An Integrated and Sustainable Model for E-Waste Management for Pune City Households

Abstract

Worldwide use of electronic devices has led to a serious socio-economic-technical challenge for managing them at their end-of-life stage. Managing EOL electronic devices or e-waste using traditional methods has been potentially hazardous to the environment and health. United nation’ sustainable development goals also have linked e-waste to three of its SDGs and support the sustainable consumption and quantification of e-waste. Policy interventions, consumer awareness, and active environmentalist roles have forced developed nations to engage in scientific ways of e-waste treatment. The high cost of treatment and increasing volume has led to a scenario where developing nations, including India, have been more attractive and easy targets for dumping e-waste. Out of 1.7 million tons of e-waste generated in India, 8% of e-waste reaches the landfill as useless material, 1.5% of which are formal recycling, and the informal sector handles more than 90%. Ineffective policy implementation and lack of stakeholder participation pose a challenge in improving the scenario of e-waste management. Although, there is many stakeholders have been brought into the sphere of policy, household shave not been considered major generators, with about 16% of the total e-waste. Growing urbanization increased dependency on electronic product usage due to the pandemic; we need to channel the household e-waste to the formal treatment units with a systematic approach. Pune is one of the proposed smart cities and has been in the news due to the solid waste treatment challenges due to the treatment sites and infrastructure. With municipal solid waste, e-waste collection and treatment at the regular treatment facilities, not equipped to handle e-waste leads to untreated e-waste parts in whole or in traces. Lack of awareness and non-segregation at source, inadequate collection channels has impacted the environment, requiring a focused and workable systematic framework for household generated e-waste disposal. Access to disposal at the doorstep develops an integral behavior that can be altered by providing proper doorstep MSW disposal infrastructure as an extension of the existing municipal solid waste segregation model. This paper proposes a theoretical, sustainable, and integrated model built with the current MSW model foundation aimed at household e-waste management, providing collection and inventory services for Pune residents.