Toxic chemicals found in electronic waste severely affect the health of rag pickers who dismantle computers and mobile phones for precious metals.
Few statistics are known about the informal e- waste industry, but a United Nations report launched in February describes how mountains of hazardous waste from electronics are growing exponentially in India.
It said India would have 500 percent more e-waste from old computers in 2020 than in 2007, and 18 times more old mobile phones.
Toxic metals and poisons enters the blood stream during the laborious manual extraction process and when equipment is crudely treated to collect tiny quantities of precious metals. The amount of metals they extract a retraces-fractions of a milligram.
There are no estimates of how many people die from e- waste poisoning as ill workers move back to their villages when they can no longer work.
The government has proposed a law to regulate the e-waste trade. The proposed law says only big firms should be in the business of recycling and dismantling. But this is not going to work because the informal sector already has a cheap system of collection, disposal or recycling in place-so people use that.
No comments:
Post a Comment