Every phone sold in Bangladesh is, in a few years, a piece of e-waste, and the country sells about 30 million a year. On Saturday the Bangladesh ICT Journalist Forum (BIJF) put the arithmetic in front of the people responsible, at a roundtable in a Dhaka hotel titled “Bangladesh at carbon risk from e-waste: causes and the way out”. The figures presented were these: the country generates 3 million tonnes of electronic waste a year; 1.05 million tonnes of it — a third — is mobile phones; at least 296,302 scrapped televisions add around 170,000 tonnes; and the total is growing about 30 per cent a year, which on current trend makes Bangladesh a 10-million-tonne dump by 2025. Worldwide, the speakers noted, e-waste will reach 74.7 million tonnes by 2030.
Where it goes
Nowhere in particular. There is no collection system; a dead phone goes in a drawer, then a bin, then a landfill or a river, or into the informal recycling trade in Old Dhaka, where workers strip circuit boards for copper and gold over open flames and acid baths. The metals recovered are real money — the reason the trade exists — and the lead, mercury, cadmium and brominated flame retardants released in recovering them poison the workers and the neighbourhood. Syed Akhter Hossain, dean of science and engineering at the Canadian University of Bangladesh, who presented the keynote paper, made the point directly: recycling done properly is profitable, done as now it is a health disaster, and the country has no modern policy to distinguish the two.
The imports
A second stream is arriving from abroad. The speakers described the unrestricted import of used IT and electronics from developed countries — refurbished laptops, monitors, phones — much of it near the end of its life, arriving without any obligation on the importer to take it back. They called for the illegal refurbished trade to be stopped; Zahirul Islam of Smart Technologies, who was present, has said elsewhere that the same imports are undercutting the legitimate market.
What was said
Rezaul Karim, managing director of the Hi-Tech Park Authority and chief guest, said the government is working on e-waste and that “within the problem there are possibilities” to be used. Commander Khandaker Al Moin of RAB observed that laws exist but are not enforced, and that enforcement alone cannot stop a problem the public does not understand. BIJF president Naznin Nahar Begum said nobody is watching where the products that build the digital economy go when they die. Officials from the commerce ministry, the consumer-rights directorate, BTRC and BUET, and representatives of BCS, Global Brand, HP, Asus, Lenovo and a recycling firm also spoke.
What a working system looks like
Three parts, all standard elsewhere: producer responsibility, so that the company that sells a phone pays into its collection; collection points at the shops that sell electronics, with a small deposit refunded on return; and licensed recyclers with the equipment to recover metals safely, replacing the acid baths. The 2021 e-waste management rules gazetted by the environment ministry contain the first of these on paper. The roundtable’s real finding was that two years later, nobody in the room could name a phone that had been collected under them.
