“Basically, if you went through every dangerous chemical and every potential risk that you could expose yourself to, improper (and the improper bit is very important) e-waste recycling – in the way that it’s carried out in some of these situations – is going to expose you to all of them.”

I’m talking to Margaret Bates, Professor of Sustainable Wastes Management at the University of Northampton, about Agbogbloshie, the suburb of Accra in Ghana that is the world’s largest e-waste dump. I’ve asked her what potential dangers the informal recyclers encounter there, and the list she’s come back with is very, very long. While workers risk physical injury by manually breaking up cast-off phones, televisions, computers and so on (usually without any protective equipment), the main concerns arise from the burning of plastics, often done to access valuable metals. “You’ve got metal exposure, heavy metals, which have neurotoxic effects, potential hereditary and developmental problems”, she continues. “And with plastic burning, we’re talking about relatively high levels of, and direct exposure to, dioxins. So, let’s say somebody is burning a bundle of cables, and they’re manipulating them as they’re burning them, all the fumes that are coming off, they’re breathing in. The active agent in Agent Orange, which was used in the Vietnam War, is a dioxin, and that’s the sort of thing that people are exposing themselves to.”

Indeed, the World Health Organisation (WHO) warns: ‘E-waste-connected health risks may result from direct contact with harmful materials such as lead, cadmium, chromium, brominated flame retardants or polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), from inhalation of toxic fumes.’ And a recent survey released by the WHO and the United Nations University looking at e-waste’s health impact on children lists outcomes including immune problems, respiratory and skin diseases, growth retardation, cancer and developmental effects.

And it’s not just the actual recyclers who are exposed to risk. In Agbogbloshie, for example, there are around 4,000 workers who dismantle millions of tonnes of e-waste a year, in close proximity to the area’s other 40,000 residents. “The water that’s around the site is highly contaminated, the soil’s contaminated, the food’s contaminated”, Bates says, noting that even if children, say, don’t work on the site, they’re still exposed to many toxins, whether onsite or in their homes and schools, which are located nearby.

The effects are so bad that even those visiting the site feel ill very quickly. German photographer Kevin McElvaney, who took the powerful photos contained on these pages, tells me: “You can feel some effects after a few hours there, and after spending a full day there, my hand also shook a bit at night.” Federico Magalini, who works on e-waste at the United Nations University (more of a think tank than a university), concurs, saying he developed a headache after spending half a day at Agbogbloshie. And the workers expose themselves to these conditions day after day, often not realising how bad it is. Magalini tells me of an encounter he had with a man who used to work in Agbogbloshie and now works in Ghana’s only formal e-waste facility. “I was feeling ill when I was working in Agbogbloshie. You know, I thought I was not strong enough for that job”, the man told Magalini, who concludes: “He was feeling as his own fault the actual consequences of exposure to these extreme conditions.”

What’s more, the dire consequences are often hidden from view in an industry that can be seen as “easy money”, as McElvaney puts it, for immigrants from the agricultural north of the country who have very little formal education. “Most of the persons are coming from the north in Ghana down to the south to work, and then when they start feeling ill, they usually go back to their village”, Magalini explains. “So, in most cases they die in their village, so people in Agbogbloshie, they don’t see people dying and are unable to establish the link between what they are doing and people dying.”

Sampson Atiemo, a Ghanaian researcher who has been working on the e-waste problem on a three-month fellowship at the University of Northampton, adds that although the Ministry of Health in Ghana has done some research, “some of these effects don’t show up very early”, and it’s only been since the late 1990s that secondhand computers started arriving in Ghana in what many have come to view as a misguided attempt to ‘bridge the digital divide’.

The good news is that many more people are becoming aware of the problem. This is thanks in part to awareness-raising reporting, such as McElvaney’s photo series; the photographer told me: “It was important to me to go there, even if many photographers have been there before. I… was hoping to come back with pictures that can make a change.” It’s also due to international agreements such as the Basel Convention, which aim to prevent developed countries from offloading their e-waste onto developing countries that are less able to handle it appropriately.

Of course, as Bates points out, “we do tend to look at the illegal export, but there’s also perfectly legal secondhand export, there’s perfectly legal new export”, and the so-called developing world is expected to overtake the developed world as the leading source of waste electrical products. Indeed, by 2030, developing economies are expected to produce 400 to 700 million obsolete computers a year, for example, compared to 200 to 300 million from developed countries. The real problem, Bates says, is that “you have no effective end-of-life solution” in places like Agbogbloshie.

But, hopefully, that will soon change. As part of the Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) initiative, run by the United Nations University, Magalini and others have been organising ‘E-Waste Academies’, the first of which took place in Ghana in 2012. He explains: “The basic idea is to bring totally different parts together – it’s not a conference, it’s a learning experience. We try to create a network of persons on the ground working because we can’t go there and bring a solution. We need to help local persons with the proper tools to develop their own solutions because every country is different – there are different backgrounds, different social contexts, economic contexts, so we cannot go there and say: ‘Hey guys, do this and you will have the problem solved.’”

Over the past few months, Atiemo has been working with Bates and others at the University of Northampton to come up with solutions that will work for Ghana. While it’s too early to talk about them, they sound hopeful about the future. Inevitably, the solution will not involve transplanting Western infrastructure into an entirely different environment. Magalini notes: “Nobody is thinking to go there and install a fully-automated plant processing two, three tonnes per hour, so basically processing in one hour what two or three persons can process in one day and employing 15 persons instead of 5,000. First of all, they don’t have the electricity to run that kind of plant, and second, you don’t want to kill all those kinds of jobs.” Bates adds, rather more bluntly: “There’s not much point in reducing the health impact if by destroying people’s livelihoods they’re all dying of starvation, is there?”

That being said, manual disassembly as it’s practiced in Agbogbloshie can actually have advantages over the shred-and-separate system employed in the West that cannot recover as much of the valuable material (Bates says the figure for metal recovery can be as low as 40 per cent). The key, she insists, is ensuring that it’s not just the metal that the recyclers recover: “In Africa in particular, the plastic’s not valued. If you can get a system where you get the plastic valued and collected properly, then there should be more jobs associated with it because there will be more money going through the system.” The solution, inevitably, will involve safer methods of cable stripping (and greater incentives to wear protective equipment, of course), and the result, hopefully, will be high employment and resource conservation.

All images © Kevin McElvaney