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The Press Trust of India

SILICON VALLEY, California, 26 February 2002 -- India, China and Pakistan have become the dumping ground for hazardous electronic waste from the United States and other western countries, according to an international coalition of environmental organisations.

Huge quantities of hazardous electronic wastes (E-wastes) are being exported to India, China and Pakistan, where they are processed in operations that are extremely harmful to human health and the environment, said a report released here by the coalition Monday. The electronic waste was the most rapidly growing waste problem in the world, said the report, which was issued by the Seattle-based Basel Action Network (BAN), a global watchdog network, and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, with contributions from Toxics Link India, a Pakistani group called SCOPE, and Greenpeace China. It is a crisis not only of quantity but also a crisis born from toxic ingredients such as the lead, beryllium, mercury, cadmium and brominated-flame retardants that pose both an occupational and environmental health threat, the report titled 'Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia' said. "We found a cyber-age nightmare," said Jim Puckett, coordinator of BAN. "They call this recycling, but its really dumping by another name."

Field investigations in China, India and Pakistan revealed that vast amounts of E-waste material, both hazardous and simply trash, was burned or dumped in the fields, irrigation canals and along waterways, the report said. The report said that millions of pounds of electronic waste from obsolete computers and TVs was being generated in the United States each year and huge amounts - an estimated 50 to 80 per cent - collected for recycling was being exported. Puckett said "to our horror, we further discovered that rather than banning it, the United States government is actually encouraging this ugly trade in order to avoid finding real solutions to the massive tide of obsolete computer waste generated in the US daily."

Identifying cheap labour and lack of environmental standards in Asia as the major reasons for exports, the report said that if left unchecked, the toxic effluent of the affluent would flood towards the world's poorest countries where labour is cheap, and occupational and environmental protections are inadequate. A free trade in hazardous wastes leaves the poorer people of the world with an untenable choice between poverty and poison, a choice that nobody should have to make, the report said. It said that export of E-waste remained a dirty little secret of the high- tech revolution, adding that the electronics industry, government officials and some involved in the E-waste recycling had studiously avoided scrutiny. Toxics Link India investigators found thriving E-waste trade in Delhi areas such as Mandoli, Sadar Bazar, Kanti Nagar Extension, Old Sealampur and Turkmangate, where men, women and children break apart and process obsolete computers imported from overseas. The operations include the burning of plastics, metals and components such as circuit boards.