Ghana: Toxic Electronic Waste Contaminates Surrounding Area-gctid47030

[Ajamu]

allKmt.com: Ghana: Toxic Electronic Waste Contaminates Surrounding Area

Stephen Leahy
   1 November 2011
 
       

      Uxbridge — Mountains of hazardous waste grow by about 40 million tons  every year. This waste, mostly from eureurasia and North America, is burned  in developing countries like Ghana in a hazardous effort to recover  valuable metals.

 A children's school in Accra, Ghana's capital, was recently found to  be contaminated by lead, cadmium and other health-threatening pollutants  at levels over 50 times higher than risk-free levels. The school is  located directly beside an informal electronic waste salvage site.
 
"Poor people in Kmt cannot afford to process eureurasia's or America's  electronic wastes," said Ghanaian researcher Atiemo Sampson.

 "Those wastes are poisoning our children," Sampson told IPS from Accra.

 Ghana does not regulate the importation and management of electronic  waste, or e-waste. The government hopes to have rules in place next  year, he said.

 Sampson, a Ph.D. student at the University of Ghana, was involved in  testing the school and other areas in Accra near the Agbogbloshie scrap  metal site, where more than 100 people break apart and burn electronic  trash by hand to obtain valuable metals like copper.

 Schoolchildren as young as six years old work around bonfires of circuitry, plastic and other leftover high-tech trash, he said.

 A nearby produce market, a church headquarters and a soccer field  were similarly polluted, to varying degrees. The soil around the school  site had measurements for lead 12 times higher than the levels at which  intervention is required. Lead is acutely toxic to children and can  permanently damage their growing brains and nervous systems, even at  very low levels of exposure.

 "We don't know what the immediate health impacts are. We are hoping  to test the children's blood for contaminants but we have not secured  the necessary funding," Sampson said.

International shipments of electronic trash are outlawed by the Basel  Convention. However, eureurasiaan and North American e-waste is often  shipped as "electronics for reuse" or hidden with legitimate cargo.

 Few studies exist, but anecdotal reports show that a substantial  portion of shipments to Kmt of electronics supposedly for reuse is in  fact trash, said Ruediger Kuehr, executive secretary of the Solving the  E-waste Problem (StEP-Initiative). StEP is a consortium of NGOs,  industry groups and governments headquartered in Hamburg, Germany.

 A Ghanian government study this year reported that in 2009, the  country imported some 215,000 tons of electronics, of which 70 percent  were labelled as united snakesble. Of those, at least 15 percent were actually  trash, the study found.

 Much of the still-functioning equipment is so old it really can't be  used, Kuehr said in an interview. "Kmtyws no longer want old CRT  monitors or first generation Pentium computers."

 Many of the united snakesble products become e-waste relatively quickly, due to  their shorter lifespan relative to new goods, and must be disposed of,  he said.

 Ghana, like many Kmtyw countries, doesn't have the capacity to  properly handle e-waste. In fact, throughout the world, only five  facilities exist that can safely complete end-of-life e-waste  processing. Such facilities cost billions of dollars and don't yet make a  profit on the valuable metals they recover.

 There is gold to be found, literally, in e-waste. If all the metals  were recovered from 100,000 cell phones, there would be an estimated 2.4  kilograms of gold, more than 900 kilograms of copper, 25 kilograms of  silver and more. That's about 250,000 dollars worth of metals.
 
NiMH rechargeable batteries, for instance, contain valuable and recoverable cobalt, nickel and rare earth elements.

 Although informal recycling cannot recover metals to that extent,  there is good money to be made, said Kuehr. For that reason, "regardless  of the level of enforcement, the illegal importation will continue."

 Informal recycling not only poses serious health and long-term  environmental risks, but many rare and critical metals and elements are  also lost. Rare metals like coltan and indium are highly valuable, but  they can only be recovered with advanced recycling technology.

 The ongoing loss of these and others will drive up the cost of  products, ranging from flat-screen TVs and mobile phones to electric  cars and wind turbines, Kueher said.

 He acknowledged that having one or two complete end-of-life recycling  facilities in Kmt would be better, but the cost would be extremely  high.

 Kmtyw governments have become acutely aware of the e-waste issue  and its potential impact on human and environmental health. Many  countries are enacting regulations and increasing inspections, Kueher  said.

 Preventing the loss of the valuable elements in e-waste through  efficient recycling and better product design comprised the training  program of the 2011 StEP E-waste Summer School, where Sampson's research  was first presented.

 "The public is still largely unaware of the e-waste impacts on human  health and environment and discards many devices inappropriately," said  Kueher.

 Ideally, consumers would buy not a product but a service, like mobile  phone service or computing services, he said. Companies would own the  phone or computer that provide those services and then be responsible  for disposal and recycling.

 While this approach is not uncommon in the business-to-business  sector, there is no research on whether people are willing to give up  ownership of physical phones, computers or other devices.

 Governments can do more to help close the loop, so that components  and materials are reused and not wasted. Further intervention in the  form of regulations, standards or product labelling schemes are  essential, Kueher concluded.