By: Rana Irfan Rafi
If you look around everywhere, you will notice one thing: almost everyone is holding a smartphone. From kids to elderly people, everyone is using laptops, tablets and all sorts of electronic gadgets. Companies launch brand-name models every few months, and people rush to buy them, leaving their old devices behind. Have you ever wondered where all those millions of old, slow and broken phones, laptops and electronic gadgets go?
Most of this tech ends up at a local scrap dealer’s shop, commonly known as a “kabari”. This is where the hidden world begins – an underground trade that we can call the “invisible economy”. When people sell their broken electronics to a scrap dealer (kabari), they think it is ordinary junk like old plastic or iron; inside these gadgets are materials that are both extremely valuable and very dangerous. When this electronic waste reaches a small hidden workshop or a dusty scrapyard, the real process of breaking it down begins. Workers use hammers to smash circuit boards. They throw them into fires, so the plastic melts away, leaving behind wires and metal parts. The purpose of this process is to extract metals such as gold, copper, silver, and platinum. You might be surprised to know that the small chips and pins inside your mobile phones and computer motherboards have tiny layers of real gold coated on them. To separate this gold and copper, workers use acids; they fill plastic buckets or pots with harsh chemicals, so everything melts away, leaving only precious metals behind. The worst part is that none of these workers wear any safety gear; they work out in the air with no masks, no rubber gloves, and handle toxic chemicals with their bare hands. A whole chain of people from small street scrap pickers to scrap lords and the illegal recycling mafia keeps this machinery running smoothly behind closed doors. However, this invisible economy has a dark and dangerous side, especially when it comes to human health and our environment. When electronics are burnt over fire or soaked in acid, they release thick toxic gases; these fumes carry elements like lead, mercury, cadmium and various chemical flame retardants. When this smoke mixes into the air and people living nearby breathe it into their lungs, this leads to breathing problems, chronic cough, lung damage, skin allergies, constant mental stress and sometimes even serious birth defects in children. Furthermore, the leftover toxic liquid and acid are often dumped directly into the drain or into bare soil. This poisonous water sinks into the ground and ruins our underground drinking water sources. The entire system operates off the books; this messy process harms the country’s formal economy as well because the people use unscientific methods to extract metals. A huge amount of valuable material gets wasted instead of being recovered properly. There is no record, no government policies regulating it. Millions of rupees change hands in this economy, but the state gets nothing from it.
What is the right way to resolve this problem? Can we just stop it? Of course not. We can clean up and manage this system much better. First, the government needs to step up and formalize this e-waste sector; by shutting small dealers down, the authorities should register them and provide them with proper training. Second, major tech companies and gadget brands must follow rules regarding “extended producer responsibilities”. This means that whatever company sells a phone or laptop in the market should also be legally required to take it once it gets old or broken, ensuring it goes through the official recycling channel. The government must introduce strict regulations to hold tech manufacturers accountable for the entire lifecycle of their product.
Third, the government should also have to spend resources trying to clean up environmental damage caused by these illegal dumping practices we need to raise public awareness. There must be e-waste collection points established by the government authorities in each area, at least in each city.
People should stop throwing mobile batteries, chargers and broken laptops into ordinary household trash or out on the street; instead, they should hand them over to certified E-collection points or responsible dealers who know how to handle them.
E-waste is no longer a distant warning or a future problem; it is happening right now in our local street or neighborhoods. Every time we throw away an old phone or broken laptop or other electronic gadgets, this hidden pollution poses an immediate threat to our health and the well-being of the future generation. While technologies have made our lives much easier, we can’t ignore the heavy environmental cost behind every screen and gadget.
The author is associated with SDPI as project assistant and can be reached at irfanrafi@sdpi.org
