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:
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:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01973...
One of the authors is a geographer at the University of Ghana. Full paper should be available via your local library or sci-hub.