By Ravi Agarwal
NEW DELHI — Rajinder Singh, 35, breaks imported used car batteries for a living. He pries them open and stacks the lead plates with his bare hands while the small, almost open furnace is fired to receive another batch. Meanwhile, in this lead smelter near Delhi, another worker, barefoot, without gloves and unmasked, skims off the slag from the already molten lead and pours it into moulds.
They and others like them are constantly ingesting, inhaling and assimilating the deadly metal. They work for a mere pittance, cogs in the wheels of an international trade in hazardous wastes which is marked by high profits and ineffectual controls.
The smelter where Singh works is on a small plot of land that once harvested wheat. All around it are strewn car batteries, some with Australian and others with US markings, which once powered sleek automobiles on clean, wide roads there. The lead which is extracted from these batteries will now help feed, and kill, Singh and his co-workers.
Some lead escapes as vapour and settles in the field around, where cows feed and villagers drink from the only well.
After years of existence, Singh's smelter was shut down when environmentalists brought to the notice of local authorities the large number of cattle deaths caused by lead poisoning. Despite the closure, the fodder and the ground water in this village are still as contaminated as ever. The children here are particularly short and stunted.
Plastics recycling
At Baprolla, another village in Delhi, 26-year-old Chander Pal's hollow cheeks strain as he speaks in a weak voice. As a foreman in a shanty plastics recycling factory, he says plastic dust destroyed his body and he cannot breathe properly.
The factory, which employs mostly women and children, does not have even a first aid box, basic ventilation or safety devices. A lot of the plastic waste processed here, like the lead batteries, is imported from western countries.
Naresh, who also works in the plastic recycling unit, has been working in the unit for as long as he can remember. It is impossible to guess his age; hard work and long hours in unventilated rooms, and breathing fumes from melting plastics, have taken a toll.
His daughter was born deaf and dumb. His brother suddenly started having seizures, despite there being no such history in his family. Naresh blames it on the pollution caused by the more than 50 plastics recycling units in his village.
During the past two years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of persons with lung disorders in the village. More than 40 villagers are chronic asthmatics, and there are not enough bronchodilators to hand out.
Local authorities do not do much about these units. "How can you prove that they are causing the problems?", they ask. And it is true: it is never easy to prove, and studies are too time-consuming and expensive. So business continues for the owners, and villagers die a slow death.
Backyard smelters and plastic recycling units dot the Indian countryside. Three years ago, the Central Pollution Control Board in Delhi had closed down 23 lead smelters because they were contaminating ground water, cattle fodder and soil, but many sprang up again, this time in neighbouring states.
Smelters around Calcutta caused stunted growth in children, limb deformations and blue gums, as well as cattle deaths, before they were ordered to close.
Zinc ash is the other commonly recycled imported waste. A by-product of the large galvanising process located in the developed world, more than 60,000 tonnes of it are imported into India every year for conversion into zinc sulphate.
Much of it may be contaminated by toxic heavy metals such as lead, chromium and arsenic, exposing workers and neighbourhood residents to possible explosions, toxic fumes and contaminated water. A 1997 study by the Punjab Pollution Control Board revealed that toxic sludge from zinc ash recycling factories was regularly "discarded indiscriminately along the road or in open areas".
Ineffective laws
The trade in hazardous wastes carries on despite Indian and international laws against it. Traders exploit loopholes in laws and porous national borders. Research by the non-government organisation Srishti reveals that while only five companies were permitted to import lead battery waste and zinc waste in 1994-95, more than 150 traders were actually involved in this activity.
It was on the basis of such evidence, which exposed the government's inability to control the trade, that on April 10, 1996, the Delhi High Court banned the import of all toxic/hazardous wastes. However, ongoing research by NGOs demonstrated that the waste continued to come in, despite the Supreme Court of India being forced to reconfirm and expand the scope of the ban in May 1997.
The reasons that India continues to draw in the waste of developed countries are not difficult to find. High profit margins owing to poor environmental regulation are a major factor.
In developed countries, it is extremely expensive to get rid of such waste. Disposal and landfill costs are as high as US$200 per tonne, and proper smelters have to follow strict environmental norms. The Exide lead smelter in the US spends more than $10 million per year on pollution control alone.
In India, where almost no environmental costs have to be borne by smelters, particularly those in the unorganised sector, recycling is much cheaper. Backyard smelters make investments of less than Rs. 50,000 to process 500 milligrams of lead daily, with very high profit margins.
Hence Indian traders can afford to pay much higher prices than their western counterparts for such wastes in the international markets. For imported zinc ash, for example, Indian traders are able to pay almost 30% higher prices than their European counterparts.
Wastes marked for final disposal are also exported under the guise of recycling. Such wastes either have a low recovery potential or are extremely contaminated. This is especially true for lead, or lead-bearing wastes, which traders/importers can buy for very low prices (less than Rs. 7 per kilo, cheaper than locally available lead scrap).
As other underdeveloped nations in Africa and south-east Asia, and China have stopped the inflow of hazardous wastes, India has become the world's dumping ground.
Owing to pressure from industry, India has vacillated on its implementation of the Basel Convention, an international treaty which prohibits the trans-boundary movement of hazardous waste from OECD to non-OECD countries, either for dumping, final disposal or recycling.
The convention puts the onus on the developed country either to stop such exports or to inform the government of the importing country whenever such a shipment is to take place. However, traders evade these requirements by mis-declaring consignments or laundering documents by transhipping through free ports.
[Ravi Agarwal is an environment activist and writer. Abridged from Unnati Features, a progressive non-profit organisation that focuses attention on environment, development and gender issues.]