Our Techno Culture Is Creating Dangerous Digital Dumps of E-Waste

I teach in a University in New Delhi, the capital city of India. In one section of the building that houses my faculty, there is an enormous and motley collection of discarded computer-related items, stacked and piled in an unwieldy mess. This has been lying around for a while now, more than a year, not only because of the prolonged bureaucratic procedures involved in getting material “written off”, but also because no one knows what to do with the stuff once it has actually been written off.

It is a sight that that is increasingly only too common in urban India, and now even in some more prosperous rural areas of the country: ramshackle piles of dismembered pieces of discarded electronic equipment such as computers, CD players, televisions and cell phones lying around in the odd corners of offices and homes. Or else simply dumped in the open in garbage heaps, and then being painstakingly searched through by rag-pickers of all ages, who look for any elements that can be resold.

In most developing countries, where recycling occurs as a matter of course because of the widespread poverty and sharp inequality that mark our consumption patterns, this may seem as something quite obvious and hardly worthy of comment. Some may even see this as evidence of our greater ability to use and re-use material items more effectively than the wasteful West. Yet this cavalier attitude to electronic waste is a major hazard to the environment and human health.

This is also because developing countries often have to deal with e-waste that is far in excess of what is generated by production and consumption within the country. The global trade in e-waste is huge and growing, and is only partly illegal even though there have been attempts to regulate it.

In fact, e-waste is the fastest growing component of municipal waste across the world (more than 60 million tonnes of it generated every year) because of the high rate of obsolescence of most electronic goods. It is more of a problem than all the other waste because of its greater health and environmental hazards. Most electronic goods contain significant quantities of toxic metals and chemicals. If these are left untreated to lie around in landfills or dumps, they leach into the surrounding soil, water and the atmosphere. Many elements of the waste are hazardous: the circuit boards, cathode ray tubes, connectors and other elements almost always contain poisonous substances like lead, tin, mercury, cadmium and barium.

E-waste has been linked to the growing incidence of several lethal or severely debilitating health conditions, including cancer, neurological and respiratory disorders, and birth defects. As usual, this impact is worse in developing countries, where people often live in close proximity to dumps or landfills of untreated e-waste.

There are basically four ways in which e-waste can be dealt with, and none of them is really very satisfactory. The most common one, especially in the developing world, is simply to store it in landfills, with all the associated dangers. This practice has already been banned in the European Union and some other developed countries, who instead export this waste to poorer countries. Another way is to burn the goods, but this releases heavy metals like lead, cadmium and mercury into the atmosphere.

Re-using and recycling are obviously preferable because they increase the life-span of the products and so imply less waste over time. The re-use of second hand electronic goods in the developing world falls in this category, although it still eventually generates waste that ends up located in these countries. But recycling exposes workers to health hazards, especially in developing countries where it is dominantly done in scrap yards by hand, without any protection for workers.