A nation gripped by consumerism provided the perfect entry point for a couple of entrepreneurs who realized the huge market for recycling electronic waste into usable cellphone devices in India – but first they had to compete with the local Indian scrap merchant.
Karma Recycling's Recycle Your Waste campaign with with social organization Delhi I Love You. Photo... [+]
Currently in third place, India is expected to become the world’s second largest cellphone market by 2017. To fuel this, the Indian Telecom Regulatory agency recently announced the nation has crossed the billion mark in mobile subscribers.
“Electronics are so common in our lives, but we’re disposing of everything so quickly,” says Karma Recycling co-founder and co-director Akshat Ghiya, “phones are supposed to last five to six years, but we’re switching them every year, it’s all status symbol.”
A smartphone undergoing Karma Recycling's refurbishment process. Photo courtesy of Karma Recycling.
But worse than that was the fact that the existing electronic disposal market consisted of the neighborhood kabadiwala, or local scrap merchant, collecting and open-air burning products in the slums where the toxic release is hazardous for nearby residents and environment alike.
It’s the dual concept of a sustainable business that prompted Ghiya and fellow co-founder and co-director Aamir Jariwala, who met as students at Northwestern University, to get involved in the electronic waste space in 2013.
In 2012 the Indian government passed new electronic waste handling rules aimed to divert waste from the local scrap merchants and into proper disposal methods. Although the laws were not being enforced six months later, mobile devices were not finding their way into the hands of the kabadiwala, says Ghiya.
Karma Recycling co-founders and directors Aamir Jariwala and Akshat Ghiya in their New Delhi office.... [+]
Ghiya and Jariwala decided to build an e-portal which enables individuals or retail partnerships to log in and sell their old cellphones for cash back. Karma Recycling then sends the phones to their New Delhi facility where they undergo a full data wipe, product backup, repair and refurbishment. They’re then repackaged with Karma’s own warranty and resold back on the market.
The goal is to keep the phones affordable so anyone may be able to purchase them.
To date Karma Recycling have partnered with the Future Group’s eZone, Sangeetha Mobiles, Apple India and classifieds site Quikr.
“We have over 100 million smartphones, and Indians are expected to buy at least 500 million smartphones over the next few years,” says Ghiya, “the numbers are baffling.”
One of the Bollywood images created as part of Karma Recycling and Delhi I Love You's environmental... [+]
Deloitte values the used smartphone market will be worth about $17 billion in 2016.
India’s signatory on the Basel Convention Mobile Phone Partnership Initiative forbids imports of phones from anywhere else in the world, to avoid a greater e-waste problem in the country.
Keen environmentalists, Ghiya and Jariwala jumped on the chance to raise some awareness last September when a friend offered up some advertising wall space in the New Delhi’s most visible locations – the local waste areas. Creating a Recycle Your Waste campaign with social organization Delhi I Love You, they painted collages of scenes from famous Bollywood movies converting well-known lines into garbage-related ones. It was a way of encouraging the masses to pay attention to their waste disposal habits.
“We realized that the e-waste that is negatively impacting our environment could positively be stimulating the economy when we choose to reuse mobile devices,” says the Karma Recycling website, “what goes around, comes around."
