Sunday, January 10, 2016

Inside Delhi's gadget graveyard where the West's e-waste ends up...

Imran Mansoori kneels in an alleyway picking over a tangle of electronic trash.

He's one of thousands of e-waste workers in India's capital, Delhi, which has emerged as one of Asia's biggest e-waste processing hubs.

Much of the junk on Imran's pile is familiar – the shell of a TV remote, a shattered Wi-Fi router and a squashed credit/debit card reader. This is the graveyard for countless electronic gadgets.

The grimy lane where Imran works is strewn with the debris of the e-age. One shop is packed to the ceiling with those familiar rectangular steel boxes that house computers under office desks across the world. Another gloomy hole in the wall is crammed with neatly stacked flat screen televisions. Across the alley from Imran, a young man, maybe in his teens, sits cross legged in a tiny room using a chisel to separate electronic components. The wall beside him is piled waste-high with circuit boards ready to be dismantled. Another young man next door uses a small drill to disassemble steel circuit boxes at lighting speed.

Imran's job is to sort through heaps of electronic refuse and separate items of value that can be sold in one of Delhi's vibrant scrap markets. Sometimes he gets lucky and finds a component containing a precious metal. He takes those fragments himself to be melted down and the treasure extracted.

"I know where the gold is," he says with a smile. Full story...

Related posts:
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  2. Toxic e-waste, from Antwerp to Ghana...
  3. The story of electronics...
  4. Africa, dumping ground for old PCs from the West...
  5. India becoming dumping ground for e-waste...
  6. How the Chinese recycle their waste... 

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