Somewhere in most Indian homes is a drawer of dead electronics: a phone with a cracked screen, chargers that fit nothing, earphones with one working side. It is where a lot of electronic waste begins its life. Getting it out of the drawer and into an authorised recycling channel is a small act, and in several places, children have been the ones to organise it. This is a look at three documented drives, told with the numbers their organisers reported, and with attention to what those numbers can and cannot tell us.
Mumbai: two boxes, a month, and about a hundred students
In June 2023, according to The Tribune, students of Class VII at Kanakia International School in Chembur, Mumbai, ran a month-long e-waste drive with the Sanskar India Foundation. The design was simple. The school set up two collection points on its premises, and students urged classmates, friends and family to bring in old electronics. About 100 students took an active part. In all, they collected 33.3 kg, which was handed over to a recycling company. The students also attended a workshop on the hazards of e-waste and the safe way to recycle it.
Do the arithmetic and the result is humbling: 33.3 kg across roughly 100 students is about a third of a kilogram each. Principal Shuchi Shukla said the students had “successfully collected a substantial amount of e-waste, thus making a significant contribution towards reducing electronic waste in landfills.” The claim is fair as far as it goes, and it is worth keeping the scale in mind: 33 kg is roughly the weight of a few old desktop computers. Its value lies in what the children learned and carried home.
A third of a kilogram per student will not change a landfill. It can change a household.
Kolkata: ten students and 500 kilograms
Around World Environment Day, 5 June 2026, a student-led group called Nirmyx reported the results of a month-long e-waste collection drive across Kolkata. A team of 10 students from Modern High School for Girls led it. According to the release, they mobilised citizens to hand over end-of-life electronics, and more than 500 kg of electronic and electrical waste was gathered.
The material was stored at Rajarhat, then moved in a vehicle supplied by CirQula India, an authorised e-waste management company, to the German Consulate General in Kolkata as a symbolic endpoint. Barbara Voss, Consul General of Germany in Kolkata, took part, and Priyasha Singhania, CirQula's founder and chief executive, said that “responsible e-waste management is no longer optional, it is essential for protecting our environment and conserving valuable resources.” The students received certificates of appreciation. The release did not list what kinds of devices were collected.
The design is worth noticing. The students did not try to process anything. They did the part that adults tend to skip, which is asking neighbours and making it convenient, and they paired it with a licensed company to handle the rest. That division of labour is the model any school can copy.
Assam: five tonnes in seven days
On the same day, Binbag, a waste-management organisation, reported collecting over five tonnes of e-waste in Assam over a seven-day World Environment Day campaign. Participants included Tihu College, through its Science Forum, Natun Fatasil Town High School and the township of Numaligarh Refinery Limited. Students took part in awareness sessions, one-minute reel and drawing competitions and street plays, and took pledges for sustainable practices. Tihu College Principal Suresh Bharali said that programmes of this kind “encourage environmental responsibility among young people.”
Note what the report does not say. The five tonnes was a campaign total that included the wider community and institutions, not a figure for students alone, and the account does not say where the waste went afterward. Both details matter. Without a documented route to authorised recyclers, a collection drive is only half a story.
What the three drives share
Each drive did three things well. It gave students a clear, doable task. It gave the wider community an easy way to take part, through collection points or door-to-door requests. And, at least in the Mumbai and Kolkata cases, it handed the material to a recycling company rather than to a scrap dealer. The last step matters most. Under the E-Waste (Management) Rules, 2022, producers, recyclers and refurbishers must be registered, and producers carry Extended Producer Responsibility for collecting and recycling their products. A school drive that ends with a registered recycler feeds into that system.
The scale problem, honestly stated
India generated 14,14,645 tonnes of e-waste in 2025-26, according to figures the environment ministry gave Parliament. The largest of these three drives, over five tonnes, is well under a hundredth of one per cent of that. It would take an enormous number of such drives to move the national total.
But the total is the wrong yardstick. The drives are about habits. Most e-waste comes from ordinary households, and it is lost when a family keeps a dead device in a drawer for years or hands it to someone who will strip it unsafely. A child who has personally carried a bag of cables to a collection box, and who knows why it matters, is a persuasive voice at home. That effect is real but hard to measure, and no report quantifies it.
The kilogram is the visible part. The habit is the part that lasts.
What families and schools can take from it
For families, the lesson is to stop stockpiling. Set aside a box, and when it has a few items, find the nearest authorised collection point or a manufacturer's take-back scheme. Keep batteries separate, since damaged lithium batteries are a fire risk. For schools, the recipe is the one these drives used: fix a date, set up two visible collection points, agree a registered recycler in advance, record what is collected and get a receipt, and use the drive as the hook for a short lesson on where electronics end up.
These are small acts by small groups, and the reports about them are, in the main, accounts by the organisers themselves. That is a reason to read the numbers with care. It is not a reason to dismiss the effort. A country that will one day have to manage far more electronic waste than it does now needs a generation that knows what to do with a dead phone, and, if these drives are any guide, some of that generation is already practising.
