He has a point. When you think of waste, don't just think of stale food, plastic shopping bags or soft drink bottles choking your roadside garbage bin. Picture all your discarded phones, old laptops, dead computers, broken printers, and other gadgets along with it. You may not consider it as waste, but that doesn't change the facts.
As per 2017 data, India generates 2 million tonnes of e-waste per year. Last year, it was expected to touch 3.3 million tonnes, and by 2020 our country will generate 5 million tonnes of annual e-waste. These are staggering numbers, not to be taken lightly at all.
Your old electronics may not smell or look as gross as the overflowing trash dump festering down the road, but they're just as bad as waste. And in most cases, they can be much worse and toxic than regular waste out there.
It's a huge problem that's only going to get worse, he says. I have no reason to doubt him, seeing how Kiran Panchal is the director of Just Dispose Recycling Pvt Ltd, a government authorised e-waste management facility situated on the outskirts of Mumbai.
Tackling India's e-waste
An e-waste processing plant can't keep up with demand these days, Mr Panchal tells me, as he gives me a tour of Just Dispose premises. The place is a beehive of activity, with assembly lines of workers tearing, stripping, dismantling and segregating electronics and their waste components.
I saw printers being taken apart and disposed off, with trained professionals wearing gloves and other protective gear as they systematically shredded the commonly found office device down to its bare elements.
Huge dumpster sized machines stood one after the other, the likes of which I had never seen before. If it weren't for their labels, I wouldn't have guessed what they all did. A toner powder collector lets you strip a printer's toner safely in a metal box with a glass pane and glove holes for your hands to slide inside.
Next to the toner powder collector stood an equally intimidating machine labelled the hard disk shredder. It had a large slit on the top, like a toaster does, allowing you to slide in old or discarded hard drives from your PC or laptop. The machine is essentially a giant mixer -- similar to the one you have in your kitchen to blitz condiments into a paste or make vegetable shakes -- with a few knobs on top that spurs it into action. After you throw a hard drive down its hatch, it churns and rumbles, and spits out spiral metal threads into a tray -- which is all that's left of the hard drive. It's a great spectacle to watch, actually.
There's a dedicated CD-DVD shredder, which is just a giant-sized paper shredder you see in any office these days. Next to it is a heavy duty plastic shredder, where broken plastic chunks are thrown in from the top, shredded and grounded into smaller, finer plastic pellets which are easy to recycle.
Just Dispose's facility also has a tape shredder (where audio cassette or video cassette tapes are stripped off and shredded down), dust collector (making sure pollutants aren't floating around in the air during product dismantling) and even a wire stripper. The wire stripper, Mr Panchal tells me, is one of the most overlooked piece of recycling equipment, since old electrical wires are one of the most common forms of e-waste out there, and separating the copper wire from its plastic insulating sheath is very important to recycle both materials.
In case you are wondering, think of any electronics or gadget you can think of, and you'll find them stripped down to essentially just three basic components in an e-waste recycling plant -- metal, plastic and glass. They are sent forward to suppliers of components to electronics manufacturers, thus completing the cycle.
Mr Panchal's quite proud of the fact that no piece of e-waste that comes inside Just Dispose's facility ever goes into a landfill, as total e-waste recycling is ensured as per guidelines set by CPCB (Central Pollution Control Board) which strictly prohibits disturbing ecological balance with any form of e-waste disposal.
Corporate e-waste initiatives
EPR or Extended Producer Responsibility where a manufacturer is held responsible for the end-of-life processing and recycling of a product or gadget is helping create corporate awareness in matters related to e-waste, according to Mr Panchal, who counts LIC Of India, Epson, Kyocera, TVS Electronics amongst their clients and partners, which are over 250 in count.
Croma electronic stores -- part of the Tata Group -- also count Just Dispose as their e-waste recycling partner. When I ask him what type of products does Croma collect from customers for e-waste recycling, Mr Ritesh Ghosal, Chief Marketing Officer, Croma - Inifiniti Retail Ltd says "Basically everything that we sell."
He emphasizes that all the old, usable or unusable electronic items which can be refurbished or can be disposed in an environment-friendly manner is collected from the customers. This includes everything from batteries, chargers, adapters, to television sets and amplifiers. There's also remotes, DVD Player, earphones, music systems, computers/laptops, irons, trimmers, hair dryers, refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves, mixers, oven, toasters, water filters, printers and much more.