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It's a bit of an obvious thing to do, but Attero Recycling has its plant in a green building. About 10 kilometres from Roorkee on the road to Dehradun, it is difficult to miss.
As we reach the gates, a security guard stops our car and says no vehicle can go in. As we enter on foot, the obvious gets accentuated. The walls of the plant have boards that talk about the benefits of recycling and how the plant reuses everything, harvests rainwater and uses solar lights. The 40-odd who work there wear green shirts on black trousers.
It’s a sprawling unit. Spread over 10,000 square metres, the plant can treat 36,000 tonnes of electronic waste a year. Given that this is the country's only authorised end-to-end e-waste recycling outfit, not to mention the colour of the building and the boards, you would think that the plant is rattling along at full steam. After all, India's e-waste generation is tipped to nudge half a million tonnes next year, up from 3,30,000 tonnes in 2007, according to Manufacturers’ Association for Information Technology and the German government's sustainable development body GTZ. We also import about 50,000 tonnes every year.
Not quite, says Nitin Gupta, the company's chief executive officer. There is simply not enough e-waste coming to Attero. Since becoming operational in November last year, it has treated only about 500 tonnes. “The problem is collection of e-waste. Almost 98 per cent of the e-waste recycling is done in the unorganised sector. Lack of awareness is the main cause of this,” he says.
