Recycler’s clean-up act
Kolkata-based Hulladek Recycling is taking on electronic waste with a door-to-door service that is raising awareness, says Geetanjali Krishna
Consider these facts: Six per cent of the weight of a typical computer monitor may be lead, a known carcinogen. Chlorofluorocarbons from old refrigerators could cause the depletion of the ozone layer. Cathode ray tubes from used televisions and computer monitors are composed of glass with lead oxide.
Improperly handled electronic waste or e-waste has been increasingly recognised to be toxic for the recycler and lethal for the environment. Yet, in India, one of the world’s top five generators of e-waste, most of us still turn to the good old kabadiwala (scrap dealer) every time there’s a need to upgrade an old computer, mobile phone, air conditioner or television.
“It’s a ticking time bomb if recycled incorrectly,” says Nandan Mall, founder-director of Kolkata-based Hulladek Recycling. “Done right, ewaste is nothing but urban mining which recycles waste as well as prevents the planet’s natural resources from being depleted.”
He has a point.
It is estimated that under controlled conditions, as much as 97 per cent of e-waste is recyclable and rather valuable. But a single lithium ion battery from a cellphone could contaminate as much as 60,000 litres of water if it is not properly contained and stored.
This is the sort of awareness that Hulladek is seeking to raise. Set up in 2014 to help manufacturers of electrical and electronic equipment meet their extended producer responsibility (EPR) as prescribed by the Central Pollution Control Board’s EWaste (Management) Amendment Rules, 2018, the company has been conducting workshops in schools and residential neighbourhoods to sensitise people about the hazards of the e-waste they generate.
“So far, we’ve been to over 100 schools and about 50 neighbourhoods to talk about this issue,” says Mall. “Most people are surprised to learn how toxic their old TVs, fridges etc can be for the environment.”
As of now, however, there are merely 300 registered e-waste recyclers in the country. So ensuring that one’s old electronics reach the right place remains a challenge.
For Kolkata consumers, Hulladek has a tollfree helpline which can help organise collection of e-waste. “At the end of the day, I believe that a door-to-door collection model is the only way forward,” says Mall. “We’re setting up such a system in Jamshedpur in collaboration with the Tata Steel-owned Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Company,” he adds.
Given that recycling technology in India has yet to come of age, the door-to-door service — which costs households ~25 per kilo of waste — is not cheap. “Even so, it is a small price to pay for the damage that improper e-waste disposal results in.” says Mall.
It is estimated that barely 1.5 per cent of e-waste generated in India gets recycled. “As the recycling market grows, the technologies are bound to improve and the cost of door-to-door collection will reduce,” he says.
Hulladek is one of 15 registered producer responsibility organisations in India, which help producers meet their EPR targets. According to law, all producers of electronic goods must collect a percentage of their obsolete product categories from consumers and deposit them with authorised re-processing units. Through its helpline, Hulladek organises the pick-up and proper recycling of ewaste for over 30 clients in diverse sectors ranging from health and hospitality to computers and heavy engineering.
Even if unacknowledged, e-waste recycling is an idea whose time has come. India’s annual e-waste generation was 1.8 million metric tonnes in 2016 and is expected to reach 5.2 million metric tonnes by 2020.
Whether the nation ends up engulfed in a mountain of toxic waste or it is able to safely extract precious resources such as copper, silver, gold and platinum from it, depends upon the awareness Mall and his cohorts in the e-waste recycling business are able to generate.