The recycling business

November 1st, 2009 - 3 years ago Clean India Journal - Editor Professional, Waste Management | Viewed times | No Comments

We talk of reduce, reuse and recycle today. But, as a child, I learnt this rule from my mother who turned out delicious melon dosas using the white portion of the fruit which would otherwise be discarded as waste. This she did, not just for the taste but to reduce waste as well. I am still carrying this principle and implementing it wherever possible. Nobody should waste paper, nobody should waste knowledge and nobody should waste time Once you understand wastage, not just in terms of its importance and usefulness, but also as a nuisance, you join a different league of people who do not create unnecessary needs, adjust with the basic needs and ensure that others also are benefited by these needs. The Orchid Hotel, an ecotel, is solely a result of the effort by such like-minded people. When we proposed the concept of eco-friendly hotel, we were ridiculed and told its an impossible project. Today, Orchid is a winner of the highest number of awards world over for its eco-friendly practices. When people challenge that it cant be done then it can be done! Success lies in pursuing ideas even when it is termed impossible. Remember, idea is your currency. Hence, the future of businesses lies in saving the planet and bridging the gap created by excessive garbage and unhygienic practices. Reducing waste is also a profitable business. Hygiene, to one and all, is nothing but to keep clean. Rather, the basic idea of hygiene, in fact, lies in not creating garbage. Minimising garbage and converting/recycling it for better purposes reduces the burden on Mother Earth, on the municipal corporation and also on fellow human beings. Recycling waste, say paper for example, is definitely profitable, because half the cost of the raw material is already met with the used paper. The cost of a recycled product is much less than the raw product. Wealth from waste can be generated at various levels. More than 300,000 children from over 150 schools participate in the Wealth from Waste contest every year and the products are displa yed at the gardens of our hotels. We also have the No Plastic Day observed twice a year, when more than 150-200kg of plastic is collected by students of various schools. The best students are awarded with Rs.11,000. Earlier, we had principals of schools at the award ceremony, but today, we have parents of students coming in. It goes without saying that they too know the importance of not creating waste.

At another level, the Advanced Locality Management (ALM) groups adopt roads from the municipal corporation at one rupee lease. Hence, on these roads, there is no encroachment and no garbage piles, as they are taken away by the Corporation promptly. This way, no one is allowed to throw garbage on the roads and secondly, the dry waste collected is sold by the garbage collectors. This helps instill confidence in garbage collectors too. At home, when my children were five and six years old, I encouraged them to collect paper newspaper, used loose sheets, etc. and allowed them to pocket the money received on selling this waste. The practice of neatly collecting paper, selling it to the vendor and putting the money in a piggy bank began at childhood. My son is a banker today. This similar principle has been implemented on the streets of Mumbai and turning them into a zero garbage zone. Here again, we took representatives who have implemented zero garbage in their areas to other areas to propagate how their efforts can be replicated. In cases, where the area heads have been unclear about the success of this project, we have brought them to our place and shown them how it can be achieved. This has helped in the transformation of a mindset. It took former Commissioner of Police J F Ribeiro, a tour of the Orchid to be convinced that zero garbage is possible. Changing the mindset, thus, is more important. In fact, all wars in the world are either lost or won not on the battlefield but in the mind. We introduced the Orchid ALM Rs.100,000 prize and today over 150 areas participate in this zero garbage competition. This is the 15th year on and this concept has expanded include rooftop gardens, garbage segregation and the formation of senior citizen group and rain water harvesting. One of our recent projects includes the collection of paan masala and other similar plastic that are not only clogging drains but also choking cows and buffaloes. We have identified few people who are converting these pouches into roofing sheets. If each one of us advocates the use of such materials, others will follow the fad. Ultimately, we form a catalyst by giving direction and motivation to leaders who have the right inclination. These leaders could be senior citizens of the society, the middle aged or the youth. The law of the land cannot alone help, we have to become responsible.

The perilous business of recycling lead

The perilous business of recycling lead
Maitreyee Handique

First Published: Thu, Nov 18 2010. 11 51 PM IST

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Updated: Thu, Nov 18 2010. 11 51 PM IST By evening in Amit Vihar, a border outpost between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, tall chimney stacks begin to belch dark grey smoke, turning the sky into a murky haze. It is here that people such as Satish Kumar work, recycling old lead batteries to make a living. A young man in his 20s who came to Delhi looking for a job, Kumar has spent the last six years stoking fires at an illegal smelter. Piles of spent batteries arrive, arranged to be dropped off by his employer, who lives 500km away in Varanasi. Kumar and his fellow workers then spend the night ripping out battery parts with axes and with their bare hands. And, as the neighbourhood sleeps, they burn them, collecting the lustrous silver liquid in casts before it clots into hard metal. The work, Kumar knows, is hazardous, but theres no one to tell him exactly how unsafe it is. To avoid the noxious fumes, he and his colleagues cover their faces with a piece of cloth, he says. We know the dangers, but we have no other choice, he says. Loading slideshow... But the business of backyard lead recycling is thriving. As Indias economy booms, the demand for lead-acid batteries growsand so, in turn, does the demand for the lead that Kumar extracts from old cells. These backyard techniques are crude and simple to replicate, and prices of lead have doubled in the last five years, making illegal recycling even more profitable. Much of this clandestine activity carries on taking full advantage of weak implementation of pollution laws, with long-term public health consequences. The World Health Organization (WHO) says more than 120 million people living in the developing world are overexposed to leadroughly three times the number of people infected by HIV. Also Read | The toxic side of Indias battery industry Experts say the bigger problem in India is that there is no programme as yet to study the long-term impacts of lead poisoning, despite the heavy use of this metal in assorted industries. While dangers of lead exposure are well known, they have so far only contributed to case studies. A few of these studies point to grave numbers. A 2008 survey of unregistered recyclers in Hubli, in Karnataka, by the National Referral Centre for Lead Poisoning in India (NRCLPI) found blood lead levels of 90-160 micrograms per decilitre (mg/dl)three to six times higher than the limit permissible on factory premises. The introduction of unleaded petrol in the early part of this decade brought lead levels in the air down to a certain degree, but scattered recycling outfits are having the opposite effect as far as pollution control goes. The phase-out has had a substantial impact, says Kalpana Balakrishnan, a researcher with Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, in Chennai. But additional reduction needs to be achieved. In 2005, the institutes department of environment health engineering carried out a survey among 800 Chennai schoolchildren. It found that, while blood lead counts had fallen 30% to 11 mg/dl after the introduction of unleaded petrol, it remained a notch higher than the permissible limit set by WHO for the general populace. Lead is most often used in battery manufacture, but there exists no precise data on this industrys output.

L. Pugazhenthy, executive director of India Lead Zinc Development Association, a body which provides technical inputs to the battery industry, reckons that 40-50 million units are produced in every year, 40% of them in the informal sector. The scraps of these batteries, once dead, are considered dangerous, and so they need to be recycled in controlled environments; there is more concentrated lead in one battery than in 26,944 cellphones or six television sets. The 2003 Basel Convention imposes strict restrictions on crossborder battery trading. But these dangers have been ignored by policymakers, according to Habibullah Sayid, a WHO consultant and a former researcher with the National Institute of Occupational Health. What we need is regular surveys of blood lead counts among people to ascertain the real situation, he says, adding that lea d poisoning is often not immediately apparent, its symptoms easily confused with those of other ailments. Much of the backstreet lead finds its way to local manufacturers of sundry battery brands. In Old Delhis Gokhale Market, battery shops sell products with brand names such as Z -power, Active and Power-on. Many of these claim to be made with Japanese technology; in reality, they are assembled under rows of open tin sheds, only a few feet from where they are sold. Slim blocks of silvery lead arrive from recycling plants to this market, purchased in bulk by the shop owners who also peddle the local makes. They pass on the raw material to workers like Ramesh, a 29-year-old native of Uttar Pradesh who uses only one name. Ramesh then melts the lead down further to make components such as battery plates. It takes him just under 30 minutes to assemble a whole battery unit, complete with label. Earning Rs 60 per unit, he and two other co-workers produce 12-20 units a day. Ramesh claims hes not worried about his health. He works outdoors, and here the lead escapes into the (open) air, he says. Only if you work in a recycling factory, you are in trouble. This sort of a general lack of awareness persists, but authorities in charge of curbing pollution have also been unable to fully implement the law. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) framed its Battery Management Rules a decade ago, but the industry has grown faster than they can track it. There are now 336 registered recyclers in the country, handling 1,200 million kg of old batteries a year; the number of unregistered recyclers is far bigger. Most retired batteries are meant to be collected by dealers by paying a small commission, about Rs 200-300, to the consumer for returning the old unit. But many times, the illegal buyers offer better rates, said a CPCB official who wanted to remain anonymous. Also, its not legally binding for the dealers to pay a fixed rate. Its also true that battery recycling, like shipbreaking or computer-waste sorting, provides employment to thousands of Indias poor. As the global economy recovers slowly in the aftermath of the meltdown, more and more workers are ending up with jobs in businesses fuelled by poverty, according to H. Mahadevan, deputy general secretary of the All Indian Trade Union Congress. Attempts by trade unions to prevent workers from taking up hazardous occupations, Mahadevan says, have been futile, since most workers have no alternate options. Under law, workers can reject such employment. But whos going to, when there is no other livelihood? he says. Jobs come first, then decent work. Battery recycling has thus become a cottage industry for people eking out a living. In south Delhis Bajghera village, not fa r from the sprawling farmhouses of the citys elite, Surendra Kumar, a young man of 25, evades questions, but says that he is only guarding a smelter, not involved in the actual work. In a clearing, next to a field being ploughed for a crop of commercial vegetables, residue of melted down batteries lie in a heap near two such smelters. A little distance away, two more smelters lie on the side of the dirt road. Like others, Kumar says hes aware of the effects of lead, but he has found little else to do after he lost his job at a textile factory. Like rich people, we too have families, he says. And we need the work. This is the concluding part of a series on Indias lead battery industry. The first part looked at how lead exposure is risin g among factory workers