Tuesday 4 December 2012

YT: E-Waste Hell - Ghana

I watched E-Waste Hell – Ghana on the Journeyman Pictures YouTube channel.  I have written about this issue before, but it is one that is dear to my heart, so I write about it again, using a different source.  The documentary from October 2011 is just shy of seventeen minutes, so it will be easy to make time to watch it!

An electronic waste recycler in Sydney, Australia, Joe Dickio, says he saw hundreds of televisions piling up at a charity depot in Sydney.  When exporters offered to take the televisions off their hands, the charity depot accepted.  Joe’s electronic waste company explained to them that this is wrong.  In response, the charity said they did not have the funds to dispose of the televisions properly.  Personally, I find this shocking.  I find it hard to believe that there is no way to have events geared at funding recycling of electronic waste, so as to avoid environmental, social and health problems that are directly associated with this kind of waste.  Many goods come from Australia, with no permits exist that allow Australian electronic waste to be shipped to any African location.  Despite this, Australian customs does not keep records on how many shipments leave for Ghana.  In the past two years, though, fifteen containers have been stopped from leaving Australia, albeit no prosecutions have taken place.

Llambert Faabeluon of the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency found this shocking and said that personally, he would like these people to be jailed.  He also says that Ghana has limited resources, making it difficult to deal with these problems.  Faabeluon did state that he wants to know why this kind of waste is leaving the core in the first place.  I completely agree.  If the waste had been properly disposed of, then this problem would not have come to such an extreme level in Ghana!  Illegal shipments started arriving in Ghana in 2003.  Now, around five hundred container-loads every month arrive in Ghana (about seventeen a day).  Though they are sent as working used goods, a broken frame shows that the sending parties know that goods are not still in working condition.

Mike Ananie, an environmental journalist, has been investigating the problem.  He brings the film-makers to a colleague of his, who shows them how easy it is to recover information from a computer.  This is something that is happening around Ghana, however not everyone is doing this with good intentions.  People and institutions around the world are therefore unknowingly sending their personal or confidential information to Ghana.  This information can then be found and used, increasing the threat of identity theft, something that can be linked to sakawa (click the word to watch a video for a brief explanation).  This is distributed throughout the country through a small fraction of electronics that can be fixed up and resold locally.  Through this resale, inexpensive used goods can be supplied to locals and more than 10 000 people get a regular income.

Despite this, what does not work ends in the landfill at Agbogbloshie, Accra.  This is Africa’s biggest electronic wasteland, where the poorest try to get money from what they can find.  Often, these are children who can be as young as five years old trying to get at the metals that can be resold, for less than one dollar a day.  By burning the plastic to get to the metal, they breathe in toxins that negatively affects their growth.  They also may complain of breathing problems and headaches.  Nearby, in the streets of Accra, the smoke affects peoples’ health both by their presence near the landfill and through the food they buy there.  Also, heavy metals which cause organ cancers go into the atmosphere, for everyone to breathe.

At the end of the film, Ananie recalls a time when that area had luscious growth.  He and his friends used to play within this growth.

Jimmy Carter:
"Solid wastes" are the discarded leftovers of our advanced consumer society. This growing mountain of garbage and trash represents not only an attitude of indifference toward valuable natural resources, but also a serious economic and public health problem.