Agbogbloshie, the world's largest e-waste dump

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agbogbloshie

by _0nac • 11 years ago

107 51 11 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

seunosewa2• 11 years ago

Yes, this is a terrible problem, but: what's the solution?

mclemme• 11 years ago

If people would only stop buying stuff they don't need, but that seems to be the driving force of the modern consumer society.

The norm where I live seems to be to purchase new computers, smartphones, etc. every 6-24 months (phones more often compared to computers). Whereas the more frugal people I know mostly purchase new electronics when the old item has truly and utterly died without the possibility of repair.

But assuming that will not change in the near future it seems that selling refurbished electronics at cheaper prices as well as improving the manufacturing process to use less toxic materials, could help quite a bit.

An example of refurbished electronics I saw in the news the other day here in Denmark is http://www.brugteiphones.dk/ buying up old broken iphones, repairing and selling them, they seem to be growing pretty fast.

microtonal• 11 years ago

The norm where I live seems to be to purchase new computers, smartphones, etc. every 6-24 months (phones more often compared to computers).

While a computer can last a decade for most consumers, especially with the long support cycles of Windows and/or Linux' support for low-end hardware, phones are pretty much obsolete in no time: they don't get security updates, apps become unbearable (since their developers have the latest & greatest), etc.

Planned obsolescence.

This is one of the reasons that I argue that e.g. the EU should intervene. Phone manufactures and/or carriers should at the very least provide security updates for a reasonable period. Another option would be to make unlocked boot loaders mandatory, so that consumers can easily replace firmware.

onion2k• 11 years ago

The people of the countries that violate agreements, or that don't ratify the agreements in the first place, voting their politicians out of power and replacing them with politicians who believe being a good citizen of the world is more important than making a quick profit or offloading problems on to other countries.

If voting doesn't work then bloody revolution could be an option.

vetler• 11 years ago

Stricter laws on proper recycling?

seunosewa2• 11 years ago

Apparently only a fraction of the waste is recyclable, so if it isn't dumped there it may have to be dumped somewhere else...

acomjean2• 11 years ago

Government regulation and laws.

Really with pollution the incentive in capitalism is to just pollute, and not deal with waste properly. It is cheaper almost always and following regulations if they even exist usually eats into profit.

I used to work for an environmental engineering firm that had to do some site clean-ups in a previous career. Companies hate being forced to pay to clean up their messes, its one of the big incentives not to pollute, as that certainly eats into profits.

creating less waste is a good goal too (shaving weight from a phone your going to sell millions of saves a lot of resources) or as a consumer buying less means you'll throw away less (swap in an ssd for your hard drive to keep that computer another year..).

Computers and phones keep getting better and better (more energy efficient too), so there is a strong motivation to upgrade (although this is less stong then it used to be).

ptaipale3• 11 years ago

Yep, government regulation and laws. The question is: which government?

Normally one would expect that in the areas were this work is done, the local governments take care of environmental and work safety regulations and laws. But they don't - due to greed, corruption and whatever.

So should, for example, OECD countries forbid export of electric waste to non-OECD countries, to enforce proper disposal of hazardous materials and recycling? I don't have very clear answers to this, because there are obvious reasons both ways (do we want to exclude poor countries from the world markets?). But I think it is a good question.

pjc50• 11 years ago

The EU's WEEE is supposed to be the solution to this. It imposes requirements on manufacturers and distributors to take back discarded products: http://www.valpak.co.uk/compliance-services/weee

The actual implementation is a bit more fraught e.g. http://www.electriciansforums.co.uk/electrical-forum-general... (supposed to be free for domestic purposes and therefore "invisible", but not necessarily for commercial). Especially in a context of phasing out the easily disposable incandescent bulbs in favour of CCFL or LED which aren't so safe to landfill.

Once the products have been returned they're supposed to be recycled. No doubt some of them end up being shipped to Ghana even though this is not supposed to happen.

Ultimately the solution is longer-lasting less obsolete products, but that's "bad for the economy" when the economy is transaction-focused.

sveme• 11 years ago

Some impressive pictures from Kevin McElvaney:

http://www.derkevin.com/Agbogbloshie.html

jpatokal2• 11 years ago

Video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSbPjtY2YPg&feature=youtu.be

francoisf• 11 years ago

This is something I can't get out of my head: as a tech user (and as an IT worker), I am an active part of the e-waste problem.

I always find it hard to relate to some tech enthusiasts that often appear to me like compulsive, irresponsible buyers.

I can't help but ask myself: can a culture shift within the IT community lead to raise awareness among the larger public?

Infinitesimus2• 11 years ago

When I saw the post on the fp of HN, my first reaction was "hey wait I know that name... ohh..ooohhh". (Disclaimer: Ghanaian here. Currently an SE in the US )

I think a culture shift in the IT community will definitely make the message loud, but the truth is that this dump comes from businesses who deal primarily with the average consumer, not the tech-savvy minority. And until the majority cares, nothing is going to change unfortunately. Every step in that direction helps though, by all means, we as a community need to be much more vocal about this (well, be concerned first of all)

davedx• 11 years ago

"Early adopters" are a much smaller segment of the market, true, but they also buy a ton more stuff than regular people by definition. :)

jpatokal2• 11 years ago

I've seen a fair bit of poverty in my travels around Africa and elsewhere, but I'm still rather astonished by how utterly and totally low-tech and unorganized this is: it's literally just a bunch of people scrabbling about heaps of garbage on an open field, only that garbage has been carted in from the other side of the world!

For example, you'd think it would be worth it for somebody to set up some sort of smelter where you could bring your cables to get the plastic melted off, but when labor is essentially free and the competition is Darwinian, it's unlikely any scavenger would pay for such a service when they could just sit around an open flame instead.

And for an even more Dantean version of this, Glawegger's Workingman's Death covers a Nigerian slaughterfield in Port Harcourt. (And yes, the footage is pretty damn disturbing.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukSAfBulphU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workingman%27s_Death

zhte415• 11 years ago

Given the low tech nature, a lot of the 'value' could have already been extracted via any widespread method, and this is the byproduct of already processed recyclables being sold on.

I highly recommend the book Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter, who follows the global scrap trade.

Link to his site: http://shanghaiscrap.com/books/junkyard-planet/ Link to the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Junkyard-Planet-Travels-Billion-Dollar...

rasz_pl2• 11 years ago

You only see most primitive and dirty last stage. Showing anything before (fixing and reusing whole products) wouldnt be sexy enough.

Its like those tent city documentary movies, think Michael Moore.

izietto2• 11 years ago

Africa is the shame of western society

izietto2• 11 years ago

You can downvote me, but that's the point. Western countries go on exploiting Africa for its space and its resources, and then can't handle their inhabitants migrations. A shame, what else.

TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

Ok, so how can we make cleaning this mess up profitable?

normloman• 11 years ago

That shouldn't be the first question you ask. Plenty of problems have market-based solutions. But some don't.

This is a matter of regulation and law enforcement.

TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

It's not usually the first question I ask. There is, however, already a subthread discussing legal approach. But since HN has a lot of smart, business-minded people, I thought it would be worth discussing commercial options.

gambiting• 11 years ago

If you make cleaning it up profitable, then it will attract more waste. What you want is to stop sending e-waste to Ghana in the first place.

TeMPOraL6• 11 years ago

If they could recycle this waste into something useful and make a business out of it, I think we'd want to send more waste there. It's better to have it recycled in Ghana than have it not recycled at all. Their economy would also be happy.

virmundi• 11 years ago

First, it is already profitable depending on which mess you're talking about. I'm defining the mess as the glut of used electronics in the world. The scrape yards aren't burning things and employing people to simply burn things and spend money. They get money from the scrap.

Second, if we define the mess as the act of burning things to mine the valuable minerals within, we have those already too. Recycling in US is about a 5 Billion dollar industry[1]. Sure some of that gets exported, but much of it doesn't. We refine the materials here in a regulated, probably safe way.

Third, the issue is more around developing countries pushing their garbage to Africa. That is a complex solution. The producing country has to see it as a problem (their problem). They have to be willing to create infrastructure to process the e-waste. They also have to adjust their present manufacturing capabilities to use recycled goods rather than transform raw materials.

There might be a market solution for the third point. Maybe? A lot of that comes with time and maturity. The US polluted a lot. We didn't really start to care until the '70s. It then took twenty years to get cleaner air, ground and water. That's from an already advanced economy. Developing markets will not likely put the money into that while they try to get their people out of the muck (literally).

[1] http://inhabitat.com/study-finds-that-the-us-electronics-rec...

ForHackernews2• 11 years ago

The scrape yards aren't burning things and employing people to simply burn things and spend money. They get money from the scrap.

It sounds to me like they aren't employing anyone. They have a big scrap heap, and desperately poor individuals pick through it on their own accord hoping to scavenge some valuable metal they can sell.

To put it in terms startup types can relate to: The trash-pickers are independent entrepreneurs and the scrap yard is like Uber, facilitating their trade.

rasz_pl2• 11 years ago

It already is profitable, but all the reports from Africa concentrate on last stage performed by most desperate clawing at scraps in the dumpster. Its African version of a homeless man collecting aluminium cans.

henrykohl4• 11 years ago

There are homegrown solutions in the pipeline, I worked with a couple of guys on a project there:

http://accrareport.com/feature/agbogbloshie-a-local-solution...

http://accrareport.com/feature/e-waste-in-ghana-where-death-...

kwiens• 11 years ago

I've spent some time there and I can share a first-hand perspective.

It looks like a dump in the pictures, but it's not. It's an active scrapyard. No material stays in Agbogbloshie for very long. Electronics show up, are mined for raw materials in crude fashion, and then the raw material is sold. Unprofitable material like copper cable jackets are burned.

Some of the footage I shot is in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMwLUnd_ydI

The other thing about Agbogbloshie nobody talks about: encircling the scrapyard is a huge repair yard where people fix everything they possibly can. It's only the stuff that can't get fixed and resold that goes to the urban mine.

cellularmitosis• 11 years ago

I have a cardboard box with a decade's worth of personal e waste. I see articles like this and wonder if I would better serve the world by simply putting it in the dumpster. It would likely pollute our ground water locally, but perhaps that's better than being burned in Ghana? What do HNers do with their e waste?

WR3A2• 11 years ago

These western descriptions of Agbogloshie are really becoming a farce. It's the scrap dump where African generate cars and old appliances go. It is not the repair hub. There are ZERO sea containers of Western e-junk showing up. NONE. The place handles less per day than the average e-waste processor in Indiana. The World Bank stats show that Accra has 4.5M residents, and the majority of households have had TV and computers for a decade. They buy used working electronics because the average income is under $3K. But it's obscene that environmentalists go to a dump and take pictures of kids and raise money and don't tell the truth about the waste origins and don't share any money with the kids. I'm going back at the end of the month. Just stop it people. (With all due respect, You too, Kyle). Your video says you saw no evidence of repair, it's the scrapyard it isn't where the repair is done and it isn't where the sea containers arrive.

And this has all been painstakingly documented in major reports!

http://www.basel.int/Portals/4/Basel%20Convention/docs/eWast...

And the original source of the statistic that it's the biggest e-waste dump in the world, junking 80%, made it up. Look!

http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2013/05/basel-action-network-...

This is environmental malpractice.

WR3A2• 11 years ago

Four comprehensive studies have found that 85%, 87%, 91%, or 93% is reused. The sea containers go to another part of town, where the geeks and technicians are. Agbogbloshie is mostly managing used scrap (cars, appliances, electronics) generated by the 4.5M inhabitants of Accra. Over half the households in Accra had television in 2003.

Links to Ghana specific studies here http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/06/21/231250/uk-man-senten...

Agbogbloshie, the world's largest e-waste dump

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