Children in Africa at risk from Britain’s toxic e-waste

Tonnes of toxic waste from British rubbish dumps is being sent illegally to Africa, putting thousands of children’s lives at risk from poisoning, an investigation has uncovered.
Our growing mountain of unwanted televisions, computers and gadgets should, by law, be recycled or disposed of safely. But instead, hundreds of thousands of binned electrical items are being packaged into cargo containers and shipped to countries such as Nigeria and Ghana, where they are stripped of their raw metals by young men and children working on poisoned waste dumps.

A television that had been broken beyond repair was traced to an electronics market in Lagos, Nigeria, in a joint investigation published today (Wednesday) by The Independent newspaper, Sky News, and Greenpeace. The TV had been left at a rubbish dump in Basingstoke run by Hampshire Country Council. Under environmental protection laws, it was classified as hazardous waste and should never have left the UK.

The television, fitted with a satellite tracking device, was bought by a London-based dealer, one of dozens of operators buying up a significant proportion of the estimated 940,000 tonnes of domestic electronic waste, or e-waste, produced in the UK each year and sending it for export.The television had undergone a 4,500-mile journey from Essex to the giant Alaba electronics market in Lagos, where up to 15 shipping containers of discarded electronics from Europe and Asia arrive every day. About a third of it is moved to dumps where waste pickers scavenge amid a cocktail of burning heavy metals and dioxins.

“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,” said Consumers International, which is campaigning for tightened e-waste controls. It added that Western governments, including the UK, have shown little desire to deal with the root cause of this problem.”

The television is just one example of a broader problem with the enforcement of legislation, which allows the export of functioning equipment but prohibits broken electronic goods from being sent outside the EU to a country with a developing economy.

Campaigners say dealers offering around £3 for a television and £1 for a computer monitor to waste sites are undercutting specialist recycling companies, creating a “grey market”.

Hampshire County Council has launched an inquiry into its waste sites but insisted it and its household waste site contractor, Hopkins Recycling, only used dealers who exported functional equipment.

Nigeria is one of the world's 20 poorest countries. One-fifth of Nigerian children die before the age of five. SOS Children’s Villages has three projects in the country including one in Isolo, near to the Lagos rubbish dump.

Written by Hayley Jarvis for SOS children