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San Jose
Mercury News
Sun, Dec. 28, 2003
E-waste
Ignored in India
By KARL SCHOENBERGER
Mercury News
NEW DELHI, India - Atul Maheshwari has
something to hide. He will not permit photographs inside the high-walled
courtyard of his mud-brick factory, where a half-dozen workers scurry
about dipping circuit boards in and out of blue plastic drums filled
with acid, stripping the boards of their last remnants of copper and
traces of silver.
None of the workers wears a mask to ward
off noxious fumes, and only one has thin yellow gloves to protect his
skin from the toxic brew. When the acid is depleted, the men dump it
into the open sewer lining a rutted dirt side-road in the Mandoli
industrial area, a collection of small, decaying factories in the
northeastern corner of India's capital.
Maheshwari says he ignores city regulations
and burns the bare plastic boards in the open air, just like the 10
rival scrap yards doing the same work in the area. He boasts of
procuring his scrap from North America, South Africa and Hong Kong,
which he processes along with computer waste generated throughout India.
``If your country keeps sending us the
material, our business will be good,'' he said, speaking through an
interpreter.
As India emerges as a technology
powerhouse, poverty, cheap labor and rampant corruption make it a prime
market for the dumping and burning of unregulated electronic waste,
environmental activists say. And Maheshwari's business is a stark
example of this growing global industry that begins as trash in Silicon
Valley and throughout the developed world and ends in India, China, the
Philippines and other developing countries.
Fed largely by the discards of U.S.
consumers and businesses, this burgeoning traffic in hazardous
electronic waste is attracting growing scrutiny because of the pollution
it causes and the danger it poses to unskilled workers overseas.
Industry protected.
``The small scrap yards and the back-alley
recycling in Delhi are the tip of the iceberg,'' warned Ravi Agarwal,
director of the non-profit watchdog Toxics Link Delhi.
``There's a framework to deal with
industrial waste in India, but not for computer waste. It's so
complicated because there are multiple components, with varying degrees
of toxicity. And the IT industry is a holy cow in this country. You
can't touch it.''
The Indian government, however, maintains
that e-waste is not brought into the country, pointing to the Indian
Supreme Court's 1997 ban on e-waste imports. Officials also downplay the
problem of recycling electronic trash produced at home.
``E-waste as such is not such a severe
problem in our country, because the waste goes into a secondary market.
We are not dumping anything,'' said B. Sengupta, a senior official at
the Environment Ministry's Pollution Control Board in New Delhi. ``Maybe
there will be a problem in five years, but not now.''
Agarwal's group sees it differently.
His group has investigated large-scale
e-waste operations in the port cities of Chennai (formerly Madras) in
Tamil Nadu to the south, and Ahmedabad in the northwestern state of
Gujarat. Posing as domestic scrap buyers, they have learned from
international brokers that despite the import ban, scrap dealers can
easily fill shipping containers with e-waste and bring them ashore if
they are identified as used computer parts.
Because of the underground nature of
India's e-waste business, statistics are scarce. But Toxics Link Delhi
cites reports indicating that perhaps 30 tons of computer waste is
imported every month at Ahmedabad alone, much of it contaminated by
toxic lead, mercury and cadmium.
``What you see are migrant workers from
rural areas, way down in the caste system, doing the dirty work,
sleeping and working in the scrap yards,'' said Agarwal, whose group
issued a report in February, ``Scrapping the High Tech Myth: Computer
Waste in India.''
Exporting U.S. waste
India's e-waste problem serves as a
reminder that the United States -- the world's largest consumer of
electronic goods -- is not party to an international accord that bans
the shipment of hazardous electronic trash from wealthy countries to
poor countries. An estimated 315 million computers will have become
obsolete in the United States between 1997 and 2004, and that number is
likely to grow at a fast clip, taxing domestic recycling capacity and
making exports the cheapest, easiest solution.
Toxics Link Delhi and other groups have
fought a lonely crusade in South Asia.
India's environmental priorities are
focused on the basic problems of foul air, poor sanitation and unsafe
drinking water. New Delhi authorities, for example, shut down polluting
industries within the city limits and cleaned up the air dramatically in
the past five years by forcing taxis and small commercial vehicles to
switch from diesel fuel to liquid natural gas.
But 70 percent of Indians still don't have
latrines. Chemicals from factories and fertilizers from fields have
added to the contamination of the water supply already soiled by
untreated human waste. Junked computers might seem like a minor issue in
a country that must deal with profound rural poverty and uncontrolled
population growth.
E-waste recyclers in New Delhi have felt
pressure to clean up their act, but the scale of the recycling is small
and it's relatively easy to conceal from authorities.
A plume of dark smoke led the Mercury News
to a small brick compound in the Mandoli industrial area, not far from
Maheshwari's acid-bath operation. Here, PVC-coated wires were being
burned to salvage copper. Across the city, in the poor Muslim
neighborhoods of Silampur and Turkmangate, workers hacked apart
computers and cathode ray tubes by hand.
The Indian government is in denial about
the problem of imported e-waste, Agarwal said. It is also neglecting to
develop a policy to handle the inevitable flood of domestic scrap as
computer consumption -- and the trashing of obsolete PCs -- rises along
with the technological sophistication of India's growing middle class.
Sengupta, the environmental official,
rejected the findings of Agarwal's group.
``I don't think it's true,'' he said.
``There was an investigation and we found that no e-waste was coming to
this country. The report is not correct.''
He declined to comment on the wire-burning
and the acid-bath treatment of circuit boards that the Mercury News
observed in Mandoli.
Whether it's a problem for the authorities
or not, the low-end trade in e-waste remains relatively lucrative in the
underbelly of India's economy, where nearly 60 percent of adults are
illiterate and 35 percent of the population lives on an income of less
than $1 a day, according to the United Nations Development Program.
Medhi Hasan, who was plucking chips and
transistors from some relatively ancient motherboards outside his tiny
shop on a cramped alley in the Silampur neighborhood, is a former fruit
seller who said he switched to e-waste recycling to improve his lot. He
said he acquires his stock of computer scrap from local banks, companies
and embassies. Hasan and his two employees recycle 200 to 300 computers
a month, but he barely makes a profit.
``I'm not worried about any toxins or
hazardous waste,'' he said. ``I don't burn any wires and we use hammers
to strip the circuit boards and stopped melting the lead solder over a
stove.''
Maheshwari said he got into the business of
e-waste recycling seven years ago when he saw how much money he could
make. Dressed as a successful businessman in dress slacks and a spotless
white shirt, he declined to say what he did for a living before this, or
exactly how much money he makes in a month.
By the time the circuit boards reach his
yard, they are already stripped of semiconductor chips -- the secondhand
components that can be found for resale in tiny three-worker shops
around the city.
Maheshwari said he does not make much
profit unless he processes large volumes of scrap, which is why he is
turning more and more directly to international brokers to get his
supply by the container-load.
Maheshwari chafed at questions about his
business. He then escorted the visiting journalists through the hatch
door on the rusted steel gate of his scrap yard and stalked away.
The Mandoli industrial zone adjoins a
residential area, where barefoot children trudged home in brown school
uniforms past a row of shops and an open-air restaurant on one side of
the road and factories on the other side. Main Street was a dirt road
cluttered by ox carts and pedicabs. One acid-bath worker from
Maheshwari's yard, 25-year-old Raj Bhadur, sat on a stool eating a lunch
of vegetable curry and fried bread.
Bhadur, a native of a farm village across
the city border in Uttar Pradesh state, said he had been doing the
e-waste work for three years, and that the pay is good compared to what
he could make doing other kinds of labor. He earns about 3,000 rupees
($66) a month, working six days a weeks in eight-hour shifts. He has had
no symptoms of respiratory problems or skin irritations, he said shyly,
surrounded by co-workers.
``There's a lot of water at the yard to
wash up with,'' he said. ``I'm not worried about health problems.''
Dr. Sunil Aggaridal, a respiratory-disease
specialist at nearby Gurutegbahldar Hospital in the Dilshad Garden area,
said he had not seen any indication of unusual respiratory problems in
the local population. He said children are most vulnerable, but he had
no information about the people living near the Mandoli industrial zone
or the burning of e-waste there.
That afternoon, the air was thick with
acrid smoke coming from a compound about 50 yards from the residential
area. There, not far from Maheshwari's factory, another scrap broker was
burning coils of copper and aluminum wire on charcoal blocks. The crude
furnace burns off the last remnants of the polyvinyl chloride
insulation, a process that environmentalists say releases toxic levels
of dioxin into the air.
An angry manager wasted no time in kicking
out journalists. Outside, he declined to explain what was happening
inside the small open yard.
Standing in the shade down the unpaved
alleyway, however, Suphbal Singh, a 37-year-old truck driver, was more
obliging. He had delivered the coils of wire to the compound and was
waiting for the burning to be completed and the wires to cool so he
could take the scrap to the next stage in the recycling processes.
Lung ailments
Singh said wire and cable burning has been
going on at this spot for about 20 years, unmolested by authorities.
``The people working inside those yards
have health problems -- lung problems,'' said Singh, who worked as a
farmer in Uttar Pradesh until he bought his truck seven years ago. ``The
burning is illegal but the police probably won't touch us, because the
scrap dealer's association lobbies the government.''
But, with increasing pressure from city
authorities to clean up pollution, the lobbying may not be strong enough
to protect the most environmentally damaging practices.
``After the local election next year,''
Singh said, ``there's a possibility the government will shut this
down.''
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