E-waste could be profitable business

NGO says stakeholders need to come together

When the Karnataka State Finance Corporation and Syndicate Bank refused to loan him money to start his e-waste recycling plant, P Parthasarathy found that "converting this disappointment into an opportunity became a challenge".

Low cost options had to be found to do just about everything, he said, to prove the financial institutions' "untested and perhaps unviable" evaluation wrong. He hasn't done that yet, but his "pilot plant" is ready, at Dobaspet, some 50 km from Bangalore.

The Rs 75-lakh plant is equipped to process one tonne of "heterogenous mixture of e-waste" a day in a single shift. It needs about two tonnes of waste every day for some years to break even.

Parthasarathy wanted to find low-cost labour-intensive ways that "use no incineration and no chemicals". They included a mechanical crush for castaway flourescent bulbs and manual segregation and stripping printed circuit boards for the tiny amounts of precious metal they yield.

His model is one of a few "formal" initiatives in Bangalore that have sprung up to profit from some 8,000 tonnes of e-waste the city generates. He had the means to start the venture, through his other profitable business, making casings for wrist watches which he exports to original equipment makers.

At the other end of the spectrum are some 100 scrap dealers, 50 "recyclers" and 20 extraction units in the city. These "family concerns", mostly semi-literate people but highly knowledgeable of the business, deal in junked computers and other IT hardware. Saahas, an NGO, estimates they reclaim up to 80 kg of gold a year, or Rs 4.8 crore worth of gold.

Manual stripping of cables also yields large quantities of copper, says Wilma Rodriguez of Saahas. The NGO, which came up with the 8,000 tonne estimate, is trying to generate awareness about "e-waste" in the city and wants IT firms to contribute to the clean up.

Bob Hoekstra, head of Dutch consumer electronics firm Philips' software centre here, says IT firms should collectively come up with solutions, Hoekstra says. They could then "go to the lawmakers" to facilitate that solution. The firms junk a third of their computers every year, Rodriguez says.

Saahas has approached the IT industry's different lobbies such as the National Association of Software and Services Companies, the Manufacturers Association of IT and even the Computer Society of India. A start has been made with these lobbies agreeing to get their members to sign a declaration of intent, to find ways to deal with e-waste.

An important concern the NGO is trying to address is the extremely unhygienic and even dangerous methods the extractors use to get to the gold. For instance, Rodriguez said, one process requires boiling parts of junk in nitric acid, which "they do in open vessels and therefore inhale the fumes".

P Bineesha, chief environmental advisor with the "Hawa Project" (for hazardous waste management), says such problems can easily be overcome with simple technologies. The project is a collaborative effort between GTZ, a German agency for technical collaboration and the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board.

"We are trying to get the IT firms to commit a small fund to pay for the non-profit part of the extractors' work," Bineesha says. "For the IT firms, it is a pittance."

Then there is also the problem of the "custom bonded" computers, which the IT firms in the city buy in large numbers. That they exploit a customs duty exemption to buy the computers binds them from selling the computers for "it would become a racket", she says.

So the firms are forced to store large numbers of such computers or donate them or simply destroy them with customs officials bearing witness, she says.

So, a way has to be found to bring the IT firms, entrepreneurs like Parthasarathy who have the ability to invest in processing plants, and the "informal" supply chain from foragers to even the goldsmiths of Shivajinagar. They can both exploit and pay for managing e-waste in the city.