The Generation, Impact, and Management of E-Waste: State of the Art

Even as the world has been unsuccessfully trying to dispose off the rising quantities of its municipal solid waste (MSW) and hazardous waste (HW) in a clean manner, it has been confronted with an even more complex problem—of e-waste. Only a few countries in the developed world are able to scientifically recycle or dispose the e-waste they generate. In other developed countries only a fraction of the e-waste is properly recycled, the rest is either incinerated or sent to landfills—which are solutions that cause serious secondary problems. Worse still, a sizeable portion of the e-waste generated in the developed world is exported to developing countries where it is recycled or dumped without any concern for the gross pollution that is being caused. It can be said that if the situation vis-à-vis e-waste is posing a challenge in most developed counties, it is alarmingly bad in the developing world. In an attempt to contain the e-waste problem most of the developed world and several countries in the developing world have enacted legislation to curb illegal trafficking and unlicensed recycling of e-waste. These legislations invoke the extended producer responsibility concept based on life-cycle considerations in the hope that it will provide prevention as well as cure. Innumerable non-governmental organizations and citizen's groups have also been trying to help out. So far, all these measures together have achieved only a modicum of success—that, too, only in a few regions of the developed world—but if viewed on the global scale ever bigger streams of e-waste are threatening to join the rising tides of MSW and HW in engulfing the world. The present paper assesses the state-of-the-art, bringing out how and why the e-waste problem has been defying all attempts to contain it. The paper also brings out that—much the same way as has happened with MSW and HW—the size and the complexity of the e-waste problem is increasing at much faster rate than the efficacy of our strategies to contain it. This trend is not likely to reverse soon and the only viable means to solve the problem is to drastically reduce generation of waste.