A mobile's final journey (part 3): from Europe to the landfills of West Africa

«When you look at some of the parts, you can see what it once was,» explains Markus Stengele, environmental engineer and Head of Quality and Environment at Solenthaler Recycling AG (Sorec). He casts his gaze over the piles of metal in front of us, looking for individual parts to pick out so he can tell me what they were: the cooler from a processor, the aperture from a computer, the idler pulley from a printer, parts from a hard drive and the bottom part of an iron. It's a heap taller than a person, made up of varying sizes of aluminium parts that were all once used in electrical or electronic appliances. Alongside the towers of aluminium, there's also iron and other metals piling up. Clustered on the opposite side of the open hangar that trucks pass through are printed circuit boards, plastics and plastic-metal mixtures of varying qualities. «We get money for this. And we have to pay for that,» says Markus in passing. «It depends how much recyclable plastic is in it.»

Once the piles of parts have reached a certain volume, they're loaded onto trucks with a shovel or a robotic gripper arm. They're then taken to metal smelting works in Belgium, Germany and Italy or for plastics processing in Austria. That way, at least some of it can go back into raw material trading. All the materials come from waste electric and electronic equipment that has been crushed in the Sorec grinder. The individual parts then get transported on conveyor belts using various sorting mechanisms. For instance, a wind tunnel that separates light parts from heavy ones; magnets for removing iron from mixed substances; screening plants and sensors that recognise different materials. «It's very high-tech,» explains Markus, as he gives me the guided tour of Sorec's epicentre. He has to raise his voice over the humming, hissing and clanging of the grinding and sorting process.

In Ghana, old devices end up in huge landfill sites

You don't get the same kind of high-tech recycling centres in many other parts of the world like you do in Switzerland. «In most countries, old devices are still predominantly recycled in the informal sector,» says Heinz Böni, who leads the Critical Materials and Resource Efficiency research group at Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa). «There are often major issues, as problematic substances can get into the environment, and the people who extract the valuable materials don't protect themselves enough and harm their health in the process.» In Ghana, for instance, where old devices still end up in landfill to a large extent. And where people burn cables at night in the open air to extract the copper but in doing so release dioxins and toxins. Or in India and Pakistan, where people try to get the gold out of printed circuit boards with strong acids.

According to «The Global E-Waste-Monitor 2020», published by the United Nations University and other institutions in July 2020, less than half of 78 countries worldwide had legislation on or rules governing the handling of old electrical equipment as of October 2019. Admittedly, that’s 11 more countries than two years previously. But the fact remains that this area isn't covered by legislation everywhere in the world. And even in the places where it is, laws alone aren't enough to form the basis of a functioning recycling system. There’s still a lot to do in Europe, where good collection systems and infrastructure for proper recycling are already in place. According to the report, only 59% of waste electric and electronic equipment in Northern Europe and 54% in Western Europe are documented as formally recycled. What's more, the statistics show that significant parts are still being disposed of in mixed waste, are being recycled, but not in accordance with the law, or are being exported for reuse. The exports in question include all kinds of electrical and electronic devices, especially computers and laptops from specialist reconditioning companies as well as used fridges, microwaves and other durable goods that are stored in second-hand vehicles or containers and shipped to Africa.

The dark channels to Africa

Reports continue to show that a portion of old devices from Europe and the US still ends up in landfill in African and Asian countries, where there's usually not any formal recycling. For instance, the European Commission's Countering WEEE Illegal Trade (CWIT) project carried out an investigation together with Interpol that estimated that in 2012 a total of 1.5 million tonnes of eWaste were exported from Europe. Some of the devices were still in working order and could be used. But of the 1.5 tonnes of waste, there were an also estimated 750,000 tonnes of damaged devices. And in accordance with the Basel Convention, it's illegal to export them. In 2019 the Basel Action Network published the report «Holes in the Circular Economy: WEEE Leakage from Europe» compiled by activists in ten EU countries who attached GPS trackers to 314 damaged LCD and tube monitors, PCs and printers in order to follow them. 19 of them were exported, and they were able to track 11 all the way to Africa or Asia.

When asked if devices from Switzerland end up in landfills in Africa and Asia, Heinz Böni from Empa says: «When old devices get put in recycling in Switzerland, it's generally a foolproof affair. But of course, you can't rule out the possibility that old devices end up abroad.» He explains that it's impossible to control what happens to devices that aren't sent for recycling. «I'm sure that the cliché that all our broken devices end up in Ghana isn't true for Switzerland,» says Flora Conte. She’s an environmental scientist and Environmental Consulting Project Manager at Carbotech AG, who carries out regular audits of cutting and recycling plants on behalf of take-back systems SENS and Swico. «It's more the case that you say: I want to do some good in the world, so I'll send my old computer to a school in Africa. And the computer is maybe already six years old. People mean well but it can have problematic consequences. No one thinks about what will happen to the PC when it breaks in two years’ time.»

The concept of what happens to old devices in Africa is something that the four-part documentary Chinafrika.mobile by German film-maker Daniel Kötter covers. In particular, it looks at mining raw materials, production, reuse and recycling. Clips are available on the website as part of «smartphone object autobiography» which was created for the research project «Times of Waste» funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

In the documentary – you can watch a clip here – Daniel Kötter takes the audience to places like the Owode Onirin market in Lagos, Nigeria. We see a young man tip a yellow plastic bag full of mobile phones onto the clay floor, sit on a device that could be a flat stereo system and start doing his job. He takes the mobile phones one by one and holds them with one side against a stone that's lying on the floor in front of him. He then hits the devices with the back of a large screwdriver until the layers come apart and he can tear out the printed circuit board. He only throws the circuit boards back into the plastic bag. Everything else, including broken displays and casing, stays on the floor for the time being.

«There will always be scrap.»

At the same market, young men are working on some cables with a hammer to remove the plastic from the copper, while others are extracting valuable components from a printed circuit board with the help of pliers. Most of them only have on flip flops or sandals. Some are wearing gloves but most of them don't have on any protective gear. Off camera, Nigerian computer expert Anthony Bankole, nicknamed «Tony Schrott» or «Tony scrap» explains that a lot of big companies from China and the UK employ people like him to collect electronic scrap. He also linked it to the weak economy in his home country and in the whole of West Africa. «They think they'll get it cheaper here and with fewer rules than in the UK, for example,» says Anthony. He goes on to mention that most of the materials go back to China. Anthony has been working in the scrap trade for more than ten years and sees it as the business of the future because new things are always being made. At some point, they'll become old and break. «There will always be scrap.»

He's definitely right on that point. According to «The Global eWaste Monitor 2020», there were 53.6 million tonnes of worn out electrical and electronic devices in 2019. Less than a fifth were demonstrably recycled. If this trend continues, there'll be 74 million tonnes by 2030. And we're talking about old devices that contain numerous harmful materials alongside the recyclable materials. Elements such as lead, quicksilver, cadmium, chromium and PCBs (oily, man-made chemicals) can have severe effects on almost every organ system. For example, they receive 50 tonnes of quicksilver and 71,000 tonnes of plastic with brominated flame retardants each year. There's no documentation on what happens to it, but it's highly likely some of it is released into the environment.

Survival is often more important than health

According to the report, there still aren't long-term studies into larger communities. But research results indicate that informal eWaste recycling can have negative effects on the health of workers, citing potential skin, respiratory, cardiovascular and immune system problems. The report also notes the materials in old devices can be particularly dangerous for children who are still growing and developing.
«People in developing countries who take apart old devices often know it's not good for their health,» says environmental engineer Esther Thiébaud from the environmental consulting agency Sofies. «But there, it's a matter of surviving. The important thing is earning a few francs so you can buy something to eat that evening.» Esther has been examining electronic device issues for about 12 years. In that time, she was also involved in projects in developing countries that formed policies or management systems with local partners on handling old devices. Ten years ago, she had to go back and forth to Ghana as part of an assessment, and now she's working on a project in Egypt. She says that while there’s some formal recycling in Egypt, there's no functioning recycling system. These days, it's often the case that companies sell their old devices at auction to the highest bidder. «Unfortunately, that's not usually a company who cares much about the environment or the health of their workers. There are market forces that don't encourage people to recycle old devices sustainably or in an ecological way. Getting a handle on that is a very tedious process.»

Esther thinks that before you can build a functioning recycling system, you need to know the system and the actors within it quite well. It's different in every country. «Some have huge scrap yards, where everything is processed in one place. Others have huge second-hand markets, and the devices get dismantled in backyards.»

A lot has been done over the last 15 years. In many countries, there have been import restrictions and stricter controls. «But these countries also produce a lot of electronic waste themselves. Even if we could stop all exports, the individual countries still have to build functioning systems that enable sustainable and socially fair processing of old electrical equipment.

South America adapts Switzerland's advance recycling fee

To help do their bit and share Swiss expertise in this field, the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs and Empa have been leading projects in various countries in South America, Africa and Asia since 2003. It began as part of the «Swiss eWaste Programme» and, from 2013, continued within the follow-up programme, «Sustainable Recycling Industries». Heinz Böni from Empa, who was involved from the start, gives an example from Colombia and Peru, where they extended product responsibility by financing the until then uncovered cost of recycling with an advance recycling fee, as in the Swiss model. They also plan to do this in other countries. The reason being that proper recycling of old electronic devices can't be financed by the material value of the valuable substances alone because of the considerable effort and amount of harmful pollutants involved. But he also stresses that you can't just follow the Swiss model to the letter. «In a lot of countries, the informal sector is still very strong. That's why it's so important to work with everyone involved.»

One option would be to buy up the informal recycling products, especially the more critical devices, for a better price than they'd get on the open market and then recycle them properly. Another way is to give the informal recycling groups a coworking space where they can dismantle the collected devices with the right tools and in an environment with certain safety measures. For instance, somewhere they can use a cable shredder to remove the copper without burning the plastic. «We've already achieved an awful lot. But the process is long. It takes years for things to establish and to reach a point where we can say we've roughly got things under control in terms of eWaste going into the environment. As a rich country with a functioning system, Switzerland has to take responsibility for doing its bit.»

You can read the other parts of this series here: