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Mercury, Cadmium and Lead are among the most toxic leachate. Mercury, for example, will leach when certain electronic devices such as circuit breakers are destroyed. Lead has been found to leach from broken lead-containing glass, such as the cone glass
of cathode-ray tubes, from TVs and monitors.

When brominated flame retarded plastics or plastics containing cadmium are landfilled, both PBDE and cadmium may leach into soil and ground-water. In addition, landfills are also prone to uncontrolled fires which can release toxic fumes. Apparently, landfilling, the state-of-the-art disposal technique to manage E-wastes, in real sense is a Poisonous Pandora's Box. Landfills are underground facility, where all the wastes produced on planet are dumped, and sealing it up in an engineered way that it doesn't seep through air or ground. It's just like: Collect all the bloodiest-poisonest-devilish anacondas from Amazon and seal them up in an 'engineered' hood. It's easier to visualize the consequence if any delicate damage happens to the seal. There are hundreds of 'abandoned' landfills, upon which now the slender-tall buildings crop-up, due to the real-estate boom. The under-ground scenario is permeation of leached wastes which contaminates the ground-water. Consumer electronics constitute 40 per cent of the lead found in landfills. The lead is treacherous that even if burned, stomped, or buried, will sustain its life cycle!

Recycling

Specialized electronic recyclers strip-off essential re-usable components and incinerate the left-overs in smelters. However, the end product is a metal stream, which is worth some money, based on the composition of the metals. It's got a lot of steel, aluminum and copper. The scrapped chunks could be recycled / used, but it's the least preferred, since the cost of recycling is not free. Either the producer should inflate the cost of greener-product or the government should provide subsidiaries for it. That's not a commercial equation which could be marketed since it's not a producer's responsibility to give ultra-green products at a marketable cost. Added to that, due to regulations and pollution laws, it's often cheaper to export the scrap to third world / needy countries where such laws, if they exist at all, are more lax than those in Canada and the United States. Cool, collect resourceful metals from the amalgamation of scraps! There are number of countries that make a huge business in the processing, recycling, smelting and disassembling of electronics, and pathetically, it is done in an environmentally unfriendly manner.

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Dr. Gursharan Singh Kainth started his career as Lecturer at Post Graduate Dept. of Economics, Government College, Gurdaspur, and later at Khalsa College; Amritsar, specializes in Quantitative & Development Economics. Has the distinction of serving Punjab Agricultural Univ, Ludhiana, for more than 2 decades and remained Director-Principal of Saint Soldier Management & Technical Institute, Jalandhar. Currently, heading GAD Institute of Development Studies, Amritsar, a self-financed research institute. Has been honoured with various awards, including Guru Draunacharya Samman, Vijay Rattan Award, etc.
Article posted on February 22, 2009.