The tragedy of e-waste import

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, the environment in Africa is highly neglected, and part of the tragedy of this reality is that the rest of the world is taking advantage of this neglect to further improve and free its own environment, putting the black continent at risk and at war with itself.

In West Africa particularly, two of the sub-region’s economic powerhouses, Nigeria and Ghana, are fast becoming thriving electronic graveyards as tonnes of discarded appliances from all over the world, including the United Kingdom (UK), are being dumped here every year.

Thousands of broken TV, personal computers (PC), mobile phones, microwaves as well as refrigerators are illegally exported to West Africa and dumped in gigantic landfills like Agbogbloshie and Olusosun in Ghana and Nigeria, respectively. The explanation for this unholy action is that it costs less than recycling them in their countries of origin.

A report by United Nations University says 41 million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) worth over £34 billion were discarded globally in 2014 and that only 6 million tonnes of that was recycled properly. The UK alone contributed 1.5 million tonnes of waste to the staggering 11.6 million tonnes generated in Europe last year, putting it behind only Germany as the continent’s greatest contributor. That dwarfs the 1.9 million tonnes produced by the whole of Africa, and yet West African nations have become a dumping ground for the world’s defunct products.

We are alarmed by this mindless export of death from one continent to another and cannot agree more with health practitioners who are of the view that both human and physical environment in these poor countries are endangered given that some of the appliances even leak toxic elements such as lead and mercury which harm the environment.

Even more worrying is that in all of these dumpsites are young men who trawl through the defunct electronics hoping to find something worth selling, thereby exposing themselves to these elements.

The higher level of tragedy we see in all these is that when massive containers arrive in Ghana and Nigeria with these wastes, they are trucked to remote locations where the locals buy the products directly without testing them to later sell in markets, thereby lengthening the chain of casualties.

In Nigeria, Lagos has witnessed a huge influx of e-waste in recent times and this is because the city has a large seaport where the items easily slip through. Also, there is a huge appetite for cheap second-hand imported electronics items in the city.

For us, the Lagos experience is as critical as it is fundamentally nauseating because this is a city that has nine identified slum areas where the residents take a daily dose of filth and odour oozing from faeces, decaying infrastructure and heaps of garbage contesting for space with humans even on highways.

It is high time those in authority rose to the occasion with determination to save the environment and, by extension, save the citizens from avoidable and premature death. We believe that the environment is a gift from God and so, we must do all we can to keep it safe and clean.

We are, however, not unaware of existing environmental laws and regulations. Our pain is that there is weak enforcement of these laws and also a lack of awareness of the risks and potential harmful effects associated with e-waste, coupled with lack of technical capacity for environmentally sound management.

It does not take a Pope’s sermon for us to know that the e-waste shipments are taking place due to economic reasons because recycling in the European Union and the UK costs a lot of money. Our worry is that from a decent and safe environment, somebody sits and decides to transport death to another environment because of the filthy lucre that comes back to him.

We are, therefore, calling on African governments to sit up and fight this inhuman act and save the continent and its people from death arising from governments’ acts of omission and/or commission. At individual level, we urge vigilance and a concerted action against the common enemy.