With electronic waste turning into a serious threat to the city?s solid-waste management, mayor Subrata Mukherjee and municipal commissioner Debashis Som, who is an IIT engineer, held a meeting last week to find ways and means of tackling the problem.

They felt that unless a proper electronic waste management policy was framed soon, the situation would spin out of control by the next decade.

According to a preliminary estimate of the Centre for Quality Management, Jadavpur University, about 400,000 mobile phones are being discarded in Calcutta each year, generating over 60 tonnes of electronic waste.

If discarded electronic toys, TV sets, CD players and personal computers are taken into account, the annual generation of electronic waste in Calcutta will be over 5,000 tonnes, pointed out mayor Mukherjee.

The Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Committee (CMPC), too, in its five-year development plan for environment in the Calcutta Metropolitan Area (CMA), has asked the civic authorities to undertake an immediate action programme, in consultation with universities and research institutes, for the management of electronic waste.

The CMPC status report reveals that over 1,200 computers are discarded every day in the country, and the total annual generation of electronic waste from discarded computers alone in six megacities, including Calcutta, is more than 10,800 tonnes.

If no immediate action is planned, the situation will go out of hand, since the present growth rate of computer use is 600 per cent per annum.

According to the Centre for Quality Management, Jadavpur University, one TV or computer monitor contains up to three kg of lead. It also contains mercury. The circuitboards of a discarded electronic item contains materials like chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and arsenic.

The most alarming part of the problem is that like plastic and polyethylene, these electronic waste, too, are not bio-degradable.

The traditional waste management practice of burying discarded electronic stuff is not possible, explained civic chief engineer (conservancy) Arun Sarkar.

He cited two reasons? first, it will crowd out bio-degradable garbage. Second, it may cause chemical contamination of sub-soil water.

Sarkar said polybags have already become a headache for the civic conservancy and drainage and sewerage departments. Several tonnes of polybags enter the city?s drainage and sewerage network daily.