I'd like to see an arial photo of this site, because these images paint an awful picture without actually showing us how big this dump is. 15,000 tons/annum in one area shouldn't be all that much in the grand scheme of things but the photos manage to make it look like this is some sort of boundless hellscape.
I'd hazard the actual problem in this picture is Ghana's GDP/capita being in 4 digit territory and not the badly disposed of waste dump.
> I'd hazard the actual problem in this picture is Ghana's GDP/capita being in 4 digit territory and not the badly disposed of waste dump.
But if Ghana became a wealthy country and chose not to accept this waste, it will end up in the next one.
The waste exists regardless, and the economic incentive for the original market "export" it, that is, hide the problem, and the receiving country to reluctantly accept it for some other consideration, whether it be money or state aid or tariff-free export of something else, will always exist while the waste does.
Re: "badly disposed of waste dump", the difference between this and landfill anywhere in the west is largely just the soil on top. Staggering amounts of recyclable and dangerous stuff still gets thrown away in inappropriate ways right near where you live, I imagine. And if the global North exports waste to the global South, sooner or later the scale almost inevitably overwhelms the receiver.
There are a finite number of poor countries. At the rate wealth is being generated it is conceivable that they all get wealthy enough that the waste gets handled well.
And this stuff all started out in heavy metals deposits, it is already present underground somewhere. The only real question is how serious the effects on humans are with any method of disposal. It isn't at all clear there is a problem as long as it is buried fairly deep and not leeching into the water table.
>> There are a finite number of poor countries. At the rate wealth is being generated it is conceivable that they all get wealthy enough that the waste gets handled well.
This waste was dumped. The fact that poor people moved to the dump to make a living scavenging is a secondary phenomenon. Without them it still would have been dumped.
Yeah but it being dumped, in the abstract, doesn't matter. It is like complaining that there is a desert or an ocean - there are places on the earth that aren't good to live in. An electronics dump somewhere doesn't rate compared to something like the Pacific Ocean in terms of how much landmass gets sterilised.
This is a bit of an imaginary solution to the problem, is it not? And there will always be poor_er_ countries, which is the thrust of my point.
The economic incentive does not go away. Not least because it is clearly already cheaper to float it away on a huge boat than bury it where it is used.
One problem is land cost: it's extremely difficult to safely build new houses on top of landfill. But that doesn't explain everything, does it? After all the USA has plenty of room to bury all its consumer waste. Why is it exporting it?
> And this stuff all started out in heavy metals deposits, it is already present underground somewhere.
It does not start out all in one place, though. It starts out in small, dispersed concentrations of heavy metals, and ends up all in a few giant landfills in poorer countries. It's not clear what the risk is, but the lack of clarity doesn't mean there's no risk.
> This is a bit of an imaginary solution to the problem, is it not? And there will always be poor_er_ countries, which is the thrust of my point.
I don't mind if the waste comes to my country. Australia is big and we're wealthy enough that it'll be handled safely. If we were the poorest country on the globe then it'd be a non-issue.
Pictures are always taken from a very low angle and make it look much larger than it is. Behind the electronics area there is the riverbed. When you look at the picture, you might think the „dump site“ goes on and on. It doesn’t.
Trust me, I visited the place in 2014. Of course I had read about the place before. When I got out of the car, first impression was that our driver didn’t bring us to the right spot. It is not that big actually. The waste was mostly domestic then, judging from what I saw (CRTs for example).
Agbogbloshie is so much more than the processing of e-waste. Think of it as a commercial area. There was a large market for onions and other products. There were workshops where people build gas stoves out of car rims. Dismantling cars was big business. There was a Coca Cola Factory on the other side of the road. The air quality was really bad but it was mainly caused by burning tires, not cables. You cannot have tires sitting around there because they will always catch water (in any orientation) and therefore be a breeding bed for anopheles, which is the vector for malaria as you may be aware of.
Over all, the people who worked with electronics, not only the scrapers but also the people who actually repair and sell things, where only a fraction of the people living, working and trading goods there.
It might look different today. Government cleaned the riverbed at least once in order to prevent floorings. There were also attempts to move the onion market. Don’t know if that really happened. I am not saying everything was fine there. Working with e-waste is dangerous. There are unhealthy levels of lead and other things in the soil and in the people. But there was neither the infrastructure nor the workers to process significant loads of foreign e-waste. Even 15,000 tons per year (figures thrown around then in western media where an order of magnitude higher) is two heavy trucks per day.
I will post a few other sources later but have to sleep now. But check this out:
It doesn't matter how big the dump is, it shouldn't exist from first principles.
Think about how incredibly worked out these devices are, how many brilliant people worked to design them, to figure out how to source the materials, how to combine them, etc... Miracles of engineering they are. Everything planned out carefully.
And then you throw them away.
That's the idea. It's not an accident. The lifecycle of these machines was designed.
It's fucking insane. The best you can say about it is that it's not quite as insane as animal sacrifice.
I'd hazard the actual problem in this picture is Ghana's GDP/capita being in 4 digit territory and not the badly disposed of waste dump.