Attero Recycling, one of India’s largest electronic waste management companies, is set to invest close to $1 billion in expanding their electronic waste recycling facilities in India.

E-waste Management: A tricky task

• E-waste management is a complicated process given the multitude of actors that are involved in the process.
• The major stakeholders in the value chain include importers, producers/manufacturers, retailers (businesses/government/others), consumers (individual households, businesses, government and others), traders, scrap dealers, dissemblers/dismantlers and recyclers.
• To critically assess each in the different stages of processing, it is important to understand the e-waste value chain.
• The process involves four stages: generation, collection, segregation and treatment/disposal.

India’s regulatory ecosystem

• Indian electronics sector boomed in the last decade.
• Increased production and penetration of imported electronics items led to an accelerated e-waste generation that necessitated regulatory control over the sector.
• India has Electronic Waste (Management and Handling) Rules 2011 in place since . Its scope was expanded in 2016 and 2018 through amendments.

Provisions of the 2011 Rules

• To streamline e-waste management, the Government introduced Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) whereby producers were required to collect and recycle electronic items.
• Since manufacturers were incurring the disposal cost, their designs would incorporate less toxic and easily recyclable materials, thereby reducing input material requirements.

Inherent flaws in Implementation

• Recycling: Less than five percent of the waste is treated through formal recycling facilities.
• Informal sector: The rest is handled by the informal sector with very little enforcement of environmental and occupational safety norms.
• Weak Regulations: A deeper analysis revealed that the EPR regulations in India were not quantified through collection or recycling targets as in other countries with better implementation framework and mechanisms.
• Lack of incentivization: In the absence of targets, producers had little incentive to ensure the collection of their used products.

Current scenario and issues in e-waste recycling

• Crude and Scrappage: As of today, some 95% of e-waste is managed by the informal sector which operates under inferior working conditions and relies on crude techniques for dismantling and recycling.
• Infrastructure lacunae: Another important issue is the lack of sufficient metal processing infrastructure which is why recyclers have to export materials to global smelters.
• Price competencies: As aggregators are mostly informal, they demand up-front cash payments.
• Bloomed informal network: The informal network is well-established and rests on social capital ties that PROs have yet to establish and are hence insulated from reaching the viable number of aggregators.
• Policy failure: Policy changes have tried repeatedly to formalize the sector, but issues of implementation persist on the ground.

Way forward

• Effective design: Since India is highly deficient in precious mineral resources, there is a need for a well-designed, robust and regulated e-waste recovery regime that would generate jobs and wealth.
• Consumer responsibility: The consumers must responsibly consume the product for its useful life and then weigh between the chances of repair or disposal with utmost consciousness towards the environment.
• Recyclable products: On the supply side, e-waste can be reduced when producers design electronic products that are safer, and more durable, repairable and recyclable.
• Reuse: Manufacturers must reuse the recyclable materials and not mine rare elements unnecessarily to meet new production.
• Commercial recycling: Rather than hoping that informal recyclers become formal it would be more feasible for companies and the state to design programs ensure e-waste easily makes its way to proper recyclers.

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