Romita Roshan Pandita is pursuing her Masters in Natural Resources Management from TERI University, New Delhi.

 After working on Waste co-processing during her 2 months internship last year in India she will be working on the problem of e-waste management over the period of next four months together with Environmental Policy Research Centre, FFU. Her study will focus on the use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a powerful tool to influence environmental policies including public policy and purchasing decisions as well as management and engineering decisions related to electronic goods. A study by the Indian government has found that the amount of electronic waste in the country is growing at the rate of 10 per cent every year and that 95 per cent of this waste ends up in urban slums–some 434,000 metric tons. The research by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research estimates that 25,000 people in the Indian slums are employed in an unregulated e-waste recycling industry, with just five per cent of waste going through official channels.The situation itself explains the need to have rigorous and reliable decision support tool to formulate the e-waste policy for India.

Since EU already has such LCA-based policies in place, her study will help her in understanding the advantages and limitations of incorporating LCA as a component of e-waste policy and problems faced by EU during implementation of such e-waste management policies (WEEE) which will help her in analysing the feasibility of LCA-based e-waste policy for India and also proposing the recommendations for Indian conditions by the end of the project.