At a junkyard in Lagos, many people were rummaging through piles of discarded electrical equipment. For 38-year-old Malaia and many others like her, this electronic waste is not only a source of livelihood but also poses considerable danger. As a mother of four children, Malaia disassembled old computers and mobile phones with just a hammer and her own hands.She said, “I’d like to do something else… but I can feed my family with this job.”
Her weekly income is only about 10,000 naira (approximately 7.29 US dollars). However, she did not receive any compensation for exposure to toxic substances – burning plastic and wires emitted toxic smoke, polluting the air and soil.
The global problem of discarded electrical appliances is rapidly intensifying
Discarded electronic products have become the fastest-growing type of waste worldwide. In 2022 alone, approximately 62 million tons of electronic waste were generated globally, an increase of 82% compared to 2010. It is projected to reach around 82 million tons by 2030. However, only about one fifth of them were safely recycled. This means that billions of dollars’ worth of gold, copper and other materials are wasted, while lead, mercury and flame retardants end up in landfills.
A large proportion of the world’s discarded electrical appliances eventually end up in more economically vulnerable countries. West Africa – especially Ghana and Nigeria – has become a major distribution center. Despite international bans, it still receives second-hand mobile phones and computers from Europe and North America.
The African electronic waste problem
The African continent itself generates approximately 2.9 million tons of electronic waste each year (about 2.5 kilograms per person), but only a very small portion (about 1%) is collected or recycled through formal channels. On the contrary, almost all of this garbage is handled by informal waste disposal departments. In Accra, Ghana or Lagos, Nigeria, garbage dumps are everywhere, piled up with discarded televisions, mobile phones and circuit boards.
Workers – including many women and young children – manually dismantle these wastes. They pry open the equipment by hand, often burning off the plastic casing or soaking the components in acid to extract valuable metals. These primitive methods release a variety of toxic substances (such as lead, cadmium, dioxins, etc.) into the air, soil and water.
Inhaling the smoke produced by burning circuit boards can put nearby residents at risk of blindness, kidney damage and cancer. These health hazards may take many years to manifest. A recent study has found that infants born near Abobo Losi in Ghana or Solus II in Lagos have a mortality rate about 10 percentage points higher in the first few weeks after birth than those born far from these areas. The medical team also reported that even without any deaths, children growing up in these areas were more prone to respiratory problems, low birth weight and learning difficulties than those in other places.
Children bear the heaviest burden. According to the World Health Organization’s estimation, there are as many as 18 million children worldwide (some as young as 5 years old) working in the informal waste disposal industry, including electronic waste disposal, where they often help their parents disassemble small parts, absorbing toxins.
For instance, scientists found that the dioxin content in an egg collected from a waste yard in Aboblosi, Ghana, was 220 times the safe intake limit for children. The lead content in the blood of children in these areas is also astonishingly high. This led to an invisible epidemic: nerve damage, developmental delay and chronic diseases.
Waste Colonialism and Future Prospects
This kind of unfairness is very obvious. As an environmental report points out, this situation can be called “waste colonialism” : Rich countries update their mobile phones and dump the outdated devices abroad to reduce their own costs, but pass on the health costs to poorer countries. When an American teenager buys a new mobile phone, he may never hear about the Ghanaian boy Coffey – he was forced to inhale toxic smoke just to recover copper from the circuit board of his old phone. However, their fates are interlinked. Every time we buy a new electronic product, we may become a source of pollution for others.
Experts believe that change is imminent. They called for strict enforcement of the ban on illegal electronic waste exports, investment in safe recycling technologies, and support for alternative livelihoods for scavengers. Although global rules such as the Basel Convention exist, due to poor enforcement, the scale of scrap yards in Lagos and Accra is still expanding. For Malaia and millions of people like her, there is an urgent need for safer options. Recognizing their predicament – choosing between hunger and poisoning – is the first step towards achieving justice.
If governments, enterprises and consumers can act together, the world may break this cycle of dumping and truly achieve the recycling of electronic products. Today’s high school students, as future voters and consumers, can also help advocate for these solutions because they know that the true cost of an electronic product cannot be measured merely in US dollars.
