With its intense black smoke, the Agbogbloshie landfill in Ghana is one of the largest and best known in Africa. But its sad reputation does not make it an exception. In Nigeria, but also in Togo, Benin and Ivory Coast, there are similar landfills where electrical and electronic waste of all kinds is dismantled, burned and stripped. For a few CFA francs, young people, sometimes children, work hard on washing machines or old mobile phones to extract a few grams of precious materials such as gold or copper.

Africa is witnessing a huge electronic waste problem
According to the International Labor Organization, more than 16 million children work in the industrial sector, including waste treatment. An activity that presents very high risks to their health and the environment: delayed neurological development due to exposure to lead, reduced lung and respiratory capacity caused by the inhalation of toxic fumes, etc.
E-waste recycling activities are responsible for the emission of some 1,000 harmful substances such as mercury, nickel and flame retardants. These toxic pollutants poison the e-waste convicts, but also the soil, air and water. And they affect communities that sometimes live far from these informal recycling sites.

Workers salvage metal from broken tools. Jon Spaull/SciDev.Net
The Basel Convention, an ineffective tool
Since it came into force in 1992, the Basel Convention has banned the export of hazardous waste from one country to another. But many Western countries continue to export it, mainly to Africa. To circumvent this legislation and thus avoid the cost of decontamination, these exporting countries present a large part of their defective equipment as second-hand devices that must be reused. A sleight of hand that saddens Edem d’Almeida, creator of Africa Global Recycling in Lomé:
“Everyone wants to have access to technology. Everyone wants a refrigerator or a mobile phone, but in countries where the minimum wage is less than 100 euros, no one can buy them new, hence the importance of recycling and second-hand products. It is an economy that Africa lives on. But the problem is that a large quantity of this equipment arrives on the continent when it is no longer repairable and ends up in our landfills. So, we should not reduce this problem to the traffic of waste developed by criminal organizations, but more generally to all second-hand equipment that ends up as waste.”

Garbage Out, Garbage In: How Europe’s e-waste problem is a burden on Africa
According to Edem d’Almeida, the quantity of electronic waste on the continent is therefore largely underestimated, since it does not take into account this informal market for second-hand products. For him, it is up to the States to monitor what enters their territories, so that Africa does not turn into the planet’s dumping ground.