From miles away great plumes of black acrid smoke mark the site of Sodom and Gomorrah, a sprawling slum on the outskirts of the Ghanaian capital, Accra.
As one edges closer to the world’s fastest-growing e-waste dumping site at Agbogbloshie, it is the smell that hits hardest. A blend of burning rubber and chemicals clogs the nostrils, stings the eyes and hangs at the back of the throat.
The dangerous trade in obsolete electronic products is being encouraged in part by Britain. The Times saw computers that had once been used in the offices of the Ministry of Defence, and workers claimed to have seen labels on the back of discarded PCs from several British companies.
An MoD spokeswoman said that obsolete computers had been sent to its Disposal Services Authority, which passed them on to Sims, one of its IT contractors. The computer identified in Ghana by its tag number T849 had been “sold to a British company for re-use”. The spokeswoman said that the MoD was trying to find out the name of the company, but added: “Where it goes once it’s in their hands is nothing to do with us.”
The waste stream from these products is termed “e-waste”. It is a vast and growing market, put by some estimates at 50 million tonnes a year. Much of it is dumped in Ghana and Nigeria, where without proper regulation or health controls pieces can be extracted and recycled by unemployed youths.
In a report last week the United Nations said that organised crime cartels, already active in drug smuggling in the region, were moving into the lucrative e-waste trade. The UN promised a co-ordinated approach in an attempt to keep it in check.
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Updates:
12:02 pm EDT, July 19th, 2009 — UK set to take back Brazil waste