India's IT firms face new challenge in e-waste disposal
by Vaibhav Varma, Channel News Asia
8 December 2005 (India) – The speed at which technology turns obsolete has given rise to a new management challenge - what to do with the e-waste that has been generated.
A demand for eco-friendly waste disposal policies at the doors of one of India's largest software service providers.
Environmentalists are accusing Wipro, India's largest software service providers, of dumping large quantities of electronic waste on unauthorised recycling dealers which cannot dispose of them properly.
The software giant is based in Bangalore city, India's software hub.
Home to more than 1,200 local and foreign technology firms, it figures prominently in the list of world cities plagued by e-waste hazards.
And environmentalist groups are calling for urgent corrective action.
Said Ramapati Kumar, a toxic campaigner at Greenpeace India: "The only way to deal with the growing problem of e-waste is for a company to have a clean product which is easy and safe to recycle, and has longer lifespan so that it will not expose workers and environments to hazardous chemicals."
Part of the solution lies in the country's first computer graveyard named E-Parisar.
The Bangalore facility claims to have processed 600 tonnes of electronic waste in the first seven months of the year - that's the weight of 400 cars.
Monitors, printers, fax machines and integrated circuits are taken to pieces by machines and the parts recycled
Care is taken to reduce human exposure to the high levels of dangerous pollutants emitted.
"Most of the materials we handle properly and process properly. There is no problem at all. Our methodology is non-incineration. We will be following the stringent environmental norms and there will not be any significant landfill of the useful materials," said P. Parthasarthi, who owns E-Parisar.
But throughout the city, loopholes remain. And abusers are abundant, even for the small sums that these parts fetch.
There are national policy checks but these have failed to eradicate dumping of computer hardware here by companies in developed nations who sell their out-of-use and discarded products to India.
20 to 50 million tonnes of e-waste are generated annually worldwide and without enough checks, the dangers loom large.
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