‘Daily cuts… infections’: India’s e-waste workers face toxic health risks

New Delhi, India – Mateen Malik sits inside a cramped workshop in New Delhi’s Mustafabad area, carefully separating copper wires from piles of discarded electronics. Around him lie broken air coolers, tangled cables, scraps of metal, and old computers and laptops stacked against the workshop’s blackened walls. Recommended Stories list of 4 items end of list Malik’s bare hands move quickly as he strips the wire’s plastic coatings to uncover the copper inside. He often uses blow torches to dismantle the electronics, a process that releases highly toxic chemicals into the air, posing serious health risks. “Sometimes the extraction is difficult, and I don’t have any protective gear – no gloves, no mask. Often, I get burns on my hands as well. This is routine in our job. The chemical residue is also there,” Malik told Al Jazeera. “But I am dependent on this job.” Malik, who is in his early twenties, is an untrained, informal e-waste segregator in Mustafabad, one of India’s informal waste hubs, whose narrow and dusty lanes are overwhelmed with the sound of continuous hammering and the smell of burned plastic and metals. A view of a street in Mustafabad housing the e-waste recycling units [Raihana Maqbool/Al Jazeera] An average worker here makes about a dollar for dismantling a mobile handset and twice that amount for dismantling a television set, altogether making about $8 a day for 12 hours of gruelling work – without gloves, masks, or protective gear. …