From The Japan News

The orange flesh of a papaya is like an oval gash in the landscape at Agbogbloshie, Ghana’s vast dumping site for electronic waste, where everything is smeared and stained with mucky hues of brown and sooty black.

A woman kneels among the carcasses of discarded computer monitors, scooping the fruit’s flesh for workers hungry from a morning’s work scavenging to eat.

If the appliances at Agbogbloshie were not being dismantled — plucked of their tiny nuggets of copper and aluminium — some of them could almost be technology antiques.

Old VHS players, cassette recorders, sewing machines, computers from the 1980s and every period since sit haphazardly on massive mounds in the dump, which meanders as far as the eye can see.

“Electric waste comes here from all over the world — but especially from Europe,” says Karim, 29, who, like almost all the scrap dealers at Agbogbloshie, originally comes from northern Ghana but has been salvaging, buying and selling at the dump for 10 years.

“We get a lot of health problems here, but we manage, because we need the money.”

Earlier this month, the United Nations’ “Solving the E-Waste Problem” initiative (StEP), which was set up in 2007 to tackle the world’s growing crisis of electronic waste, warned that the global volume of such refuse is expected to grow by 33 percent over the next four years. Much of it will be dumped in sites such as those in Agbogbloshie, increasing the risk of land contamination with lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, flame retardants and other hazardous materials.

Agbogbloshie seems chaotic — almost apocalyptic in places — but there is an order to the large, desolate, rubbish-strewn site.

Written by Afua Hirsch | Read more at The Japan News