Toxicity e-waste ejects could have long term effect on habitat and Homo sapiens. It accounts for approximately 40% of lead and 70% of heavy metals found in landfills. This leads to ground water contamination, air pollution and soil acidification.
India is the fifth biggest producer of e-waste in the world, discarding 1.7 million tonnes (Mt) of electronic and electrical equipment as per UN report. There is a complete ignorance in public about the repercussion of throwing electronic products and accessories unattended.
E-Waste is the sticky end of ever growing world of electronic gadgets. Last two decades and a half have witnessed a revolution in electronic products which has no doubt enormously enhanced our economy, created jobs and brought about a great transformation in our day-to-day life. In 90s electronic gadgets and computers were as expensive as being luxury items and were only within the reach of upper middle class and above.
Over the years, the technology has improved and electronic items have long been easily accessible to common men. Their prices keep on declining and electronic gadgets are becoming more and more affordable as well as useful even for all and sundry. As per various surveys, people prefer ever having a mobile in their possession to having a toilet in their dwelling houses, whether they are from urban or rural areas. With the economy ever growing, we find people universally taking pride in consumerism. Normally durability of these products is not more than four to five years. Due to advancement in technology, day by day consumers do opt for the latest energy- efficient products.
With each passing day new features are coming up leaving behind the previous day’s acquisition of a handset out of date. Our curious mind begins to feel unhappy if left behind in the era of gadget freak world and gets easily lured to purchase latest gadget even on loan which is readily available. It is ironical that there are fewer schemes to provide loan for toilet construction which is a basic necessity for health and hygiene of modern India than purchasing the electronic goods.
Every individual is generating e-waste and masses are ignorant about multiplying and hazardous effects of it. Majority of people are not aware that so much unaccounted magnitude of e-waste will have adverse and irreversible impact on the future generations. The equipments used in most of the industries which include the energy, and oil and natural gas sectors also, have lot of electronic items which also add to the quantum of e-waste. High and prolonged exposure to chemicals/pollutants emitted during unsafe e-waste recycling is also hazardous to health. Lethal contents include lead, cadmium, mercury, polyvinyl chloride, chlorofluorocarbons, arsenic, nickel and barium that are causes of many known and unknown diseases like cancer, asthma, bone diseases, brain diseases and others.
These harmful unbridled pollutants will gradually enter in our body through food chain by contaminating first the soil and later its produce for consumption.
Once an agrarian village Guiyu and its neighboring villages in Guangdong Province of China, have now been converted into graveyard of the world’s largest electronic waste dump sites, there by destroying inherent character and beauty of soil, river water and their flora and fauna.
Studies by the Shantou University Medical College revealed that very high levels of lead were found in young children of these villages that could adversely impact IQ and the development of the central nervous system.
Likewise the village of Sangrampur, a small hamlet located 30 miles south of Kolkata has also been identified as big waste centre though no specific studies have been conducted as yet to as certain its repercussion.
High and prolonged exposure to chemicals/pollutants emitted during unsafe e-waste recycling is also hazardous to health. Lethal contents include lead, cadmium, mercury, polyvinyl chloride, chlorofluoro carbons, arsenic, nickel and barium that are causes of many known and unknown deadly diseases.
A recent study by University of Michigan has found that illegal battery recycling business in Delhi has enhanced the airborne lead levels by two to eight times,well above the recommended health parameters.
The main concern regarding e-waste is that it might contribute only a few percent of total waste but the toxicity it ejects could have long term effect on habitat and Homo sapiens.
E-waste accounts for approximately 40% of lead and 70% of heavy metals found in landfills. This leads to ground water contamination, air pollution and soil acidification. A recent study by University of Michigan has found that illegal battery recycling business in Delhi has enhanced the airborne lead levels by two to eight times, well above the recommended health parameters. About 2 percent of India’s total electronic waste gets recycled due to absence of proper infrastructure, legislation, framework and concrete guidelines.
The country produces approximately 1.3 million metric tonnes of e-waste per annum.
Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is likely to generate about 1,07,000 metric tonnes (MT) of e-waste per annum by 2017 from the current level of 68,000 metric tonnes per annum growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 25 per cent, as revealed by the latest study by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM).
United States is ranked top(42%) acquiring the highest share of e-waste import in India followed by China(30%) and European Union(18%).It is far cheaper for these countries to ship these items than recycling them there.
Though import of e-waste for recycling is banned in India, as per Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology (MAIT) and GTZ, the German Technical Collaboration Agency survey during 2007 has revealed that about 50,000 tonnes of electronic scrap is imported annually stealthily making India one of the biggest yards of e-waste.
There is need for strong enforcement of law to prevent the country from turning into a dump yard for global waste. Loopholes in law facilitate illegal import. Second-hand electronic equipments having residual life of five years are being imported.
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has notified e-waste management rules, 2016 in which producers are for the first time held responsible for Extended Producers’ Responsibility (EPR). EPR has become common in Europe, but it is a huge success and buy in Japan.
The law places the burden and responsibility of recycling on everyone: consumers, retailers and manufacturers varying with the type of appliance and brand.
However, EPR implementation in Norway mandates the domestic producers and importers to finance the e-waste collection and treatment systems and the financing could happen individually or collectively.
Computer equipment accounts for almost 68 percent of e-waste followed by telecommunication equipment (12%), electrical equipment (8%) and medical equipment (7%). Other equipments, including household e-scrap, account for the remaining 5 percent.
The Three R principles: Reduce e-waste through smart procurement and good maintenance; Reuse electronic equipment by donating or selling; and recycle those products that cannot be repaired will delay the accelerated generation of e-waste. Proper recycling of electronic items will not adversely impact our environment and human healths rather increase the use of reusable and refurbished equipment and reduce energy use while conserving limited resources.
There could be one or more ‘Collection Centres’ in each town as per population variation for collecting the e-waste. The consumers will hand over their unused electronic items to either scrap dealer ‘Kabariwala’ at some cost or directly to the Collection Centre in the town. The scrap dealer in turn will hand over them to the Collection Centres that would send all e-waste to the ‘Disposal Centres’ which will be established near the bigger cities for the bulk collection and processing.
To get rid of unattended e-waste from each household and spread awareness among people, some days may be earmarked in a year or month through the involvement of youth and college students to collect e-waste at some landmark places as initiated in some cities. The scrap dealer or any other unauthorized person should not be permitted to either dismantle the e-waste products or process them to extract any useful item. Rather they would have to necessarily deposit the e-waste at the Collection Centres.
It will deter e-waste going directly into landfills or in the hands of informal sectors. The processing of e-waste should be done through public private partnership at the Disposal Centres. Engagement of various stakeholders and relevant scientific consultation within this chain of events will be a step forward to solve the e-waste problem. Effective implementation of e-waste management policies throughout the industry will streamline informal recyclers and safe disposal of e-waste.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.