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In the foyer of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic timber. A bit on the nostril, I believe: that is central California, residence of the grand Sequoia nationwide park. However you possibly can’t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter (to not point out the ceiling clearance problem), so the vacationer board has deemed it match to construct these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my telephone and take an image, amused and considerably appalled. What is going to reside longer, I ponder: the true timber or the fakes?
I haven’t come to Fresno to see the timber; I’ve come concerning the machine on which I took the image. In a warehouse within the south of the town, inexperienced vehicles are unloading pallets of previous electronics by way of the doorways of Electronics Recyclers Worldwide (ERI), the most important electronics recycling firm within the US.
Waste electrical and digital tools (higher recognized by its unlucky acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream on the planet. Digital waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a determine rising at about 2% a 12 months. Contemplate: in 2021, tech firms bought an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computer systems, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that’s ignoring the tens of millions of consoles, intercourse toys, electrical scooters and different battery-powered units we purchase yearly. Most are usually not disposed of however reside on in perpetuity, tucked away, forgotten, just like the previous iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer, stored “simply in case”. As the top of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail and refurbishing service, tells me: “Our largest competitor is apathy.”
Globally, solely 17.4% of digital waste is recycled. Between 7% and 20% is exported, 8% thrown into landfills and incinerators within the world north, and the remaining is unaccounted for. But Weee is, by weight, among the many most treasured waste there’s. One piece of digital tools can comprise 60 parts, from copper and aluminium to rarer metals similar to cobalt and tantalum, utilized in all the pieces from motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. A typical iPhone, for instance, incorporates 0.018g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and a tiny fraction of platinum. Multiply by the sheer amount of units and the impression is huge: a single recycler in China, GEM, produces extra cobalt than the nation’s mines annually. The supplies in our e-waste – together with as much as 7% of the world’s gold reserves – are price £50.9bn a 12 months.
Aaron Blum, co-founder and chief working officer of ERI, arrives sporting the company uniform of a tech government: navy hoodie and denims. “You’ll want these,” he says, handing me a pair of vivid orange earplugs. Blum and a good friend began ERI again in 2002, after leaving school. California had simply banned electronics from landfills as a consequence of hazardous chemical contents – however little recycling infrastructure existed. “I didn’t know something about electronics. I used to be a enterprise main,” Blum says. Right now, ERI has eight amenities throughout the US and processes 57,000 tonnes of scrap electronics a 12 months.
To get to the manufacturing unit ground, we move by way of a scanner. Safety is tight for a motive: tens of millions of {dollars}’ price of still-functioning or repairable electronics passing by way of make it a tempting goal for thieves. Within the loading bay, a goateed man named Julio is unloading pallets of shrink-wrapped screens from a Salvation Military truck – charity outlets are a serious supply of ERI’s product. All the pieces that arrives is scanned earlier than being dismantled and sorted. “You’ll be able to’t shred sure supplies, so that you’ve acquired to do a form,” Blum says.
Electronics are piled all over the place: flatscreens, DVD gamers, desktops, printers, keyboards. At a set of tables, 9 males are taking aside massive TVs, their electrical screwdrivers emitting a low whiz. One other is smashing a monitor from its casing with a hammer (“As a result of adhesive”). The dismantling crews, Blum says, will deal with as much as 2,948kg (6,500lb) of units a day.
We move a noticeboard marked Focus Materials, on which precise elements have been pinned as visible aids: motherboards, wire scraps, monitor casings. “This hits residence greater than studying a doc,” Blum says.
Scrap recycling incorporates so many various supplies that the trade has developed its personal shorthand: gentle copper is “Dream”, No 1 copper wire is “Barley”, insulated aluminium wire is “Twang”. There’s no such poetry right here, nevertheless. As an alternative, the extracted items are thrown into bins scrawled with issues like Copper and CAT-5 wiring. Inside one I discover a coil of LED Christmas lights. “Throughout the holidays we get a ton of those. That is all copper, within the wire,” Blum says, grabbing a handful. “We’ve got to undergo and manually reduce the bulbs off.”
Some supplies – paper, batteries – have to be eliminated for security causes. “If one thing will get by way of that may’t be shredded, you possibly can have a fireplace or an explosion,” Blum says. “If you’re shredding steel, it will get actually scorching.” Warmth-sensing cameras always scan the manufacturing unit ground for decent pockets, and the employees put on masks and gloves: e-waste incorporates toxicants starting from lead and mercury to polybrominated flame-retardants and PFAS.
The centrepiece of the power is the shredder, a hulking beast that stretches the size of the constructing, three storeys excessive, making a prodigious racket. (Therefore the earplugs.) As soon as the waste has been sorted, a employee in a Bobcat telehandler carries it over to the conveyor’s gaping maw, the place ultra-hardened spinning blades reduce by way of aluminium and plastic like ice in a blender. “If you’re shredding electronics, you’re creating mud that incorporates lead from the circuit boards, so we now have assortment hoods sucking up all of the mud,” Blum hollers. The mud must be disposed of as hazardous waste. I nod, exhilarated by the sheer violence of it.
Magnetic belts, air-sorters and filters separate the supplies as they move alongside the shredder, dropping them into big “tremendous sacks”. We cease at one and look down at a treasure haul of silver-grey flecks. “We name this treasured steel fines,” Blum says. “It’s gold, silver and palladium from the circuit boards.” A single sack’s contents are most likely price sufficient to purchase an honest automobile.
Farther alongside the road, the conveyor splits off into tributaries. A robotic arm whirrs above one, choosing up elements. “We used to have 15 pickers on this line. Now we now have two or three,” Blum says. The corporate spent some huge cash coaching the robotic, which picks far sooner than any human might and is now 97% correct. Blum appears to desire it to folks. “It involves work day-after-day and by no means acquired Covid,” he says. I can’t inform if he’s joking.
Close to the top of the road, extra metals roll into their tremendous sacks. ERI’s largest materials streams, by weight, are metal, plastic, aluminium and brass. The circuit boards are despatched to LS Nikko, a metals manufacturing big primarily based in South Korea; the aluminium goes to the US smelting big Alcoa. “The metal may go to your massive metal patrons within the US – they could ship it to mills in Turkey, however in any other case, all the pieces stays home.”
ERI prices prospects a payment for disposal, dismantling, knowledge removing and recycling. Most are motivated not by lowering waste, Blum says, however by cybersecurity: “Ninety-nine per cent of the electronics you’ve at the moment have your knowledge on them. So knowledge has turn into very, essential.” Paranoid about dropping industrial secrets and techniques to China, firms would quite have their previous machines wiped and shredded. “We’ve got Homeland Safety come to our amenities. They may escort the fabric to the shredder, stand watching whereas we run the fabric by way of, and typically even take the shred out.”
As we move again by way of the manufacturing unit, one thing catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a serious producer, nonetheless neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They’re model new, however right here to be shredded: “They don’t need this product resold and competing towards their new merchandise, so they need all of it destroyed.”
I’d anticipated to see this at ERI, however not so openly. Producers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold gadgets, often known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founding father of the restore chain iFixit, tells me, these “must-shred” contracts are the “soiled secret” of the recycling trade. (“The recyclers are determined for producer contracts, in order that they’ll do something and preserve their mouths shut,” Wiens says.) In 2021, for example, an ITV Information investigation within the UK discovered Amazon was sending tens of millions of latest and returned gadgets a 12 months to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the apply.)
In 2020, Apple sued a Canadian recycler for reselling among the 500,000 units it had despatched for shredding. The recycler, GEEP, blamed rogue staff – however the implication that the units had been working properly sufficient to promote set off a wider scandal. The unlucky fact is that firms destroy new and almost new merchandise on a regular basis. Luxurious and know-how manufacturers are reluctant to low cost or donate unsold gadgets that may undermine gross sales of latest fashions. Burberry, for one, admitted to incinerating £105m of unsold gadgets within the 5 years to 2018, to cease them being bought at discounted charges (Burberry additionally says it has ended the apply). In different instances, the monetary upside of processing unsold gadgets or returns is just not well worth the prices, so it’s cheaper to put in writing it off. Burn it or bury it, losing is reasonable.
There’s an previous axiom that they don’t make issues like they used to. Items cheaply purchased are cheaply made – no shock there. However on the subject of e-waste, a extra severe allegation is “deliberate obsolescence”, by which industries design merchandise with artificially brief lives, in order that they should be changed extra shortly.
Some obsolescence is sweet: changing vehicles for fashions with extra fuel-efficient engines, for instance. Equally, we all know the speedy churn of good units within the final decade has been pushed not by defective merchandise, however by the relentless tempo of technological progress.
Even so, the electronics trade has confronted allegations that deliberate obsolescence is contributing to our rising tide of e-waste. In 2017, for instance, Apple admitted it had been utilizing software program to gradual older iPhones. After a number of lawsuits, together with a $500m civil motion it settled in 2020, the corporate finally apologised. However it has additionally engaged in a sample of behaviour critics allege undermines its self-image as a sustainable enterprise: the iPhone 13, launched in 2021, initially included a function that will disable the Face ID unlock system if the display screen was changed with one not made by Apple.
Most of us would don’t know the right way to repair our telephone and even when we did, many producers have eliminated the flexibility for shoppers even to interchange batteries, arguing that repairs have to be completed by professionals and even by the corporate itself – for a hefty payment, in fact. iPhone house owners within the US who need to restore their telephone, for instance, should pay a $1,200 deposit to rent Apple’s particular instruments. I discover this disheartening, as a result of as a young person within the mid-2000s I spent my weekends working at a cell phone restore stall within the native purchasing centre, fortunately swapping out dud batteries and damaged screens from previous Nokias and Motorolas for brand spanking new ones.
However it isn’t simply amateurs who discover trendy electronics onerous to restore. As our units have turn into thinner and cheaper, they’ve turn into trickier to repair: once-removable elements printed on to circuit boards; screens held in place by adhesives; tiny earbuds that may’t be opened; software program locks that render older units unusable. This battle over restore has come to a head, because of organisations similar to iFixit (which, along with its restore outlets, publishes How To guides on-line totally free), the Restart Mission and Europe’s “proper to restore” guidelines. In France, new electronics should now be labelled with a “repairability index” rating, which charges merchandise on classes similar to spare elements and ease of entry.
Whereas most of us are most likely not going to aim to repair our telephones, even with a $1,200 restore package, the problem of restore has real-world penalties farther afield – usually in locations the place technical help is far more durable to search out.
Rich international locations have been exporting e-waste to poorer international locations for nearly so long as there was any to ship. However the commerce didn’t earn a lot consideration till 2002, when the Basel Motion Community launched Exporting Hurt, a now-infamous documentary concerning the environmental disaster e-waste was inflicting on recycling cities in southern China, significantly Guiyu. The movie confirmed desperately poor employees, together with kids, breaking down electronics by hand, burning the casings off wires and separating elements with acid baths, to entry the precious scrap metals inside.
The ecological and human toll was heartbreaking. Soil and water samples within the recycling zones contained lead and different heavy metals that exceeded each World Well being Group threshold; in a single research, 81.8% of kids below six surveyed have been affected by lead poisoning. The Chinese language authorities has since cleared lots of the casual recycling outlets in Guiyu and concentrated e-waste inside allotted industrial zones. However whereas China’s imports have fallen, the quantity we produce has solely grown. For the previous few years, probably the most infamous vacation spot for western electronics has been not China however a slum in Accra, Ghana. Dubbed “the world’s largest e-waste dump”, Agbogbloshie has been the topic of harrowing press protection, in addition to many viral YouTube movies (most shot by white westerners).
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I remember being horrified by the images: barefoot “burner boys” torching scrap wire as toxic fumes billowed from scorched earth; others cracking open imported phones against the backdrop of a dilapidated slum. Once again, it seemed, western waste electronics were being dumped on the world’s poor, who were reaping the toxic consequences. I decided I needed to see it for myself, and it turns out the reality is not quite so simple.
It’s a glorious day in Accra when I arrive outside Evans Queye’s electronics shop. “Welcome!” Queye, who is expecting me, steps out to offer a warm handshake. A spectacled man with a bright smile and a taste for even brighter shirts, Queye is an electronics importer who buys used laptops from the Netherlands to resell in Accra’s thriving secondhand market.
“Our biggest market is schools,” he says, gesturing into an open-fronted unit with sun-baked brickwork and faded signage, on the end of a row of similar shops. Inside, I spot several dozen new-looking Dell boxes, stacked chest high. Children have recently returned to classrooms after the pandemic and orders are picking up again. “Some of these have come from schools in Holland and will go to schools in Ghana. Come,” Queye says, gesturing at the high sun and perhaps noticing the sweat pooling at my neck. “We’ll talk in my office.”
Queye’s office is a few blocks away and as we drive there in his Volvo, I notice more repair shops. Outside one, rows of old Sony TVs hide in the shade of an awning. At another, kitchen appliances – almost all imported – spill into the street. Ghana’s economy, like many in this part of Africa, is built on the secondhand trade. Every year, more than 1.2m containers pass through the nearby port of Tema, loaded with pre-owned goods from the US, Europe and Asia. Not only electronics, but clothing and cars, too. In 2009, the last year with solid data, Ghana imported 215,000 tonnes of electronics, 70% of it used. The imports are by necessity, as much as anything: the minimum wage in Ghana is just 12.53 cedis (90p) an hour, so few people can afford to buy new. That’s where repairers like Queye come in.
His office is a cool, welcoming place, the desk dotted with old laptops, a ceiling fan looping lazily overhead. Queye has worked in the secondhand trade since he left school, in 2002. These days, he is a rep for Snew BV, a “circular telecoms” company based in the Netherlands, which collects used electronics from across Europe for resale. The newer models are resold in Europe, the older ones in Africa, where prices are lower. “The standard model we receive is five years old. But we can use a machine for as much as 15 years. I have a Pentium IV … ” He pulls out a Dell laptop that must be at least a decade old (Intel stopped making the Pentium IV in 2008). “I’ve been using it a very long time and it’s working perfectly.”
Later, Queye drives me across town to Danke IT Systems, a small repair shop on the second storey of a strip mall. It’s a tiny place, internet cafe-style, with a handful of machines set up for customers. The manager, a bright-eyed, bald 39-year-old named Wisdom Amoo, sits behind his desk with a laptop on his lap and a screwdriver in his hand. The cubbyholes and drawers around him are brimful of laptops and parts: Dells, mostly, but also machines from HP, Lenovo, Asus, Apple.
Amoo has just finished with the HP in his hands, which had a broken charging port. The part is soldered down, so he has improvised by converting a display port to accept a charging cable. “I need to cut a hole here and replace it with parts from another machine,” he says, gesturing with a precise finger. Certain models tend to have the same issues – screen burn in one, faulty trackpads in another – and repair work is a delicate skill: a single slip with a soldering iron can ruin a laptop rather than fix it. When he’s soldering, Amoo holds his breath.
In Accra, Queye explains, the scrap recyclers from dumps such as Agbogbloshie are part of the repair ecosystem. “If the repair shops had a machine that could not be repaired, then the scrap boys would pick it up and take it to Agbogbloshie. Then the repair shops would go down there to see if they could source parts. If I need a part for a TV with a working screen but a broken power system, by chance, I might find the same TV with a broken screen but the power system working.” Only after usable parts had been extracted would the remainder be dismantled and sold off for scrap.
This, Queye explains, is the context often overlooked in western media stories about Agbogbloshie. E-waste is not coming to Ghana to be dumped; it’s coming to be used. In that sense Agbogbloshie was not “the world’s largest e-waste dump”.
It’s a neighbourhood, home to schools, markets, churches and to a large informal settlement, Old Fadama, which houses an estimated 100,000 people, many immigrants from the poor northern regions of Ghana. The “dump” was a scrapyard – albeit a very large and well documented one, where the environmental controls were tragically lacking.
I’m writing in the past tense because Agbogbloshie no longer exists – at least, not in the form it once did. In 2021, the Ghanaian police raided and demolished the scrapyard. A couple of days after meeting Queye, I head there to see it for myself. From Old Fadama, I can look out across the Odaw River to where it once stood. The site has been razed. Bare earth covers the area of the former scrapyard and shops, a handful of heavy earth movers still dragging topsoil around. The government supposedly plans to build a hospital there.
I don’t intend to minimise the pollution caused at Agbogbloshie, which was nothing short of horrifying. The toxic toll of burning and dismantling the e-waste polluted the soil, the groundwater, the workers and even the food. In 2011, a Ghanaian researcher found soil at a nearby school exceeded European safety standards twelvefold; in another study, eggs from chickens living in the settlement contained 220 times the tolerable daily intake of dioxins. Agbogbloshie might not have been the largest e-waste dump in the world, but it was almost certainly among the most polluted.
With Agbogbloshie gone, many of the scrappers have simply crossed the river into Old Fadama, itself a sprawling place: colourful wooden dwellings separated by thin mud lanes, so close as to be almost on top of one another. Inside, some inhabitants sleep eight to a room. Few of the buildings have toilets or running water. The scrap workers have set up shop around the edge of the slum, on the river beach. There, several dozen men are dismantling waste: hammering apart old engine blocks and tearing down refrigerators. Here, a teenage boy is cutting up a gearbox while an older man prises the springs from an old car seat. With nowhere to keep their stocks, the scrappers store them in the open. One tangle of old bicycles looks like the aftermath of a collision on the Tour de France. The ground is flecked with snapped fragments of TV casings and old motherboards, which chickens and goats pick through, looking for lunch.
The burner boys have set up as far from the houses as possible, out beyond the children playing football. A dozen are gathered around a makeshift fire pit, carrying nests of wire on metal poles, which they press into the flames. The plastic melts away like marshmallow, giving off smoke. The air is singed with the wretched stench of plastics and burning solder. I want to talk to some of them, but my colleagues advise me not to. Since the government clearance, some of the scrap workers have become angry with western interlopers, whom they justifiably blame for the government’s decision to knock down their old homes. “They have given thousands of interviews,” Queye says. “They were still evicted.”
But Queye has known many of the scrap boys for years and offers to introduce me to some at his office. When I turn up next day, half a dozen young men – some of whom I’d still consider children – file in, looking down, wearing flip-flops and the tattered shirts of rich European football teams: Juventus, Chelsea, Real Madrid. Most are not from Accra. “We’re all from the north,” Yakubu Sumani, a wiry young man in tired black jeans and a brown T-shirt says.
Sumani had worked in the scrapyard since he was 15, earning 15-20 cedis (£1.10-£1.40) a day, buying and selling material. It wasn’t easy or glamorous, but it paid better than other jobs in the informal sector; many of the young men were able to earn enough to send some money back to their families.
Sumani recalls the clearing of Agbogbloshie: “The police came with weapons. They were arresting us. They beat some of us.” The scrappers scattered, some returning home, to scrap jobs in the north. “We have a lot of people who are displaced,” Queye says, quietly.
By destroying Agbogbloshie, the government has not eliminated the e-waste, but spread it. “The waste is still in the system. But where is it now? You can’t find it because it is scattered all over.” Queye and other scrap traders argue that it would be better to formalise the trade in Ghana: allocate an industrial zone, provide health and safety rules, give workers formal recognition and social support, such as pensions. “None of them have any savings,” he says. “What they make, they eat that night.” He fears the country will soon follow in the footsteps of others, including China, India, Thailand and Uganda, and ban the import of used electronics entirely. “If it happens here,” he says, “we are doomed.”
Too often, the way we talk about e-waste falls into a kind of guilt trap: aren’t we terrible, for inflicting our waste on others. But the story is rarely that simple. To see exports as “dumping” ignores the local importers and the reasons they do it. That isn’t to say we should permit dumping, but rather recognise that, for consumers in the global north, our role in this story is more difficult. (And that we aren’t always the protagonist.) A more serious attitude to e-waste might ask why extended producer responsibility schemes – in which technology companies pay into a central fund that goes towards recycling and product end-of-life programmes – aren’t sending far more money into the global south, where their devices end up. When we discuss the right to repair and obsolescence, we rarely see the last links in the chain, the people who often use those products the longest. Who is listening to their voices? Where are they at the table? As the journalist Adam Minter writes in his scrap travelogue Junkyard Planet: “When you think about it, insisting Africa’s secondhand traders adopt Europe’s definition of ‘waste’ … is a kind of colonialism.”
As I step out of Queye’s office into the bright sunlight, I’m reminded of something he’d said that first morning we met. “Every machine one way or the other will die.” Then he’d grinned that irresistible grin. “Like humans: everything has a lifespan.”
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