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

made. This means that from the total of computers that are discarded as e-waste in
2009, 57% are coming from households and MSEs (category 1), 28% from MLBs
(category 2), and 15% from the government and education sectors (category 3).
2.2 Field survey
Data used for chapters 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 is based on information that CNPMLTA 4 and
EMPA have been gathering since the beginning of the Colombian e-waste project in
2007 and particularly on field studies conducted in 2009 in Colombia’s four main
cities Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, and Barranquilla (Uribe et al., 2009; Uribe et al., 2010;
and unpublished field reports). All the data was complemented by literature research,
interviews, and field visits carried out by the author from February 2010 to May 2010.
The information gathered corresponds to what is happening in the five most
important cities that are Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla and Bucaramanga.
These five urban areas concentrate 40% of the Colombian population (DANE, 2005)
and more than 90% of the Colombian computers (Ott, 2008).
Information was collected through observations and semi-structured interviews
carried out during the field visits and complemented with telephone interviews. The
number of personal and telephone interviews on which this study is based are
consigned in Table 6. A summary of the field visits, personal expert interviews and
telephone interviews made by the author is available on Appendix A.
4 The Centro Nacional de Producción mas limpia y tecnologías ambientales (CNPMLTA) is the local
agency charged of the implementation of the “Swiss e-waste programme” in Colombia.
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