Delhi govt approves e-waste eco park, first in country: Manish Sisodia

Delhi government on Thursday approved setting up of an e-waste eco park in the city, the first in the country, for scientific and environmentally safe processing of electronic waste items, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said.

The government will soon appoint a consultant for setting up of the e-waste park that will have an authorised refurbishing market as a secondary product sale market for electronic goods, batteries, chargers, laptops, personal computers and mobiles, he said.

Currently Delhi releases about 2 lakh tonnes of e-waste per year and it is mainly handled and recycled by informal recyclers. At the eco-park recycling, refurbishing, and dismantling of waste will be done in a scientific and environmentally safe manner, he said.

There will also be collection centres across 12 zones in the city to channelise e-waste, he said.

"The Delhi government is the first one to start this project. No other state has started working on this yet. During the Cabinet meeting, the proposal for e-waste park was approved and a consultant for the same will be appointed soon, Sisodia said.

The e-waste park will provide infrastructure, training and tools to the operators in the informal sector to groom them as formal recyclers.

Being an integrated facility, it will accommodate various handlers in the ecosystem such as e-waste refurbishers, dismantlers, recyclers, plastic waste processors and others in the same premises, said a government statement.

The e-waste eco-park will have all types of processing and recycling units of the materials recovered from e-waste sites, it said.

It will have facilities for extraction of precious metals like gold, silver, copper among others, especially from Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) through high-end technologies.

The activities in the e-waste park will be targeted towards the small and medium scale enterprises clusters involved in e-waste recycling, the statement said.

There will be end-to-end processing of e-waste with zero landfill. Rare earth metals and precious metals like copper, silver, gold, aluminium and reusable plastic extracted in the park will be transferred to the mainstream production line. E-waste, it added.