End of Life - Facts

Maruti claims it’s newly launched A-star complies with European Union’s ELV (End of Life vehicle) standard.
ELV restricts the use of hazardous materials like lead, mercury, cadmium, PVC and chrome. Reuse and recovery will have to achieve 85% of the vehicle’s weight and reuse and recycling by 80% according to this norm, and these target levels will be revised and raised in another one year to 95% and 85% respectively.

MSIL’s adoption of ELV is good move in a right direction. It will bring out a lot of awareness if they had intricate details in their corporate web page.

Here is the sad side to this story:
In Indian situations, we have a real mystery towards a product’s end of life.
A product can be recyclable, but who is going to recycle it in a safe and sustainable way. Inappropriate recycling methods can cause more pollution than the product could have caused during its entire life. Hopefully we will have stringent environmental standards and technology for recycling in our country at least before A-star reaching its end of life.

Hard facts:
we recycled only 0.25% of electronic waste we generated last year in a safe way. Another 4.75% was recycled in the informal sector in urban slums contaminating the surrounding environment, and causing vulnerable diseases to people including children working in those scrap yards. It is rather evident that we don’t have a system in place to cope up even a 100% safe product around.

There is no proposed regulation or legislation for recycling in our country, and is not yet on the political agenda. By the way, you must be wondering what happened to the remaining 95% of electronic waste?!