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| HOW SAFE ARE THESE AFRICAN SCANVENGERS? |
10/23/2009 |
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We are familiar with the flock of vultures that hover around the abattoirs and diving at the sight of any entrails and carcasses, and off they go. A meal for the moment, before they return in their habitual “feeding in between meals.” The smokes from the incinerators beclouding the air as the butchers go about their routine business of getting beef to our menu. The same scenario is being replayed in the West African e-waste dumps from Accra to Lagos and other urban cities in developing countries. Clouds of black smoke and stinking odour emanating from burning plastic, copper wires, etc, hang over the sites of these vast dumps, as these scavengers- tiny figures, undauntedly maneuver the maze of cracked PC monitors and television screens, through slicks of oily water, stampeding swarms of flies and mosquitoes. While the vultures indulged in this exercise to scavenge for food, their human counterparts are in addition, treading on the threshold of death unwittingly. It is not the risk of just a cut from broken glasses or a pierce from hidden wires that these mainly young scavengers are risking. It is much more! Some of the children may not be aware that breaking open junked electronics exposes them to potentially harmful chemicals, such as lead, mercury and cadmium. Old computers for instance, can contain mercury, and heavy metals like nickel, cadmium and chromium. Plastic casings use flame retardant chemicals and monitors contain lead. Many don't know. No one is deterred.
Their primary concern is what they could salvage off the discarded electronic kit -valuable quantities of aluminum, copper, cadmium and other minerals, all of which can be sold on, if they can be extracted. They are ignorant that they also contain highly toxic materials, which have been linked to reproductive problems and cancers. Greenpeace campaigners noted that, “the people living and working on and around the dump sites, many of whom are children, are exposed to a cocktail of dangerous chemicals that can cause severe damage to health, including cancer, damage to the nervous system and to brain development in children". The open burning creates even more hazardous chemicals among which are cancerous dioxins.
Our growing mountain of unwanted televisions, computers and gadgets should, by law, be recycled or disposed of safely. But instead, they are being packaged into cargo containers and shipped to developing countries. The sight of children scavenging toxic wastelands overflowing with the West’s unwanted computers and televisions makes a mockery of international bans to prevent the dumping of e-waste and efforts of organizations campaigning for tightened e-waste controls. Developed countries should try to love their neighbour as themselves, and not give to their neighbour the things they don't only want but are agents of death.
A Chinese academic report published in "Environmental Health Perspectives" in 2007 confirmed that children living in the same area had higher levels of toxic metals in their blood than other children living outside the area. There is increasing evidence that this new health and environment problem is arriving in shipping containers from Western countries. Nigeria is one of the principal global destinations for "e-waste”. Some of these items may have been legitimately handed in to be recycled in an EU or U.S. city, but lax enforcement, vague legislation and a lack of political will has meant that it instead passes through a network of traders keen to profit from developing countries' hunger for hi-tech and a burgeoning second hand market.
About 80 percent of e-waste generated worldwide is not properly recycled. A small proportion is burnt in Western incinerators or buried in landfill sites. But much is exported to developing countries including India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria and Ghana. When it arrives, a further percentage may be repaired and sold on to populations desperate for affordable technology. But anything beyond the skills of local traders will end up dumped.
It is toxic waste from the U.S. and EU countries that is causing serious environmental and health problems in developing countries without the means to deal with this problem. Therefore, U.S. and EU must play the biggest role in stopping the spread of e-waste; they are most responsible for the problem and have the resources to tackle it. There are calls from environmental groups likes Greenpeace for electronics producers to do more to phase out their use of hazardous substances, and there are some signs of progress. If producers continue to use hazardous chemicals in their electronics and to fail to take responsibility for the safe disposal of their products, e-waste will continue to be dumped in developing countries.
The pollution and related health problems in countries where e-waste is dumped will increase massively as the amount of electronics used worldwide is growing exponentially and the number of countries used as dump sites will grow. It is high time the developed nations took responsibility for their waste. The countries and their companies have a moral obligation to treat Africa in exactly the same way that they do themselves. Until then, toxic black smoke will continue to cast a shadow over the lives of not only the scavengers but also those residing in the vicinity the dump.
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