The Hindu Business Line : A clean-up spur

A recent report by two US groups says the chemical residue found in the dust collecting on computers and other electronics devices threatens human health.

IT is the ultimate in trade bilateralism and the conjunction of the old and new economies: India exports cheap cyber-labour to the US and the US exports its toxic e-waste to India.

It's a deal made in heaven.

The US is the world's largest consumer of electronic goods, doesn't want to get its hands dirty working with junked goods, and is not a signatory to any international accord which prohibits it from shipping its hazardous electronic trash to other countries.

And India, which feels bound to please the world's sole surviving super power in whatever way it can, is in a position to clean up after it because we have no clearly defined framework for dealing with computer waste — although the Supreme Court did say in 1997 that there is a ban in place on the import of e-waste.

As far as the Union Environment Ministry's Pollution Control Board is concerned, the Supreme Court view is entirely correct - but essentially irrelevant because no e-waste is coming into the country in the first place.

But what about all those hole-in-the-wall chop-shops in, for instance, the Mandoli industrial area in the north-eastern corner of India's capital, right under the board's collective nose, where migrant workers from rural areas scurry about stripping down PCs with their hands, thereby coming into debilitating contact with toxic lead, mercury and cadmium? Or, for that matter, in the impoverished Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods of Silampur and Turkmangate where workers break open computers and cathode ray tubes by hand. And what about the tonnes of e-waste being shipped into the country as "used computer parts"?

Well none of these things exist because the board says that they do not exist. Life, at times, can be simple, especially if you are a bureaucrat in India.

The fact of the matter is that the US generates a humongous amount of e-waste that is dumped in India, China, Bangladesh, the Philippines and other developing countries, creating an environmental crisis that is not acknowledged as such.

The government in India doesn't want to acknowledge the problem because the recycling of e-waste is a lucrative business and those engaged in it are quite happy to spread the money around. The opinion mafia in the country doesn't want to acknowledge the problem either because they don't have to: the re-cycling is done by faceless workers whose health and the threat posed to it by the manual recycling of junked hardware is of no particular interest to anybody except, presumably, to themselves.

But this might change - and quick - with the recent report released by Clean Production Action and the Computer TakeBack Campaign, two US groups that study environmental and health issues related to computers, saying that the chemical residue which is found in the dust collecting on computers and other electronics devices could pose a long-term threat to human health.

In other words, there's a sporting chance that all those code kings and media moguls and civil society czars out there are being crippled or killed by their laptops and cell-phones, something that they are not likely to be sanguine about.

According to the Clean Production Action and the Computer TakeBack

Campaign researchers, they have found potentially dangerous elements of brominated fire retardants in dust samples taken from computers. Of these, the most common are fire prevention compounds known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers. PBDEs, which are to be found in electronic household devices, television sets and radios too, are known to cause health problems — essentially reproductive and neurological — in lab animals.

As of now, the harmful effect of these substances on the health of lab animals has been established - but there is no definitive research proving their danger to humans. But the US is not taking any chances: Maine has banned the sale of products containing deca-BDE while California has banned the production and use of other types of PBDEs — penta- and octa-BDE. The state of Washington has also passed an executive order to develop a plan to phase out all PBDEs. Similar legislation is being enacted in other states, including Massachusetts, New York and Wisconsin.

However, Clean Production Action and Computer TakeBank Campaign say that the US is lagging behind Europe in initiatives to cut down human exposure to the toxic substances. The European Union has mandated a phase-out of all PBDEs used in consumer electronics by 2006.

As for India, we can expect a hoo-ha about PBDEs because they adversely impact the health of the users of computers, cell-phones and so on who are invariably affluent people with a voice.

And, once their problem has been taken care of, they will relapse into the indifference with which they have treated the report titled `The High-Tech Trashing of Asia' prepared by The Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) with contributions by Toxics Link India, SCOPE (Pakistan) and Greenpeace China.

The report was published in February 2002, — but, except for some cursory coverage in the media, has not received much attention.

The report reads like a nightmare in print.

It kicks off with the observation that electronic waste or e-waste is the most rapidly growing waste problem in the world.

"It is a crisis not only of quantity but also a crisis born from toxic ingredients such as the lead, beryllium, mercury, cadmium, and brominated- flame retardants that pose both an occupational and environmental health threat. But to date, industry, government and consumers have only taken small steps to deal with this looming problem."

But all this bad stuff is being handled by some hick from the sticks working in Mandoli, right? Who cares? You can't become a global IT player without keeping Uncle Sam happy and, if this is what it takes, then this is what it takes.

eworld@thehindu.co.in

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