Campaign to clean up e-waste kicks off

GURGAON: Any city official will tell you that the biggest environmental question of this age is how to efficiently manage the ever-increasing volume of e-waste in this city. Despite the pollution board's repeated warnings, and with a litany of e-waste regulation norms in place, an abundance of Gurgaon's e-waste still ends up in the informal sector, where it is then illegally sold as scrap.
To bring some such facts to light and raise the general level of awareness on e-wastes, a Gurgaon-based NGO called Advit Foundation, in collaboration with local corporate players, has launched an e-waste management campaign here. The aim is to educate members of society ? at school-level and in residential, commercial and industrial settings ? about the deleterious effect of unrecycled e-waste on the environment and personal health.
"The campaign has been initiated in a number of residential complexes and educational institutions in Gurgaon. The entire pool of e-waste that is collected from these places, during our activities there, is then sent to an authorized e-waste recycler for safe disposal," said a spokesperson for Advit Foundation.
He added that as of today, around 93% of e-waste generated in Gurgaon finds its way to the informal sector where it is not handled with due process and is disposed of without any attention to safety measures. "We've a target of collecting five tonnes of e-waste over the course of this project. In future, we'll partner many more RWAs, schools and commercial firms to take forward this initiative," the spokesperson added.
Material research firm Pluss Polymer is collaborating in this project, and has recently held a volunteer-based programme on e-waste recycling in a residential society in DLF phase III. "We kicked off the first phase of our ?erase the e-waste' campaign at the Belvedere Towers, where nearly 100 kg of e-waste was collected," said one of the organizers