Dealing with e-waste at present, the amount of obsolete computers and other e-waste temporarily stored for recycling or disposal is increasing at an alarming rate worldwide. The production of large amounts of electronic waste has caused huge environmental and health hazards to any community. This is best illustrated by the following table, which shows the amount of waste that 500 million computers can generate.
So far, there are basically four ways electronic waste disposal. But it was not found to be completely satisfactory. The most common is to store e-waste in landfills, but it is full of all the leaching hazards described earlier. In older or less-maintained landfills or garbage dumps, the hazardous effects are much more serious. In the United States, about 70% of heavy metals (including mercury and cadmium) in landfills come from electronic waste. Due to its dangerous nature, most states in the United States and the European Union prohibit dumping waste in landfills. Another commonly used method is to incinerate or burn-related items, but this process releases heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and mercury into the atmosphere. Municipal incinerators have been one of the largest point sources of dioxin and atmospheric heavy metal pollution in the United States and Canada.
India imports dangerous electronic waste
India is one of the largest waste importers and e waste pickup in the world. All types of waste are imported into the country in the form of cheap raw materials, including hazardous and toxic waste. According to data released by the customs department, even the banned import of waste, such as medical waste, incineration ash, municipal waste, and electronic waste, exceeds 5 million tons per year. In 2009, India produced 5.9 million tons of hazardous waste and imported 6.4 million tons. It produces about 3,50,000 tons of electronic waste every year and imports 50,000 tons. So far, India has been a destination for hazardous waste and industrial waste such as mercury, electronic and plastic waste from the United States; asbestos from Canada; defective steel and tinplate from the European Union, Australia, and the United States; from the United Arab Emirates, Iran, and Kuwait’s toxic waste oil; zinc ash, residue, and skimming, lead waste and waste, used batteries and metal waste such as cadmium, chromium, cobalt, antimony, hafnium, and thallium from Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Norway, and scrap. These wastes contain toxic components that are harmful to public health and the environment. The draft new rules on the import and management of e-waste are currently under consideration. Prior to the publication of the rules, the 2008 Hazardous Waste (Management, Treatment, and Transboundary Movement) Rules regulated the import and export trade or transboundary movement of hazardous waste (including e-waste). According to these measures, hazardous wastes are not allowed to be imported for disposal. However, imported waste can only be used for reuse, recycling, or reprocessing. The unit that monitors the recycling of hazardous waste is the responsibility of the State Pollution Control Board or the Pollution Control Board of the Union Territory. The rules also require that all imported goods must be accompanied by transport documents and test reports from accredited laboratories or pre-shipment inspection certificates from accredited bodies.
The e-waste rules proposed in 2011 did not address the import and export of e-waste. The transboundary movement of hazardous waste (including e-waste companies in India) is regulated by the 2008 Hazardous Waste Regulations. Only with the permission of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry and the permission of the General Administration of Foreign Trade, can we consider importing e-waste for actual users.
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