Shifting Mountains of Electronic Waste

Local users are now the main source of electronic waste in Africa, but illegal imports of old computers, televisions, and other electronics devices from Europe, Asia, and North America still make their way there. That's the finding of Where Are WEEE in Africa?, a new United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report about waste electronic and electrical A large portion of these imports are of good quality, have a decent life expectancy, and bring many socioeconomic benefits, according to the report, but the rest is hazardous junk that is often resold and recycled under unsafe conditions. 2 e-waste that contains hazardous elements may not be exported to developing countries for disposal, although such waste can be sold as scrap inside a country. Nevertheless, at least 250,000 metric tons of e-waste still illegally enters the five African countries surveyed each year, comparable to about 5% of the e-waste produced in Europe. 1 Where Are WEEE? coauthor Mathias Schluep of Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, says most e-waste imports into West Africa come from Europe despite the presence of efficient European recycling facilities. Local use of electronics equipment has jumped in each of the five countries, accounting for an estimated 50–85% of the e-waste reported in these countries in 2010. The report estimates that 30% of all secondhand imports don't work, but that half the non-functioning items imported that year were repaired and resold locally. E-waste often ends up in informal recycling centers, where it is sorted for reuse or broken down by hand and picked clean for valuable metals, then destroyed in in efficient, toxicant-producing settings, Schluep says. Open fires are tended by children, who are paid by dealers collecting metals such as copper. Schluep says girls who sell water to the workers in these settings also are exposed to the potentially toxic by-products released from the low-temperature fires. The release of dioxins is on the rise from the burning of brominated flame retardants in plastics that house these components— dioxin emissions from cable burning in the greater Accra region, for instance, are estimated to correspond to about 0.3% of total dioxin emissions in Europe. 3 While that number may sound small, Schluep says Accra's tiny proportion, when extrapolated to the whole continent, adds up to a substantial amount. Recent measurements in Accra show increasing levels of polybrominated diphenyl ether flame retardants in breastmilk associated with informal …