Nitin Gupta has a penchant for garbage. The mission of his start-up company, Attero, is to recycle old computers, cellular phones, and other used electronics in a state-of-the-art industrial facility about 100 miles from New Delhi. Nearly a third of Attero’s source materials come from informal collectors who earn their living by finding and selling e-scrap, Gupta says. Attero pays them slightly more for used computer circuit boards than they would make from extracting gold from the boards by drenching them in cyanide — a largely unregulated process that poses risks to soils, water, and human health.
“They’re getting more money … and also they don’t have to go through the process” of dismantling the circuit boards in a haze of lead and cyanide fumes, says Gupta, 34, who co-founded Attero with his brother Rohan in 2008. The facility now reprocesses roughly one percent of the printed circuit boards generated in India, according to Gupta, and it uses 77 percent less energy to extract copper from the boards than virgin mining would require.
For two decades the global narrative around electronic waste has typically been that rich, industrialized countries were dumping used devices onto impoverished ones, where the desperately poor often recycled printed circuit boards under unsafe conditions. But experts say nascent e-waste trends are beginning to challenge that paradigm. Developing countries are now shipping more e-waste by weight to developed countries than vice versa, according to a recent analysis of United Nations trade data by Josh Lepawsky, a geographer at Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland and an expert on the electronic waste trade. “Between 1996 and 2012 the dominant inter-regional trade pattern has been turned on its head,” he says.
Meanwhile, a small but growing number of businesses such as Gupta’s, often backed by international donors and lenders, are exploring ways to create incentives for informal collectors to sell e-waste to formal recycling operations. For example, the German government’s development aid agency, the German Society for International Cooperation, has supported an Indian company named e-WaRDD that has piloted a project to incentivize circuit-board collection in Bangalore, India. And a Belgium-based non-profit, WorldLoop, receives corporate funding to support a range of electronics recycling programs in Africa that link informal recyclers with state-of-the-art facilities overseas that recycle printed circuit boards, transformers, and leaded glass.
Researchers say printed circuit boards, which often contain gold and other valuable metals, are a good first step for such projects because they typically represent the most valuable — as well as the most environmentally hazardous — aspect of the e-waste recycling process. The goal is to allow collectors to continue their practice of re-using or manually dismantling electronic equipment, but then sell those parts to professional facilities instead of melting them or using cyanide to extract valuable metals in backyard workshops. Advanced recycling facilities employ commodity separation, shredding, resource recovery, and pollution-control technologies that greatly reduce the health and environmental hazards associated with backyard recycling operations.
Source: Yale environment360
By Mike Ives