Behaviour of Individuals towards E-Waste Management in India

Abstract

Technology is changing very quickly at very cheap prices. Along with this, it becomes easier to buy any electronic product right now as compared to previous years. There are many channels (Online & Offline) available in the market to buy your desired products. Nowadays it becomes a trend: to buy new electronic products to use the latest available technology. People prefer to buy new product instead of upgrading the old product. Mobiles and laptops are the most common products which are bought frequently instead of to upgrade. Expanding usage of the mobiles, computers/laptops, and LCD/LED in all the sectors inflicting dramatically increase in generation of e-waste. E-waste referred to all kind of electric and electronic appliances that is thrown by their end user. The electronics equipments are very complex assembly structure. It contains toxic gases, toxic metals plastics, circuits, some precious metals like gold in very small quantity. The toxic substances have very adverse effect on the health of human being. These are also very dangerous for our environment also. . The objective of the study is to find how the individual consumers behave towards the e-waste. Awareness level of the individual consumers also checked. Northern Indian states are selected to conduct a study to check the awareness level of individual consumers. In this paper consumer recycling behavior was analyzed with the help of questionnaire.<br /> <br /> Figure 1 Graphical Abstract<br /> The figure shows that in all the factors, the value of mean lies between 1 and 2. It shows that most of the consumers either have no idea of hazardous materials in e-waste, concept of e-waste management and electronic waste management policies implemented in India or they have very little knowledge.