in open acid baths, which is illegal, emits toxins such as dioxins, heavy metals, lead, cadmium, mercury and brominated flame retardants . Acid and chemical residues also contaminate water bodies and soil. Informal recyclers work without protective clothing, exposing themselves to these hazardous chemicals liable to cause physical injuries — mercury, for instance, can cause brain and kidney damage and BFRs disrupt hormonal function — and chronic illnesses like asthma and skin diseases.
Despite the activity at places like Seelampur, India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh says India’s current e-waste regulations are comparable to the best in the world. “For e-waste, we have set up a couple of new integrated facilities. Not only for e-waste but chemical waste in general, we have signed a $90 million project with the World Bank,” Ramesh told TIME in an earlier interview. “However, I do agree that our infrastructure for dealing with e-waste or hazardous waste in general is inadequate.”
The new regulations that Ramesh is talking about are designed to improve that infrastructure. By the end of the year, the nation’s largest e-waste recycling plant is due to be up and running. Built on government land in Bangalore, it will have the capacity to recycle around 60,000 tons of e-waste annually. The government is simultaneously trying to pass a new law to oversee formal e-waste management, both through the establishment of more large-scale recycling plants and by regulating the formal disposal of e-waste.
The transition won’t be easy: today, 95 to 97% of the e-waste collected in India funnels into the informal sector, in which about 80,000 people work, for recycling. “The informal sector is well-networked, has a historic presence and provides fiscal incentive to consumers on collection of waste,” says Abhishek Pratap, a Greenpeace India activist. “It provides livelihood to a huge number of poor migrant laborers.”
The major challenge for formal recyclers will be to tackle this sprawling informal sector. Informal scrap dealers pay consumers by the kilogram; for an old computer, for example, a consumer might get from $10 to $20. Recycling plants won’t pay for the waste. “Unfortunately, the Indian consumer is used to getting paid for their waste,” says Priti Mahesh, project manager for Toxics Link, a project manager for Toxics Link, an environmental NGO. “It will be difficult for [formal recyclers] to go from door to door and collect the waste, which the informal sector is very adept at.”
For an effective and long-term solution, Mahesh says India needs to train and integrate informal recyclers and scrap collectors like Ahmed and Ashu into the official system. Until then, as Jim Puckett, executive director of Basel Action Network says, “The global problem of toxic e-waste production will get worse before it gets better.”
