Electronic garbage mounts in India as consumers snap up goods

Anil Penna1 hour, Yahoo News 15 Dec 07;

India is piling up mountains of electronic rubbish as consumers snap up the latest gizmos and firms upgrade computer systems, raising fears the nation is headed for a toxic-waste crisis.

Manufacturers are introducing new models of mobile phones, televisions and computers to entice cashed-up consumers to upgrade, with no policies or infrastructure in place to recycle often toxic electronic scrap.

By 2011, the world's second-most populous nation will generate 470,000 tonnes of "e-waste", up from 330,000 tonnes this year, the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology said in a study received here Friday.

"The situation could assume alarming proportions and therefore it is high time we pay serious attention to the issue," said Vinnie Mehta, who heads the association, or MAIT, said.

India needs a policy that "identifies and defines the roles of each stakeholder including the vendors, the users, the recyclers and the regulator for environmentally friendly recycling," Mehta said.

The figure for electronic waste generated this year is more than twice the previous official estimate. India also "imports" an estimated 50,000 tonnes of e-waste such as obsolete television sets and mobile handsets that are refurbished and resold, said the survey.

Environmentalists say the figure could be higher because the survey does not take into account villages where two-thirds of India's 1.1-billion people live and which are attracting companies such as mobile-phone makers.

"The way people are discarding their electronics, toxic garbage is going to be a big crisis," said Ramapati Kumar, a campaigner for the environmental group Greenpeace, in Bangalore.

"The problem is that it releases toxic chemicals -- people burn electronic items to recover valuable materials, impacting health and environment," Kumar said. Many components of electronic equipment are toxic and not bio-degradable.

Slum dwellers who scavenge rubbish for a living burn wires in the open to extract re-saleable copper and soak circuit boards in acid baths to extract copper and other materials next to neighbourhood drains.

India's electronics market will expand to 363-billion dollars by 2015, from about 30-billion dollars now, according to an estimate by the Bangalore-based India Semiconductor Association.

As personal incomes rise in an economy growing by nine percent a year and competition forces prices down, India's 300-million-strong middle class is grabbing the latest, expensive electronic gadgets.

India is the fastest growing market for mobile phones, with handset sales reaching 24.5-million units during the three months ended September, according to market research firm Gartner.

Meanwhile, computer sales are set to reach five-million units this year as businesses upgrade their systems to boost efficiency in an increasingly competitive marketplace, according to MAIT.

"Significant growth in consumption of electronics items in the last few years, accompanied by a very high rate of obsolescence of these products, is leading to generation of electronic waste," said Juergen Bischoff, India head of the German technical cooperation agency GTZ that co-sponsored the survey.

About 94 percent of 200 organisations MAIT surveyed did not have any policy on disposal of obsolete electronic products, and the problem is exacerbated because India has no special law to deal with electronic waste.