A television in Germany is thrown out. Months later, it lands on a giant rubbish heap in Ghana, in Agbogbloshie. Along the way, several people earn some cash from the recycling process. Thousands of tons of old electronic devices make the long journey — often illegally.
Tony Obour is a master with a screwdriver. He’s working on an old television set in his workshop in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where he repairs unwanted electronic devices from Europe.
Not far away, Lubman Idris is bent over a pile of scrap metal. He makes a living selling old parts from broken electrical devices.
But more than 5,000 kilometres away, in the northern German port of Hamburg, police superintendent Wolfgang Heidorn is tasked with tracking down electronic waste that is leaving the country illegally.
Computers, printers, vacuum cleaners, lamps: The global pile of so-called e-waste is growing rapidly. According to a United Nations study, there will be an estimated 44.8 million tons of it by 2021.
In the world’s richest countries, consumers want the latest technology. When a new washing machine is delivered, the old one is taken away. Either that, or the owner will sell it online or take it to a flea market. But what happens to the machine after that?
Tafsir Rahimi, from Afghanistan, works as a dealer in Hamburg. He buys old televisions and other devices that have been returned to companies by consumers, repairs them and then ships them to Africa.
Police regularly inspect people like Rahimi to make sure the devices they trade are in good working order. But nevertheless, broken devices often slip through the net.
One of the most important importers of old electronic devices is Ghana. As the goods arrive in Accra, a crane lifts the containers from ships onto trucks that take them to warehouses for inspection.
Up to 100 containers pass through here daily, says Peter Bopam, who’s in charge of Jubilee Terminal. The humid tropical heat is oppressive.
“We try to check as many containers as possible,” says Fred Yankey of the tax office. But there is too little capacity. And what happens when broken appliances are discovered? Yankey shrugs his shoulders.
They don’t have time to check whether everything works, he explains.
Obour has been making a living from old electronic equipment from Europe for almost 30 years. In his workshop in the Abeka district, about 50 kilometres from the port of Tema, the 51-year-old repairs used televisions. The shelves are stacked with dusty spare parts.
He buys the equipment from importers who sell their goods next to the port, Obour says. He doesn’t know whether the devices work or not until he brings them back to his workshop. “We don’t test them beforehand. They’re cheaper that way,” he explains. He tries to repair as many as possible, then he sells them through a dealer.
Some will end up in the living room of a Ghanaian family, or on the wall of a street cafe. Obour uses the broken ones for spare parts.
What’s left after that is of no value to him, so he gives it to the scrap metal collectors.
Accra is full of them: Young men, mostly in pairs, pushing wooden carts along the streets from shop to shop, house to house, looking for practically anything that contains metal.
When they’re done, they head to a downtown area of Accra known as Agbogbloshie. It stretches along a river whose dirty water flows into the Gulf of Guinea.
Agbogbloshie looks like an electronics cemetery. Discarded engines and spare parts lie scattered at the sides of the roads. The ground is black. Young men work beneath ramshackle corrugated iron roofs.
But against the odds, people here are able to make a little money from the rubbish.
There is almost no official recycling industry in Ghana. “We buy things from the people with the carts,” says Idris, 30, who has a small workshop on the banks of the river. He has been working as a recycler for 12 years.
Idris comes from the north of Ghana: “There is no work there.”
At first glance, Agbogbloshie appears chaotic, but it soon becomes clear that it’s a well-oiled machine. Tens of thousands of people work here: collectors, recyclers, dealers, handlers. There’s even a tax office and bank branches.
Pungent smoke hangs in the air as the recyclers burn old plastic from cables so they can get to the metal inside.
The recyclers breathe in toxic fumes every day, as well as handle dangerous materials without protection. But it’s part of the job, Idris says: “You can’t escape that.”
He sells the metal he extracts from old appliances — copper, aluminium, iron — to dealers, who then sell it on to others.
One dealer arrives on a rickety bicycle. “I sell it to companies that melt and export the metals,” he explains. It then ends up in China, France, India, Germany and other countries, completing the circle.
There are advantages to this informal system of reuse and recycling, according to experts.
“From the point of view of resources, it makes total sense,” says Till Zimmermann from the Hamburg Institute for Ecology and Politics.
But then there are the health risks, environmental damage, low wages — and another downside: “Because the informal recycling sector in Ghana is so well-organised, the formal sector cannot really gain a foothold,” says Markus Spitzbart, who works for the German development agency in Ghana.
Can informal recyclers be turned into official recyclers, and the processing of toxic substances and the burning of plastics be stopped? Achieving such a feat will be a daunting task indeed. – dpa
