Electronic or E waste refers to all type of electrical and electronic equipment’s along with its parts, which are discarded or which are no further in use. This type of waste stream is also referred to as WEEE (Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment). It includes a huge amount of waste starting from household equipment’s to big machine parts and related components. 

This type of waste is increasing at huge peace, the reason is the race of technology. As the technology is getting more advancer the old technology is being redundant and ultimately scraped or disposed, which cause threat to the human life. The best example for technology advancement is laptops, cell phones, televisions and other products. One of the problem is that it is much expensive to recycle the e waste by developed countries, due to which environmental problems also occur which also become part of food chain.

E waste is beneficial as well as problem on other hand, precious material can be obtained from the E waste however on other hand burning of the e waste and extracting precious material will cause contamination of the environment in the form of dioxins, furans and heavy metals.

One of the most dangerous part of the e waste is hazardous e waste. This type of e waste mainly includes the lithium batteries which are mainly discarded or damaged, Mercury containing switches, printer toner cartridges, printed circuit boards, capacitors, Liquid crystals displays and plastic containing halogenated flame retardants, these are mainly produced during the process of incineration or burning of plastic can produce toxic components which contaminate environment as well as human health.  

One of the method is to recycle the material which is disposed and further useful material is extracted, in this way it can help out restore the material further putting less impact on the natural resources, but in this process toxic material is produced which not only landfills and other area where they are disposed further casing safety issues. 

Another method of restoring and removing the contaminants of e waste from the environment is through the process called bioremediation, which involves the microbial remediation and also phytoremediation technique. These biological methods have shown a huge success for removal of pollutants and also help in cleaning of the environment.

So, the basic aim of this whole discussion was too aware about the problems faced and to provide sustainable solution to cater E waste in the form of celebrating International E waste day. 

About the Author: Meraj Ahsan Qureshi is a young, motivated environmentalist dedicated to create a change through implementation of change.