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Feb 17, 2008 11:11 pm US/Pacific
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Assignment Africa: eWaste in Ghana
Reporting
Dana King
Accra, Ghana (CBS 5) ―
CBS 5 anchor Dana King recently completed a trip to Ghana in western Africa. This week she reports on the trouble of toxic e-waste, the struggle to find clean water in remote villages, the journey Americans often take to find a bit of their own heritage in the history of slavery, and the clash between an ancient belief in witches and the standards of modern justice. Below is Part 1: e-Waste in Ghana.
You smell Agbogbloshie market before you see it. It is filthy, crammed with people and junk. The path into the heart of the dump narrows the farther in we walk. We are obviously unwelcome. A young man grabs at our camera, asking "Why are they shooting?"
We need to get approval to be here. There is actually a tribal chief of Agbogbloshie. We sit with him and a group of men that are his elders. Since we have come unannounced, it's touch and go, but young chief allows us entry, but only as far as the river.
Blackened sludge runs through the dump and out to the ocean. And what look like raindrops on the surface are actually mosquitos, likely carrying malaria.
We cross the river and meet the second chief. It's another 25 minutes of diplomacy before we are escorted in to wander the littered landscape.
And that's when we see it: an enormous pile of computers. In fact, there are acres full of these first-world relics chucked into a third-world heap. Where did they come from?
We find labels on them from Radius Incorporated of Sunnyvale and ViewSonic from Walnut in Los Angeles County. And those are just a few. All the major manufacturers are represented here: Apple, Epson, IBM, Dell - all these companies, all this waste in Accra, Ghana.
Kids can make a lot of money from this scrap because it's loaded with copper. To get to it, the surrounding parts have to be burned. We're told that a small bundle can bring in the equivalent of five dollars, pretty good when many Ghanaians exist on about two dollars a day.
But the cost is high. Computers release a cocktail of toxins when they are burned or smashed. There is lead, dioxin, and mercury, and many others toxic substances. Goats feed on the trash. Children seem unaware of the danger.
Apparently, so is Ghana's government: the Ministry of Education and Sports has a field right next to where people are burning toxic material. The children play soccer in the smoke.
"It's just horrific, these people are being poisoned right before our very eyes," says Barbara Kyle of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition.
Kyle looked at our Ghana video with disgust. Her organization is a non-profit trying to get the government and computer industry to recycle responsibly. There are laws against dumping e-waste in poor nations and the Environmental Protection Agency considers computers hazardous in general. But Kyle tells us, there's a problem:
"The EPA has deliberately created huge loopholes by tinkering with the definition of hazardous waste," she explains. "They've created the circuit board exemption, the precious metals exemption, the scrap metals exemption, the recycling exemption.. the exemptions cover every product three times over so it doesn't count as hazardous waste anymore."
But it is dangerous waste and it's filling up developing world dumpsites at an alarming rate. The United Nations environment program estimates the annual tally at around fifty million tons of electronic cast-offs per year. Even the best of environmental intentions wind up in places like Accra.
For more information on how to properly recycle your electronics, check out this link from the Electronic TakeBack Coalition
For more information on aid to Africa, call World Vision at 510-525-5665 or email amason@worldvision.org.
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)