Africa’s Global Dump

By | TERRY JACK RUSSELL | Somewhere in the world, a person is unwrapping a new smartphone. The old one, its battery fading and its screen scratched, is already forgotten in a drawer or dropped into a recycling bin with a warm feeling of responsibility. Months or years later, a fragment of that device may be smoldering on a patch of scorched earth in West Africa, where a teenager named for no one in the global supply chain is burning its cables to pull out a few grams of copper. This is the hidden second life of our gadgets. The story of how Africa became a destination for the discarded refrigerators, monitors, plastics, chemicals, and clothing of wealthier nations is not simply a tale of villains and victims. It is a story of economics, law, loopholes, ingenuity, and a planet that is far more connected than we like to admit. The poison does not stay put, and neither does the responsibility. The roots of the trade reach back to the late 1980s. As industrialized countries tightened their environmental laws, the cost of safely disposing of hazardous waste in Europe and North America climbed sharply. Disposal that cost thousands of dollars per tonne at home could be arranged for a fraction of that overseas. Brokers noticed, and a shadowy market was born. Two episodes from that era shocked the public. In 1988, residents of Koko, a small port town in Nigeria, discovered that an Italian businessman had rented a plot behind a farmer’s house and filled it with thousands of drums of toxic waste, including polychlorinated biphenyls, for a monthly payment of about one hundred dollars. The drums leaked. Workers who handled them fell ill, and the scandal prompted Nigeria to recall its ambassador from Italy. Around the same time, the cargo ship Khian Sea spent years wandering the oceans carrying incinerator ash from Philadelphia, looking for someone to take it. Some of its load was dumped in Haiti, and the rest vanished at sea, apparently discharged into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. African leaders were furious. Many of them had watched the continent’s debt grow its resources were removed.

The 1989 Basel Convention was adopted to control the movement of hazardous waste across borders. It required notification and consent before shipments could cross frontiers, which was a start. Many African nations felt it did not go far enough, because it still allowed trade as long as paperwork was in order. In 1991 they responded by adopting the Bamako Convention, which banned the import of hazardous waste into Africa outright. The mood of the time was captured, uncomfortably, in a leaked 1991 internal memo from a senior World Bank economist suggesting that shipping pollution to low-income countries made economic sense, since lives there were valued less in purely financial terms. The memo was reportedly meant as provocative reasoning, but it landed like a confession and became a rallying cry for environmental justice movements. The Basel Convention was later strengthened by the Ban Amendment, which prohibits hazardous waste exports from wealthy countries to developing ones, and which finally took legal effect in 2019 after decades of waiting for enough ratifications. Yet several large exporters have never ratified it, and the law has always had a trapdoor: the difference between “waste” and a “used product.” Here is where the story gets slippery. A broken television is waste. A “second-hand television” is merchandise. A shipping container labeled “used electronics for reuse” can legally cross borders in a way a container of junk cannot, and that label is where much of the abuse occurs. Reuse itself is not the villain. Across Africa, imported used computers, phones, and appliances have opened up digital access for people who could never afford new equipment. Repair markets are vibrant and skilled. The trouble starts when a container holds a mix of working goods and dead ones, because the dead ones become the importer’s problem. Studies of used-electronics shipments into West Africa have found that a meaningful fraction of what arrives does not work and cannot be economically repaired and must be recycled for mineral reuse.

Investigations using hidden GPS trackers placed inside discarded electronics in Europe and the United States have followed some of these devices across oceans to destinations in Africa and Asia, even when they had been dropped off at supposedly responsible collection points. It would be wrong to blame imports alone, however. Africa’s own consumption of electronics is growing quickly, driven by mobile phones, solar panels, and cheap computers. The United Nations’ Global E-waste Monitor reported that the world generated about 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, and that only about a fifth of it was documented as properly collected and recycled. Africa generates far less per person than Europe or North America, but it has almost no formal infrastructure to handle what it does produce, with only a tiny share formally collected. Imported junk and homegrown e-waste pile onto the same inadequate system. No place has come to symbolize the problem like Agbogbloshie, a district beside the Korle Lagoon in Accra, Ghana. For years, images of young men silhouetted against black smoke circulated around the globe, and the neighborhood was nicknamed “Sodom and Gomorrah” by some of its own residents. Workers smashed monitors with stones, stripped wires, and burned insulation off cables to expose the copper, because burning is faster than stripping by hand. Smoke from that burning carries lead, cadmium, mercury, brominated flame retardants, and dioxins. Studies of soil and sediment around such sites have found heavy metal and dioxin concentrations far above safety guidelines, and workers report headaches, chest pain, and chronic respiratory trouble. Children are especially vulnerable, because lead and other heavy metals interfere with brain development. It is worth adding some honesty and nuance here. Researchers who have studied Agbogbloshie closely argue that the popular image exaggerates how much of the material is imported from abroad, and that much of what is processed there comes from Ghana itself, where electronic products are destine.

They also point out that the workers are not helpless victims but entrepreneurs in an informal economy that supports many families. The site was largely cleared by authorities in 2021, but the activity did not vanish. It dispersed to other places, which is what usually happens when a problem is bulldozed rather than solved. Lagos, with its sprawling Computer Village market and its informal recyclers, tells a similar story, as do sites in Kenya, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Beyond electronics there are plenty of chemicals, plastics, clothes and poisoned ships who make port calls electronic waste is only one thread of the tapestry, when we consider all waste in the stream from developed countries. In 2006, a tanker called the Probo Koala, chartered by a multinational commodity trader, discharged hundreds of tonnes of toxic slops from oil refining and cleaning into open-air sites around Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire. Tens of thousands of residents sought medical care for nausea, breathing problems, and skin burns, and several deaths were reported. The company eventually paid a large settlement and a European court convicted the trader on the charge of illegally exporting waste, yet campaigners argue that the victims saw only a modest share of justice. Pesticides tell another story. Over decades, well-meaning donors and exporters shipped agricultural chemicals to Africa that were later banned, expired, or simply unused. Tens of thousands of tonnes of obsolete pesticide stockpiles have sat in rusting barrels and leaking sheds across the continent, seeping into groundwater. Cleaning them up has been a slow international effort. Plastic is a newer chapter. For years, China absorbed a huge share of the world’s recyclable plastic, but its import restrictions beginning in 2018 sent exporters hunting for new buyers. Waste flows redirected to Southeast Asia and, to a lesser degree, to countries such as Kenya and Ethiopia, where much of the low-grade material is burned or dumped, but should be recycle into other useful products placed into the export stream.

Why it matters to everyone not just Africa, it is temping to treat all this distant tragedy like “out of sight out of mind” or “not in my back yard” kind of thinking. Several African governments responded boldly: Rwanda banned plastic bags years ago and is famous for its monthly community cleanup day, and Kenya instituted one of the world’s strictest bans on plastic bags in 2017. Then there is fashion. Every week, millions of used garments arrive at Kantamanto Market in Accra, one of the largest second-hand clothing markets in the world. Traders buy bales without seeing the contents, and a large share of the clothes, by some estimates around forty percent, is of such low quality that it is unsellable. These clothes end up in drains, on beaches, and in landfills, where they tangle with the shoreline. Synthetic fabrics do not rot, so the ocean currents carry the evidence far from where it was dropped. First, the pollution travels. Dioxins and mercury released by burning are carried by wind and water, and they climb the food chain. Mercury accumulates in fish that are eaten across continents. Plastics break into microplastics that have been found in the deepest ocean trenches and in human blood. The atmosphere has no customs office. Second, the economics boomerang. Electronics contain precious and critical materials, including gold, silver, palladium, copper, and cobalt. When devices are burned in backyard fires, most of that value is lost, which means manufacturers must dig up fresh ore elsewhere, often in conflict-affected regions with their own human costs. A circular system would shrink the pressure to extract new resources. Third, justice and security are at stake. Communities that bear the burden of other people’s consumption without sharing its benefits grow resentful, and health crises in poor regions strain global health systems and sap human potential. Cheap disposal also removes the incentive for manufacturers to design products that last, are repairable, and are safe to dismantle. The “out of sight” economy lets the entire planet keep making those mistakes.