Slashdot Mirror
Agbogbloshie: The World's Largest e-Waste Dump
kc123 writes "Photographer Kevin McElvaney documents Agbogbloshie, a former wetland in Accra, Ghana, which is home to the world's largest e-waste dumping site. Boys and young men smash devices to get to the metals, especially copper. Injuries, such as burns, untreated wounds, eye damage, lung and back problems, go hand in hand with chronic nausea, anorexia, debilitating headaches and respiratory problems. Most workers die from cancer in their 20s."
Dispose of my stuff in the proscribed manner at the municipal dump. TV's here, computers there, light bulbs in that shed, batteries one over.... but how do I know they aren't just paying to have that stuff shipped overseas?
E waste. Plastic in the ocean. Pharmaceutical water contamination. We are f'ed.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
If any statement needs a fact checking, that one does. I call bullshit.
This is serious. Not throwing away my e-waste unless I can be sure someone is not going to die from it. We are acting like savages!
You aren't acting like a savage - the people who dispose of it for a living or enrichment, without a care to what they've stuck in some bog, river or former farmland, those are savages. Rather like the cretins who roam our backroads, looking for a clear chance to unload their trash, rather than take it to a proper disposal site.
Much of what's in Ghana has been exported from the first world, to the third world, where people live (even if briefly) on scavenging. This isn't much different from the very depressing and massive ewaste dumps in China.
I was told and old IBM 360 system was being trucked to Savannah, Georgia, where it would go aboard a ship and taken to China, where families would bid upon bits of the system, which they'd take home and extract copper, gold and anything else of value - you can do the math yourself to figure what they did with the remains.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm sorry it should not be legal to enable the killing of others!
It could inspire us to support companies that actually do recycling rather than dumping. It could inspire you to pay to recycle your phone rather than toss it in the trash. It could inspire you to push for consumer options that create less e-waste. It could inspire you to donate to a research project or start one to find a industrial use for e-waste.
It could even just be simply to inform you that people are suffering because of greed. News does not always need you to take action. Sometimes its purpose is just to inform.
Right... so... you want to be sheltered from the worst news from the unprivileged, because you feel powerless to stop it? Tell that to the people in that situation, with significantly less power to stop it! Yes! Let's not talk about the bad things in the world unless the newspiece has a button that you can personally click to solve that problem. That's exactly how problem-solving works. Who knows why the press never thought of that!
Awareness is only useful if it can lead to change for the better. Knowing about this is not helpful, at least to me.
There's a difference between knowing it as a vanilla fact and seeing it, so yes, awareness on a more motivational level, which might lead to change, eventually. I could see pressure being put on companies to market products with a verified disposal program, but we've got a long way to go just pressuring them to use decent workplaces, so it will probably be a while. Still, bringing the reality home helps us keep in mind what everntually needs to happen.
Of course the natural reaction of some will be to hang on to power-hungry older electronics and machinery over newer more efficient models, which depending on the exact device in question, may or may not do any good in the larger picture.
(I've got a cellar full of cat litter pails full of old e-waste I can't bring myself to hand over to anyone, given I don't trust any of the available recipients. Way more than I need to scavange the occasional diode or transistor off of.)
Someone had to do it.
- Cities in Africa have had TVs for decades, generate their own "e-waste". Nigeria had 6.9M households with TV in 2007 (World Bank)
- According to the UN, the 6B people in "emerging markets" generate far more e-waste, and far more ewaste trade, than OECD nations.
- African importers have no financial interest in paying to import junk.
- UNEP studies of seized "e-waste" in Lagos and Accra found 91% reuse and repair, better than brand new sales.
- The Western Accuser (BAN.org) earns money from "certifying" that recyclers don't export, has a $$ interest in the accusations
The Western Accuser admits to fabricating the statistics about 80% e-waste exports. They lied and admit they lied. http://retroworks.blogspot.com...
These stories belittle the techs in Africa who tinker and repair, for financial gain among manufacturers intent on "planned obsolescence". "Parasites of the poor" is the label for these stories in Africa.
Gently reply
Compare the photos in the Slashdot submission to these http://shanghaiscrap.com/2012/...
And none of the TVs in this photo were imported from western nations. None of them. So, of the 1% of these shown in TFA, how many were actually imported? Or is the point to think about the sad Negro children paid $1 to stand on the husks of TVs thrown out by African cities?
This is what you come upon when you go filming the poor amongst the poor. Yet again a relatively small are is shown, this time around the RT monitor stands. It looks like a problem of law enforcement, lack of recycling infrastructure for terminal waste and lack of employment for these people.
Don't fall for e-waste scare again. Actual numbers tell that the vast majority of it is recycled and reused. This was covered already but here's one witness example :
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
"A handful of countries in the developed world don't like the ban," Puckett said. "Some countries have ratified the Basel Convention but don't agree to the ban."
Ingenthron disagrees with the definition of electronic equipment exported for repair as hazardous. He said those exports account for about 8% of the 13 million pounds Good Point processes, and provide a livelihood for Third World entrepreneurs.
Wahab Mohammed, 36, of Accra, Ghana, relies on Good Point to provide an inventory of used computers and more for his business in Ghana.
"I buy TVs, computers, speakers, amplifiers and stereos," Wahab said last month as he roamed the maze of shrink-wrapped mountains of equipment at Good Point. "When I take them back I have people who work for me. We resell everything, 80% to 90% we're able to make it work."
Wahab tries to make the pilgrimage to Good Point every three or four months, splitting his time between Middlebury and Accra. He's planning to open a recycling plant in Ghana.
"In Africa laptops cost more than here brand new," Wahab said. "My customers appreciate me bringing in used laptops they're able to buy for $100. I still make money."
In fact what you see in TFA is not our waste, but Ghanans's waste. The news is they're dumping CRT PC monitors (looks like 17 inchers), probably because they're too expensive to run, and some of them may just have failed.
Africans don't want to buy our discarded CRTs these days and no goodwill organisation will pay for the shipping either.
I would also like to know what happens to TFA's pile of five PC on the moped. "PCs and electronic devices that look in reasonable condition are sold untested in Accra". Well three are AT, so a bit crap (but may contain hard drives, etc., and may serve some limited use or as thin clients), two are ATX and so are USB, can do MP3 playback, file transfers to from USB flash drives or cell phones, word processing or accounting ; probably divx playback (the bottom one is color-coded, thus powerful) . Just don't turn it on often.
killall | god | sort > out.dat
Yes, that would have been a very good message to give, had they listed ANY reputable companies as alternatives. This article gives practically no information. Other than photo captions, the slashdot "summary" is actually LONGER than the entire article.
This is nothing more than a heart-string sensationalist article to up their viewership. Had the author actually cared about these people they would have listed the companies responsible for this crap, and the reputable companies that actually recycle the materials properly instead of literally putting the people on little monitor-soapboxes (yes literally, check out the photos) and adding sad captions like some twisted version of lolcats.
If you throw away e-waste, it ends up in a domestic landfill at the worst, recycled in a domestic processing plant at best.
http://www.bloombergview.com/a...
It's actually the used computer equipment that gets sold to the third world that ends up in places like Africa. They do actually end up using most of it, until it either breaks or they find something better, and NOBODY buys their used stuff, so THAT stuff ends up in these photographs you are seeing here. The only way WE can prevent that is to completely deny the third world access to technology, which I don't think is an ideal situation.
But basically this is unwarranted environmental alarmism, exactly like the imagined (and never realized, and never will be realized) threat of so called overflowing landfills:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Quoting previous articles:
In Pictures: Ghana's e-waste magnet
E-waste at the Agbogbloshie dumpsite near Accra has created a socio-economic and environmental disaster.
Kevin McElvaney, 12 Feb 2014
Inside Ghana's electronic wasteland
Dangerous practice of burning electronic waste to extract metals could be made safely obsolete.
Chris Stein, 02 Nov 2013
I did that a couple times. Want to use speaker cables? You can cut the cable at the desired length with a pair of scissors, then if you're lazy, burn the end of the cable with a cigarette lighter to bare it. Ditto with CAT5 pairs (the tiny inner wires - I don't suggest burning what surrounds them), there the pollution is tiny is comparison.
(Don't buy thick high end speaker cables, they're useless and a rip off.. and they're harder to rip off?)
The fact that responsible recycling is occurring doesn't change the fact that irresponsible e-Waste burning is occurring any more than the fact that America is full of obese people changes the fact that there are literally children starving in America.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
To add to the imagery and stories we see in the posts above, a friend of mine recently went to Agbogbloshie to film a documentary about damage being done, to connect with the people who's live are impacted by this environmental atrocity. A trailer for the documentary has been cut and is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_610iyt_HA
It is a good thing that here on slashdot, its relevance is being shown to the perfect audience. We need/must to do something about this.
The question I have, is, how do we band together to help bring this to the attention of the masses and stop this type of dumping across the globe ?
Pony, Keeper of Cerberus
Must be returned and recycled exactly where it came from.
Ghana does not make/assemble/profit from eletronics industry.
Return it to whomever profited the most from it.
Jose T Oliveira Jr.
The first step to solving a problem, is to know that one exists.