Sustainable Electronic Waste Management and Recycling Process

Electronics waste is becoming a major global issue. Huge accumulation of e-waste and their recycling through primitive means for extraction of precious metals are real concern in the developing countries due to presence of hazardous materials in e-waste. Recycling of e-waste through appropriate technologies is, however, considered to be a profitable business as the printed circuit boards (PCBs) contain the precious metals (including gold, silver etc.). The present recycling cost in developed country is, however, not viable, and thereby, huge volume of e-waste is being exported to the developing countries like India, China, Brazil etc., where manpower is in-expensive and enforcement of environmental laws is not so stringent. This article has proposed an outsourcing model where equal participation of the organised and unorganised sector is ensured to make the e-waste management business a profitable one. The main motivation of the units in unorganised sector is to extract the precious metals like gold, silver and copper from the printed circuit board (PCB). The unscientific and unhygienic methods, used for extracting the metals, are harmful to the workers and the environment. This practice needs to be discouraged by providing alternative earning mechanism of the unorganised operators for the collected materials. In the proposed approach, unorganised operators will concentrate on collection, disassembly, segregation of e-waste, whereas, organised sector will concentrate on processing the PCBs to extract precious metals. The 95-97% of the e-waste by weight contains metal, glass and plastics, which can easily be dissembled and segregated manually without damaging environment; whereas, the rest 3-5% by weight of e-waste actually consists of PCBs/connectors, need environmentally friendly recycling techniques to manage. The major segregated materials from e-waste include metals, glass and plastic parts can be managed through the conventional recycling practices used in municipality waste management by organized smelters and re-processors. The segregated PCB and connectors will be pulverized by professional agency to make homogenous powder and assessment of assay content of the powder will be done to know the worth of the PCBs. Once the right price is decided, unorganised sector can sell the PCBs to the organised recyclers for further process. This approach will allow the organised recyclers to concentrate only on processing PCBs, which requires technologies, specialized skills and expertise. The said approach will eradicate the unhygienic practice prevailing in unorganised units in developing countries and thereby will stop polluting environment, soil, water, and will also protect the health of the worker. Once the outsourced model is established, the recycling of e-waste business will again be viable. It will also ensure the higher yield of metal recovery from e-waste as well as minimum landfill.