E-waste disposal from schools kicks starts

Thiruvananthapuram: E-waste removal from schools in the State has begun with about 12,500 kg being disposed statewide on a single day under a programme aiming to clear accumulated junk, reportedly estimated at over one crore kg.

Education Minister Prof C Raveendranath flagged off the first vehicle with e-waste from a school here Thursday under the programme jointly initiated by Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), formerly IT@School project and Clean Kerala Company for scientific processing.

It is aimed at disposing e-Waste such as desktop computers, CRT monitors, laptops, disk drives, printers, UPS, camera, speaker system, television, network components and generators from 10,000 odd schools and educational offices in the state.

Similar vehicles from Alappuzha, Puthukkad, Kozhikode North and Thaliparamaba constituencies where the Hi-Tech School programme was piloted, were also flagged off, through video conferencing, a press release said.

A total of 12,500 kg of e-waste was disposed yesterday through this drive, it said.

Schools were reportedly having over one crore kgs of e-Waste accumulated since the past two decades, which eats-up huge space of IT labs, besides obstructing the lab activities in a large way.

Instead of simply disposing e-Waste as garbage which create environmental issues, scientific methods are used to recycle and refurbish them as per the central government norms.

Clean Kerala Company collects the e-waste in batches of 500 kg from schools, for which neighbouring schools will be clustered.

KITE has undertaken an online survey to capture the quantity of e-waste in each school and to collect them as batches and this exercise was completed by July 15.

The e-waste will be scientifically processed at recycling facility of Earth Sense Recycling company in Hyderabad.