Recycling and electronic waste management process

Published in India, Tuesday, November 27th, 2009

Posted by S. Chatterjee and Krishna Kumar
Overview
This article proposes the model where non-formal and formal cooperation equally participated to
make the business of electronic waste management into the profitable business. This article
further focuses on non-formal sectors that will focuses on segregation, unassembled and
collection e-waster while on other hand formal sectors will likely focus on processing PCBs printed circuit boards in order to extract the important or precious metals.
Facts observed in the article
It has been analyzed that recycling of e-waste is turning out to be non-viable in developed
countries because of following reasons;
1- E-wastes major source is basically the disposal of electronic and hardware items from
research institutes, private sectors and government offices.
2- In recent years it has been observed that huge amount of e-waste is exported from western
nations to Asian countries such as India, China etc. for dumping.
3- E-wastes volume is increasing terrifyingly in developing regions because they themselves
import disposable hardware and electronics products.
4- The non-formal sector is steadily growing because of the market value and demand of
recoverable of materials
5- One of the studies in this article defines that almost tons of 50,000 to 70,000 of e-waste is
getting imported to India annually.
6- The fact in the article reveals that E-waste sometimes contains important materials which
include glass, plastics and metal which are around 95% of total e-waste if weighing them.
7- In formal sectors, e-waste management are environmental friendly as well as they take care of
health and safety of the operators.
8-The writer suggested some measures to recover materials from PC by using the methods of
collection, segregation and disassemble.

Social factors

Environmental factors

of related
E-wasteconcerns
when mixed
with
strongmight
municipal
waste
can create the threat for
d volume of generation of e-waste asDisposal
well as its
in this
society
reduce
drastically.
One of the environmental threats is the recycling of PCBs which is being considered as the m

Effects of E-waste

Technological factors

n formal sectors technology is unavailable and in non-formal sector they are extracting valuable metals for the purpose of
In developed countries, technologies are accessible to process the useless e-products and to extract it into precious met

Discussion questions

Does Re-cycling of e-waste through technology is considered as profitable business in

developed countries?

Which sort of metals is harmful for the environment?

What is the role of formal and non-formal sectors in electronic waste management?

Describe the methods used to segregate different elements through e-waste process?

How this electronic e-waste cycle will help the workers on their health and what will be
the impact on the developing country of it?