Resource Recycling Magazine: In my opinion: Malpractice in e-scrap stewardship

In My Opinion: Malpractice in e-scrap stewardship

By Robin Ingenthron, Fair Trade Recycling

September 9, 2015

It was a hot day in early April in Agbogbloshie, an area of Ghana that's been called the biggest e-waste dump in the world. We were interviewing scrappers.

Rachid is 22. His father died before he can remember. In Ghana's rural north, Rachid and his siblings cut and burned trees to make charcoal, until he married and had a son. He came to Agbogbloshie, a neighborhood in the Ghanaian capital of Accra known for onion markets and scrap recycling. "I hustle", he says, explaining that he does this work to feed his family. But recently his pride in hustling had been taken away. His picture appeared that week in Washington Post. It gave his age as "between 13 and 18."

Beside me, three Ghana technicians – Wahab, Emmanuel and Jaleel – translate Rachid's take on Agbogbloshie. Wahab, Emmanuel and Jaleel have done well. They are in the reuse business, repairing and servicing computers and displays. They also import used electronics.

Twenty years earlier, a technician no doubt imported the VCR that Rachid is now dismantling by hand. It was likely used in Accra for more years than the original owner. But finally, someone in the city has sold it for scrap. No intelligent design, or manufacturer stewardship, could save this VCR from the DVD.

Not much is actually burned here. Tires, mostly, and automobile wire. No circuit boards or computers. Nothing here in Agbogbloshie is being boiled in acid. And nothing here arrived recently by ship. The story that appears over and over again, that hundreds of sea containers per month head here, is a hoax. Rachid and his friends, Awal and Razak, collect stuff like motors and VCRs by pushcart. On a good day, they may get 50 TVs, computers, printers and other devices. On a slow day? Awal shrugs – maybe 20. That is for the entire group of e-waste scrappers that work across the entire site of Agbogbloshie.

Twenty-seven individuals were burning wire when we visited. Still more were on the streets, collecting with carts. Far more than that worked with automobiles, bikes, buses and refrigerators. A few hundred scrappers work the site, but the footprint of the area dedicated to "e-waste" scrapping is just a few thousand square feet.

Looking at Africa with African eyes

The World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association's (WR3A) upcoming 2015 Report on Agbogbloshie is written from Africa's point of view. Africans living in America and Europe (like Wahab and "Hurricane" Joe Benson) are the exporters. They arrange the shipments of second-hand products from Europe and the U.S. They cherry-pick equipment from Western collectors and move it to Africa's tech sector, where savvy geeks like Emmanuel and Jaleel will then take the helm. According to a study from the Secretariat of Basel Convention looking at used electronics imported into Nigeria, 91 percent of devices of a sample were working or could be used after basic repair.  The incidental breakage and spoilage is no different from the shipping damage to cars, rice or new appliances. It's not perfect, but 9 percent isn't criminal, either.

The German Council for Sustainable Development, and Interpol’s Phase II Report (Electronic Waste and Organized Crime: Assessing the Links) have indicated Africans themselves handle both the export and import of electronics bound for reuse in the continent. And Africans are the ones whose incomes are destroyed, whose goods are seized and who are going to prison.

For more than a decade, it was a popular theory that companies based in wealthy nations would "stack and pack" containers with scrap electronics to avoid recycling costs. Original owners of equipment needed stewards to "oversee" Africa's demand, the reasoning went, because selling used electronics to Africans would be risky and reckless. The Basel Convention (which explicitly allows import for repair), an NGO claimed, must be "amended" to require wealthy nations to repair their own used equipment.

Merriam-Webster defines stewardship as "the activity or job of protecting and being responsible for something." In reply, African technicians might say, "You're not the boss of me."

Wahab, Jaleel or Emmanuel wouldn't import a VCR today, even if you paid them, and even though a VCR has more copper and steel than a DVD player. A VCR no longer has a market for resale, and as Joe Benson says in a soon-to-be-released film called "Clean Hands," the business of moving electronics here is focused on reuse and reuse only.

The "export crime" theory was built on hoax statistics. A decade ago, NGOs announced that the computers Africans were exporting were not being reused, that the majority – 80 percent – were dumped in junkyards and pounded apart for metals. They named Agbogbloshie as "the largest e-waste dump in the world." Poverty is not a hoax, and pollution is not a hoax, but 80 percent dumping, and 600 containers arriving in Agbogbloshie per month, and it being the planet's largest e-waste dumping point – if that's not a hoax, what is the word for?

A growing economy tied to reuse

The greater Accra area has more than 4 million people, with electricity. Nearly every resident has a TV, a computer or a cell phone. Many have VCRs sitting in their closets. Yes, some of those have asset tags that label the material as originating in from London, Paris or New York. Those asset tags are also 20 years old in many cases.

The cars and appliances that sit in Agbogbloshie were used for years, generated by millions of homes and businesses in Ghana's largest metropolis. Cities make waste.

It's not healthy in Agbogbloshie here, nor is it pretty or safe. But the notion of cutting off the pipe of material exports is an emotional reaction, and it's misguided. Of the millions of dollars raised by anti-export organizations and interests, not a penny went to Emmanuel, Wahab, Jaleel, Rachid, Awal or Razak. Furthermore, British taxpayers are paying to destroy working equipment and to imprison Benson, an African TV repairman jailed for reuse.

I have formed close friendships with Africans who import second-hand equipment. The "tests" they use for electronics are more efficient than "plug and play" guidelines written by EU regulators for customs enforcement. Not a single African tech got to comment on the PACE standards. They'd say used electronics are more affordable, last longer and have better value than new goods, and the tests they use are superior to "plug and play" tests. Shipping 700 unrepairable televisions, or 3,000 functioning VCRs, from the U.S. to Ghana costs four times more than the copper is worth. There is no way, Africans say, to break even by breaking TVs.

In a quote from clips from the to-be-released documentary "Clean Hands," Benson says, "If you think I buy equipment, put it in a boat and follow it all the way to Africa, pay customs duties and truck it to a landfill – if you find that, put me in prison for 100 years."

Thanks to Africa's tech sector and the reuse options it's spawned, the continent has achieved achieve double- and triple-digit growth, year upon year upon year, in "teledensity."

Without the African network of exporters and importers, World Bank researchers say, investors would lack the "critical mass of users" necessary for TV and cell phone towers, programming and other capital investments. The trade has created more than just good jobs and affordable electronics. It connected the continent.

The best and brightest

The psychological effects of repeatedly associating African children, tire fires, fake stats and ghoulish words with electronics exports seem obvious, and the effect of press images on implicit bias are well-documented. Africa’s tech sector, and Africa’s technology users and consumers, are depicted less often than African scrappers in Agbogbloshie and elsewhere, who receive the material decades later. This art of dissociation, or "otherization," is an easy sell that gets easier with each photo essay. When we educate society about a "risk" with close-up pictures of young minorities, there is a lingering cost to the social fabric. Harvard's online experiment, "Project Implicit," is an interesting study of the subconscious effects of negative propaganda.

Africa pays a lot of money to buy, transport and distribute second-hand goods. Fair Trade Recycling wants to use the value of this trade to give incentives to Africa's tech sector to do for its "e-waste" what it has done for Africa’s teledensity. We'd sell laptops and displays cheaper to them, in return for them hiring recyclers like Rachid to take back and properly recycle the CRT televisions their predecessors imported, by the millions, in the 1980s and 1990s. They aren't being dumped by Western boats, but they aren't a hoax, either.

Fair Trade Recycling has an idea about who to put in charge – Africa's best and brightest. We can start by not boycotting them, by not racially profiling them as "waste tourists" and by not locking them in prison.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not imply endorsement by Resource Recycling, Inc. If you have a subject you wish to cover in a future Op-Ed, please send your suggestion to [email protected] for consideration.

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