Indian-Australian scientist sifts through e-waste for jobs

An India-born Australian says end-of-life electronic products offer huge economic and job-generating potential, and India, which produces upward of two million tonnes of electronic waste every year, surely has an advantage.

The solution uncovering significant economic value in e-dumps is also in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Swachh Bharat” and “Make in India” campaigns, said Veena Sahajwalla, materials scientist at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney. 

Sahajwalla is the inventor of what she calls micro-factories that can transform e-waste into reusable material to be converted into ceramics and plastic filaments for 3D printing. The high-grade metals – like gold, silver, copper, palladium – in the e-waste can be separated for re-sale in conditions that are totally safe. India has an advantage, she said. But how? Street scrap collectors, and the country has a huge number of them, can be employed, trained and introduced to the micro-factories. 

“India already has kabadiwallas (waste collectors) and scavengers working at the grassroots level, collecting and separating waste and that is the biggest advantage the country has. 

“What we and the government need to do is give them the technology, deploy the (e-waste) micro-factories and teach them how it works. What will happen is that, instead of burning that e-waste, these people will be working in a sustainable and safe environment without producing any kind of toxic waste,” the Mumbai-born alumnus of IIT-Kanpur’s metallurgical department said.

“This way,” she said, “we are not displacing the kabadiwallas and scavengers. Instead, we can create more job opportunities.” 

The Director of the Centre for Sustainable Materials Research and Technology (SMaRT) at UNSW was in the capital to meet government officials to discuss her invention. The recipient of the 2011 Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honour conferred on overseas Indians, for outstanding achievement in science among numerous other awards, proposed to deploy a micro-factory in Delhi’s Seelampur – the capital’s digital graveyard with piles of discarded mobile phones and computers. 

People in this semi-urban pocket work with waste, including e-waste, to create value-added products like decorative glass panels, acoustic panels with throwaway cloth and highgrade wood-plastic panels. She said her invention “offers a cost-effective solution to one of the greatest environmental challenges of our age”. 

“It delivers new job opportunities... to our cities... to our rural areas,” she said.