The Hindu : The ugly face of IT

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jun 23, 2003

Business

Business

The ugly face of IT

Unless the Indian Government comes up with legislation compelling vendors to initiate a takeback and recycle mechanism, the Indian IT dream could well end up in an ecological nightmare.

IN THE lay mind, information technology (IT) is associated with a clean and safe environment. Actually this is far from the truth.

The manufacture of IT hardware involves the use of more than 1,000 materials. Many of these materials are highly toxic, such as special gases used in semiconductor manufacture, lead and cadmium in computer circuit boards, lead oxide and barium in computer monitors' cathode ray tubes, mercury in switches and flat screens, and brominated flame retardants on printed circuit boards, cables and plastic casing.

Comprehensive health impacts of the mixtures and material combinations in the products are often not known. But international research has revealed that high-tech production workers experience premature death, elevated rates of cancer, neurological disorders, miscarriages and giving birth to children with severe birth defects. In addition, new evidence is revealing that computer recycling employees have high levels of dangerous chemicals in their blood. The IT industry also saps a community's resources. One semiconductor plant alone can require enough electricity to power a city of 60,000 and several million gallons of water a day. Thirty years of irresponsible handling of chemicals used in manufacturing have resulted in highly contaminated groundwater and severe community health problems in a number of countries including, the U.S., Japan, Mexico and Scotland.

At least the health and environmental problems associated with the making of IT equipment are limited to the regions around the manufacturing nodes. But a much bigger and more widespread ecological disaster is in the making due to another reason — the universal adoption of IT all over the globe and the rapid obsolescence of IT products. This has led to mountains of obsolete IT products, particularly PCs, monitors and printers occupying landfills, where their highly toxic contents can eventually leach into the soil and groundwater. "E-waste'' has become one of the world's fastest growing and most toxic waste streams.

The U.S. National Safety Council predicts that in that country alone between 315 million and 680 million computers will become obsolete within the next few years. The waste will contain more than 2 billion kg of plastic, 0.5 billion kg of lead, 1 million kg of cadmium, 0.5 million kg of chromium, and nearly 200,000 kg of mercury. Environmentalists also worry that with the popularity of new liquid crystal display technology, an increasing number of old monitors using cathode ray tubes are ending up in the trash. Now looming on the horizon is a similar disposal problem regarding the tens of millions of first generation mobile phones.

What is ominous for developing countries is that much of this e-waste is being dumped in their territories due to their lax monitoring of waste imports. In February 2002, the Basel Action Network (BAN) and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC) released the ground-breaking report, "Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia,'' which stated that as much as 80 per cent of electronic waste collected for recycling in the U.S. was shipped to Asia, mainly China, India and Pakistan, where environmentally destructive processing and disposal such as open burning, acid baths and plain dumping create environmental and health nightmares.

Significantly, The Basel Convention of 1994 and the Ban Amendment, which was signed by all developed nations except the U.S., identify e-waste as hazardous and prohibit the shipment of hazardous waste from rich countries to poor ones. After the release of the report, China has clamped down on e-waste imports but India continues to receive the trash.

Amazingly, less than 10 per cent of outdated computer products are refurbished or recycled. In 2001, a national Computer Takeback Campaign (CTBC) was started in the U.S. which promotes "clean and green'' production and extended producer responsibility (EPR). Simply stated, EPR requires companies to take full financial and physical responsibility for their products throughout their life cycle, including end of life recycling, reuse, or disposal. Where countries have enacted environmental regulations the computer industry has responded by developing sustainable products, accepting their responsibility throughout those products' lifecycles, encouraging reuse of materials, and working toward environmentally sound disposal.

Some significant examples of laws include:

Europe: The European Union's (EU) Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) and Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directives, both adopted by the EU's Parliament in October 2002, require the elimination of certain hazardous materials and set standards for producer responsibility for recycling and takeback.

Japan: The Appliance Recycling Law in 2001, now requires takeback of certain electronic products that will soon include computers. The Pollution Release and Transfer Registry (PRTR), also introduced last year, is driving the disclosure of chemical use in production.

U.S.: While there are no national laws or regulations, California and Massachusetts have banned landfilling cathode ray tube monitors and televisions because of the lead content in the glass. Several other states and municipalities are considering similar legislation.

During the past year, more than 20 states introduced legislation to address electronic waste (e-waste). The National Conference of Environmental Legislators has a chart of states with e-waste legislation.

The failure to pass crucial legislation in many countries has allowed the computer industry to resist addressing many criticisms, such as the amount of hazardous material used to make their products and the ever-growing pile of waste that results from the dynamic pace of innovation in the Information Technology (IT) industry. As a result, double standards exist between countries, as well as within companies. For example, one of the world's leading computer companies sells to American consumers, computers containing brominated flame-retardants, used to prevent fires in circuit boards. Some countries prohibit the flame-retardants, which are suspected of blocking hormones and impairing some biological processes. In those countries, this MNC ships machines free of the chemicals.

In India, the mountains of e-waste have not yet manifested themselves. This is because of the propensity to not throw away equipment, even if it is obsolete, till it becomes totally unserviceable. But, in the younger generation, this attitude is changing and the throwaway culture of the West is slowly permeating into the country. Another factor limiting generation of e-waste in India is that we do not have a sizeable IT hardware manufacturing infrastructure as yet. We also commenced large scale computerisation a bit late in this country, compared to the developed countries or even the ASEAN bunch.

Nevertheless, the problem is going to build up from henceforth. On a rough estimate, we should now be having around 10 million computers ready for junking, and we are going to scrap a million more every year in the future. With mobile telephony zooming off, we can soon see at least a million handsets joining the scrap heap every year in the near future. To this pile, we will start adding a few lakh CRT monitors every year, especially when LCD monitors start coming down in price. Unless the Indian Government comes up with legislation compelling vendors to initiate a takeback and recycle mechanism, the Indian IT dream could well end up in an ecological nightmare.

N. N. Sachitanand

in Bangalore

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