Over the next five years, Delhi-NCR-headquartered Atero Recycling, one of India’s largest electronic waste management companies, expects to invest around $1 billion in expanding its electronic waste recycling facilities. More than 70% of it is set up operations in Europe, the United States and Indonesia to recycle lithium-ion batteries based on the growing share of electric vehicles in the coming years. Nitin Gupta, the company’s co-founder and CEO, says lithium batteries could be the future for the company, but the present one depends on the increasing number of electronic waste at their factory in Roorkee. The credit, they say, is due to mandatory recycling targets that electronics-goods manufacturers have been set under Electronic Waste Management Rules, 2016, From 30% of sales in 2018, companies expect to recycle 70% of their sales by 2023.
“Before the EPR regime, recyclers like us had to pay for the purchase of e-waste. We extract precious metals and sell them. Informal recyclers use dangerous methods and were therefore able to do so at a low cost. Even though their (metals) recovery was low, their cost was low and so profitable, now with the EPR regime, it is the original equipment manufacturers who are paying for the recycling and a lot is collected in the formal sector,” Gupta said.
The many technological processes deployed in his organization helped to extract approximately 98% of the valuable copper, gold, tin, lithium, palladium, nickel, cobalt within electronic equipment. “We have developed these technologies in-house and have close to 20 patents on these processes. The increasing emphasis on the formality of recycling means that India can, in the coming years, reduce its dependence on imports of precious metals that would otherwise be only Mining can be done from abroad only.
Issuance of EPR Certificate
Last month, the Union Environment Ministry unveiled a set of draft rules that further incentivize registered electronic waste recyclers. The key difference from the 2016 rules is the generation of the EPR, or Extended Manufacturer Responsibility, certificate. A certificate confirming this number will be given to recyclers upon processing a certain amount of waste by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). Electronics goods companies can buy these certificates online from CPCB to meet their annual targets. Recyclers can directly contract with the company to recycle a certain quantity of waste and prepare a certificate which can be obtained from the CPCB.
The challenge is verifiable. For example, how does the CPCB verify that the certificates actually guarantee the amount of e-waste that is recycled? Before the EPR scheme, state pollution control boards were expected to conduct checks on recycling and monitor whether they were actually processing the amount of waste claimed by them. Gupta said that in the new system, this verification would be done through “software matching”. Gupta said a recycling company would pay a certain amount of Goods and Services Tax (GST) annually based on the amount of precious metal extracted and sold by them, and this would be related to the amount of e-waste processed. This can be matched with the certificates procured by the manufacturer to meet the target.
The latest e-waste regulations are yet to become a formal law and the environment ministry has set a 60-day period for public consultation.
Independent experts say it is impossible to confirm the actual amount recycled because no data—how many electronic goods were sold in a particular year and how much e-waste was generated and how much recycled—is not available in the public domain.
The CPCB said that 1 million tonnes of e-waste was generated in 2019-20, of which 22% was “collected, destroyed, recycled”. “The Global E-Waste Monitor reports that India generated about 3 million tonnes of electronic waste, which is three times the Centre’s estimate,” said Siddharth Singh, Program Manager, Center for Science and Environment. Organization working on environmental issues. “If a company is asked how many mobile phones it has sold in a year, its figure will be in kilograms and not in units. This is information that should be shared with the CPCB, but this data is practically not available. Therefore, there is no transparency as to whether a company is ensuring that a percentage of its sales are actually being recycled. In our own surveys, we have observed that companies never physically go to a recycler.”
Monitoring lapses, irregularities
Preeti Mahesh, who leads e-waste research at Toxics Link, another leading environmental research firm in Delhi, estimates that after the EPR regime, there is a “noticeable” change, with much more e-waste than the formal sector. is being recycled. informal sector. “The figure of around 90-95% of e-waste being processed informally is dated. I would say it is reduced to around 60%-65%. This is because of the need to register yourself as a recycling company to access e-waste. However monitoring is still a major challenge. Even now, we know there’s a lot of paper-trading going on,” she added. Hindu, This means EPR certificates are being double counted. “I fear the new regime gives producers even more incentive to take no responsibility for the waste they actually generate.”
Bangalore-based Cerebra Green, which is also a recycling and refurbishment of electronic goods, said the EPR regime was generally positive and helped smaller recycling companies that could not directly obtain large recycling contracts from large producers, but There were drawbacks. “Since companies only have annual targets, the finance team would like to buy permits only at the end of the financial year. However, we need to recycle throughout the year. From where will we get the working capital for this? Therefore, it is reasonable to have a monthly recycling target.”