Click to play videoNew Delhi: Subhash Sinha, a director at a diagnostics company has just found a new place to discard his office waste – the HCL office.
“We manufacture things but there are wastes also. We need to have a vendor that can dispose this waste responsibly. So while searching on the Internet we found that HCL was dealing in such things,” Manager, Actia, Subhash Sinha said.
Even a year ago, this mechanism was unheard of. In 2007, India generated 3,80,000 tonnes of e-waste from discarded computers, TVs and mobiles phones alone.
The biggest fallout of this has been a deadly illegal business where all this is unsafely treated to extract its metals. But a handful of IT and communication companies are now making an effort to clean up the system.
For various reasons – be it following global mandate, improving business with the west or just pressure from environment groups – this attempt at establishing producer responsibility is clearly a step in the right direction.
According to the latest Greenpeace report, manufacturers like Wipro, HCL, Noika, Acer, Motorola are on top of the charts for initiating individual producer responsibility. Wipro has 17 collection centres, HCL has 500 and Noika has 1,300 collection bins.
“From the point where we started off, we were recycling about 2,000 kg a month, and today we recycle around 5,000 to 6,000 kg a month,” General Manager & Head, Personal Computing Division, Wipro Infotech, Ashok Tripathy said.
But the fact remains that authorised e-waste recycling facilities capture only 3 per cent of total e-waste generated. So managing e-waste is still a question of changing perceptions.
(With inputs from Abhirr VP)
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