10 07 29 Master thesis Juliana Leon - e-Waste. This guide

collection, refurbishment, manual dismantling, and recycling processes, mainly
recovering and taking profit of metals contained in e-waste that finally are
transformed into secondary resources for the production chains, while simply
dumping the non-profitable and often hazardous components.
1.4 Inclusion of informal sector in e-waste management
The inclusion of the informal sector (IS) in municipal solid waste management
systems has been broadly studied (Wilson et al., 2006; Gerold, 2009; GTZ, 2010).
The development of the IS organizations with the support of municipalities and the
consideration of IS in planning and policy formulation appear to be successful factors
for the integration process (Gerold, 2009). Participation of NGO’s in the integration
process and collaboration with the private formal sector are also key factors for the
integration (GTZ, 2010).
Studies about the inclusion of the informal e-waste sector in India focus on the
country’s major problem: the use of toxic chemicals to recover metals such as gold,
silver, and copper from Printed Wiring Boards (PWBs) by wet chemical leaching
processes (Rochat et al., 2008). These artisanal practices cause a direct impact on
the environment and workers’ health, and their inefficiency compared to industrial
refining processes has been demonstrated (Keller, 2006). Based on that, alternate
business models were proposed according to which workers from the informal sector
have to change their habits and instead of collecting e-waste and conditioning it for
the recovery of gold, they prepare the optimal fractions for shipping to an integrated
smelter in Belgium (Rochat et al., 2008).
The application of economic instruments to channel scrap circuit boards from
informal to formal recycling has also been presented by Williams et al. (2010) who
proposes that an interface organization could play a key role by purchasing circuit
boards from informal dismantlers and selling them to advanced metal refineries.
Based on field investigations in Chile, Wolfensberger (2010) has proposed an
inclusion model with three possible levels of participation for the actual informal (and
future formalized) sector. Levels of inclusion depend on the step of the end-of-life
process where the inclusion is done. Level 1 proposes to integrate individual waste
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