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Electronic Wasteland

Clemenceau is in the news, but India pays no heed to the influx of tons of toxic e-waste. Lax laws don't help.

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Electronic Wasteland
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Dozens of computers are broken down in a day in each such shop, hundreds of others lie in a heap. There's waste ash by the fireplace, lying next to it the meagre food that these young boys eat. After 15 minutes in the shed, you come away with an acid stench on your clothes.

India 'imports' lakhs of PCs every year, mostly from the US, under the guise of charity or recycling. But it's only useful as scrap. As with old PCs, so with discarded mobiles, TV sets and refrigerators. The collective stream is called 'e-waste' because computer waste forms the bulk of it. Americans bought a staggering $125 billion worth of electronic goods in 2005, which meant an equally staggering number of old goods needed to be got rid of. It's reported that there was one obsolete PC in the US for every new one in the market last year. Add to that obsolescence within India, pegged at two per cent per year, and you are looking at a humungous pile of plastic and waste.

But e-waste is only the latest in a rather long list of hazardous material happily received in India, where economics and lobbying usually trump environmental and health concerns. From mixed metal scrap to zinc ash, used oil, plastic waste, lead acid batteries and asbestos, the Indian platter is loaded with stuff that other, mostly rich and developed, nations do not want on their soil. Le Clemenceau may be mired in controversy but other ships of its kind have found safe passage here. Like the two Danish fugitive ships, Riky and Beauport 2. They skirted the Basel Convention that prohibits trans-boundary movement of hazardous wastes between countries, found ways around the Indian laws banning entry of hazardous wastes, the ministry of environment and forests (MOEF), the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on Hazardous Wastes (SCMC), and were dismembered in Alang last year. Reports say 245 kgs of asbestos was found on one of them when only 40 per cent of the ship had been broken down.

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Developed countries find disposing of lethal waste an expensive proposition. For example, several US states have banned e-waste in landfills. And while lead smelters in the US are history, lead acid waste recycling in India is booming. India is favoured for the high profit margins, poor legal and environmental regulation, and powerful lobbies that focus only on the business aspects of waste.

However, the blame does not lie with the rich countries alone. There is a lack of resolve within the Indian establishment to fight dumping. If the government and relevant trade lobbies didn't want the deadly cargo entering India, they would not be here. It's as simple as that. "The law is happily flouted by the government itself," says Nityanand Jayraman, a Chennai-based independent researcher/writer who has tracked the journey of hazardous wastes into India for over a decade.

"India's implementation of the Basel Convention has dithered, the government is on the defensive. Whether it was the Bharat Zinc case in 1995 or Clemenceau, the MOEF's position is shameful. There are 132 mothballed US warships, waiting to be broken. Feasibility studies are being done for breaking them in other countries, particularly India. This is when a law exists (to prevent their entering India). On e-waste though, we still don't have clear legislation," says Jayraman.

Everyone agrees waste imports have steadily increased over the last few years, but figures for exact volumes are hard to come by. That's partly because all waste does not come as such; it's often marked for recycling. Then there are a plethora of agencies; customs, ports and commercial intelligence authorities that maintain different registers of what comes in. Not all of it is collated. Often, the imports are not even reported to the MOEF or the SCMC.

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The international market in waste is clearly booming. A Canadian internal trade report listing business opportunities for Canadian firms stated that "the hazardous waste market (was) worth Canadian $52 million in 2003 with annual growth of seven per cent until 2010". The British Environment Agency (bea) reported last December that several companies were exporting e-waste from the UK to India.

Greenpeace, which is also spearheading the anti-Clemenceau efforts, tracked the illegal entry of hazardous wastes for a year in 1999; it was a whopping 1,00,887 tonnes. The SCMC's 2005 report is an eye-opener: "The committee has not yet examined whether imports of hazardous wastes have come to a full and final halt. From the information before it, some consignments are still entering the country. Cochin Port Trust has, for example, impounded some recent waste oil consignments. There are 133 containers of waste oil lying at Nhava Sheva port."

Other reports say there are actually 333 containers, that the importer's identity is not clear. The time limit for it to be re-exported is long over. Mumbai port has 31 consignments of hazardous wastes. Hazardous waste cleared by the Visakhapatnam Port Trust was sold to auctioneers last year. As Ramapati Kumar of Greenpeace puts it, "Clemenceau is a test case for many of us, including the SCMC."

Dr G. Thyagarajan, SCMC chairman, told a national newspaper recently: "My position is there should be no import and no export of hazardous substances...and no exceptions to that rule." Easier said than done. Add India's own hazardous wastes to those 'dumped' here. We generate an estimated 7.5 million tonnes every year, with five states accounting for nearly 80 per cent of hazardous wastes. More than 70 per cent of it is disposed through landfills. Barely 1.4 million tonnes are recycled. So the recycling industry hinges on imports, legal or illegal, say researchers.

Green lobbies celebrated when the Basel Convention was signed in '90. Lawrence Summers, WB chief economist, had said: "The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to it." Summers must be pleased with India's "progress" in the last 15 years.

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