May/June 2015 Electronics recycling in Kenya and Ghana is both primitive and promising. Despite their many challenges, e-recyclers in those countries are meeting local customers’ needs for inexpensive used products and international demands for accountability and responsible recycling.
By Adam Minter
In a suburb of Nairobi, Kenya, five technicians sit at a long table and methodically use screwdrivers, pliers, and hammers to dismantle decade-old desktop computers and servers imported from Europe. The circuitboards go into one pile, the power packs into another. When the piles are big enough, the technicians place the material into small bays located behind them. Despite the East African heat, the workers wear heavy gloves, hard hats, face masks, and full-body uniforms with their employer’s name—WEEE Centre—on the back.
It’s a small-scale facility compared with the large e-recycling operations in more developed economies, but it’s cutting edge for Africa, which is just beginning to manage the end-of-life electronics that have accumulated in homes and businesses for two decades. Until now, the continent’s thriving electronics repair, refurbishment, and reuse sector has held back the tide of gadgets that otherwise would end up in the waste stream, but that situation is starting to change. “The 10- and 15-year-old technologies aren’t in demand anymore, so we see a big and growing opportunity to recycle,” says Jane Kariithi, the WEEE Centre’s managing director. It isn’t easy to refurbish or recycle electronics in Kenya or other African countries because they lack “the technology and markets to do it like in the developed countries,” she says. African recyclers’ knowledge and sophistication is evolving, however, as the volume of e-scrap grows and environmental consciousness expands across the continent. I witnessed this evolution during an eight-day trip that took me to reuse and recycling facilities in Kenya and Ghana, two of the more developed countries in West and East Africa.
Creating a New Model
Although nongovernmental organizations and international media groups have made “e-waste” in Africa a topic of concern for decades, there’s little data on how much e-scrap the continent or its countries generate. Take Kenya, for example: In 2007 and 2008, the Nairobi-based Kenyan Information and Communications Technology Network conducted the first comprehensive survey of e-scrap in the country. It determined that Kenyans were producing 2,984 tons of end-of-life electronics annually, evenly split between computers (laptops and desktops) and monitors. That grew quickly: In 2012, they produced 44,000 mt, according to the UN Environmental Programme’s Solving the E-waste Problem (Bonn, Germany) initiative.
According to the KICTN study, Kenya imported most of those used electronic products for the simple reason that it’s a rapidly developing country but a poor one, so its citizens need access to low-priced electronics. In 2012, a Kenyan’s per capita GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity in current U.S. dollars was $1,807—a sum far too small for most individuals or families to justify buying a new laptop, phone, or TV.
The WEEE Centre, located 20 minutes from central Nairobi, started out as an importer of used electronics, supplying computers and other technology to Kenyan education institutions in conjunction with Computers for Schools Kenya, a Kenyan NGO. The program receives computers from companies such as Microsoft, imports and refurbishes them, then provides training and support to individuals at the receiving institutions. Kariithi says the program has given in excess of 250,000 computers to more than 9,000 Kenyan institutions, giving 15 million young Kenyans access to technology.
That was the easy part. “After a few years, the computers started to become obsolete,” Kariithi says, as we step into a room at the WEEE Centre where technicians evaluate and refurbish returned machines. “We didn’t know what to do, and we realized the problem was much bigger than schools.” That’s how, in 2006, the WEEE Centre became the first licensed, formal recycler in Kenya. Although Kariithi led that effort, she had assistance from World Loop (Brussels), an NGO devoted to offsetting the negative environmental impacts of information technology, as well as the cooperation of corporate and government partners, including the European Commission (Brussels) and the Kenyan Ministry of Environment, Water, and Natural Resources (Nairobi).
Dismantling is at the heart of the WEEE Centre’s operation. It sells reusable parts locally. Nonferrous metals, wire, and cables go to local metal recyclers, while plastics end up at local processors who downcycle the material into plastic lumber. Circuitboards and hard drives are segregated from the rest of the scrap and sold to agents for European refiners. When I ask if anyone “cooks” circuitboards in Kenya to recover the precious metal content, Kariithi laughs. “No. You’d make less money. Even the informal sector sells to the Europeans.”
Next, we visit a room in which a wire-stripping machine processes clean cables that are obsolete or damaged. The room also has a small table for processing cathode-ray tube monitors. A worker uses a hot wire to separate the CRTs’ leaded glass from nonleaded glass, then vacuums out the phosphorus. To show me what happens to the glass, Kariithi takes me to her office and presents to me the manifest for a 50-mt shipment of CRT glass bound for Belgium later in the week. World Loop helped arrange the shipment, she notes, showing me the export documentation, including a letter from the Kenyan government allowing the transboundary shipment of the leaded CRT glass. “We don’t have a local solution here, so we have to export it,” she explains.
The WEEE Centre handles about 10 to 15 mt a month of end-of-life electronics and appliances, with most of the material coming from its program. It also has a few corporate suppliers that sought to work with a certified, formal recycling operation. According to Kariithi, the center has the capacity to handle 50 tons a month, but it won’t fill that capacity until it can compete with the informal sector for spent household, business, and corporate equipment. Still, she sees reason for hope. “The government is creating a producer-responsibility system,” she notes.
Kenya’s proposed producer-responsibility system has been in parliament for years, but this year it’s expected to pass. Amina Abdalla, chair of the National Assembly’s Committee on Environment and Natural Resources—and the driving force behind the proposed system—blames the holdup on “a low level of understanding of the entire recycling sector and the complexity of the regulation.” In her view, Kenyans still associate recycling and e-scrap with waste disposal and the country’s plentiful dump sites. “Scrap collectors are looked down upon, and they’re registered under the solid waste laws, not recycling laws,” she says. “We need to separate them legally and in people’s minds.”
Despite those obstacles, she isn’t dissuaded. The producer-responsibility system, she says, is an inevitability that will open up Kenya to a formal recycling sector for one reason: “The most efficient institution in Kenya is the tax man,” she says, “so we’ll have the tax man register and tax new and used goods at the point of entry [into the country].” Importers will pay the tax, and the collected money will go to recyclers. Abdalla is pragmatic about the limits of such a system, and what kinds of systems Kenya can and will build. “I’m worried about our technical capacity to handle some materials,” she says. “If a material is hazardous, I’d rather see it exported.” Still, a producer-responsibility system should be able to take care of around 40 percent of the end-of-life electronics problem in Kenya, she says. If that happens, it will be an important step forward for Africa’s scrap recycling industry—and its environment. A few days before my visit, in fact, Nairobi hosted a conference on e-recycling that attracted representatives from across East Africa who were keen to learn from Kenya’s example. “We are the model,” Abdalla says.
A Culture of Reuse
Kenya might be the model for Africa, but it is the exception, not the rule. Most of the continent’s electronics recycling remains highly dispersed and informal due to the low income level of its population. The inability of most Africans to afford new electronics has spawned a highly sophisticated reuse and refurbishment industry, leaving recyclers only a modest stream of the oldest, most obsolete goods.
I see this supply chain in action when I visit Tema, the biggest port in Ghana. My guides are Leticia, a clearing agent who works with an importer of secondhand goods; Wahab Muhammed, a Ghanaian-American importer of tested, working electronics who lives in Vermont half of the year; and Robin Ingenthron, CEO of Good Point Recycling (Burlington, Vt.), one of Muhammed’s key suppliers and founder of WR3A, a free-trade recycling association. According to Leticia, roughly half of the goods imported into Tema—electronics and otherwise—are secondhand. That quickly becomes apparent as we walk down a line of shipping containers stacked three high. By my count, there were at least 600 containers on site in a line that extends hundreds of feet.
Of the dozens of containers being unloaded for customs officers, only a few contain new goods. The other loads are mixed and variable. The first container we pass holds 12 TVs, four car bumpers, 12 children’s bicycles, two baby car seats, a large propane-powered generator, and a recliner, just to name a few of the most identifiable items.
That’s just the beginning. The most plentiful secondhand imports at Tema are automobiles and automobile parts. Whole cars, vans, hearses, and ambulances arrive in containers, while other containers hold used struts, doors, hoods, transmissions, engines, engines still attached to transmissions, and lead-acid batteries (imports of which are prohibited under Ghanaian and international law).
End-of-life electronics is one product category you don’t see much at the port. According to Muhammed, the tested and working laptops and desktops that Ghanaians covet have become harder to buy overseas, as recycling programs in the United States and Europe swallow up more material. “If I bring a load of laptops to Tema,” he says, “I’ll have people rushing over from around the container yard, asking to buy them. There’s so much demand.”
To see what happens to such electronic goods, we leave the port and drive the streets of Tema, which are lined with stalls selling used goods of every kind: tires, refrigerators, furniture, mattresses, bicycles, and TVs, both flat-screen and CRT models. I pause at one stall to take a photo, but the owner snaps at me to stop. Later, as he chats with Muhammed, he says, “We can do this kind of business, but we can’t really do this kind of business.” When asked to explain, he replies, “Ghana needs this kind of used good”—gesturing toward his TVs—“but it’s controversial because of the documentaries. Some officials are embarrassed by it.”
For data on the volume of electronics—new and used—flowing into Ghana, the most reliable figures come from the secretariat of the Basel Convention’s e-Waste Africa Project. According to that study, in 2009 Ghana imported 215,000 tons of consumer electronics, information technology, and small and large appliances. Used goods are 70 percent of that total—150,500 tons—of which 85 percent tested as working or repairable. The remaining 15 percent of the goods—or roughly 22,575 tons, which includes appliances—presumably went for recycling or disposal.
Dispelling a Myth
To see what happens to the imported, used electronics that are not working or repairable, I head west across Accra, Ghana’s capital, to Agbogbloshie. For more than a decade, environmental NGOs and international media organizations have called Agbogbloshie the “world’s largest e-waste dump” (the Guardian), one of the world’s “10 most polluted places” (Time), and the final destination for “hundreds of millions of tons” of e-waste (PBS Frontline). Such claims have circulated without challenge for years, making Agbogbloshie an international byword for “African e-waste dumping.”
Yet in Ghana, at least, Agbogbloshie symbolizes something much more complex: commerce. The district is home to a Pepsi bottling plant, numerous small manufacturers, and markets for everything from onions to yams to timber. Recycling is part of the much bigger whole—and, indeed, it is woven into that whole, with Agbogbloshie’s scrap supplying manufacturers around the district.
Having visited informal e-scrap processing sites in China and India, I know what to expect. The first thing I notice in Agbogbloshie’s recycling zone, however, is what’s missing. I don’t see many electronic products or parts, certainly not enough to qualify it as one of the world’s top dump sites. “Yeah, there’s hardly any e-waste; by weight, it’s mostly auto scrap,” says D.K. Osseo-Asare, a Ghanaian-American architect who is co-lead on the Accra-based Agbogbloshie Makerspace Project, or Qamp. The group seeks to improve Agbogbloshie by, in part, helping the workers there develop tools, products, and methods to turn the area into a small-scale manufacturing hub. To do so, Qamp has built its own shed among Agbogbloshie’s recycling stalls and established relationships with many of the workers.
During my first visit to Agbogbloshie’s recycling zone, Osseo-Asare said I’d be surprised by how small it is. Although the entire Agbogbloshie district is massive, its recycling zone is about 600 feet wide along its street frontage and roughly 800 feet long, stretching back toward a large city dump, which it abuts. There’s also a secondary site that hugs a riverbank for roughly 600 feet. “It’s getting smaller, too,” Osseo-Asare says. A few days earlier, the city government—which owns the land—demolished the site’s plastics recycling section, which he calls “a real pity” because the city “desperately needs plastics recycling.”
In Agbogbloshie’s recycling sector, hundreds of workers occupy dirt-floored stalls, mostly hammering away at greasy automobile parts. Some workers use hand tools to dismantle whole vehicles. The end-of-life electronics there appear to be culled primarily from the scrap automobiles, such as circuitboards from dashboards and wiring harnesses from undercarriages, as well as the occasional home appliance, including microwaves. I occasionally see workers beating circuitboards with hammers to free them from cables, but I don’t see any work areas dedicated to e-scrap processing. Rather, the small volume of e-scrap flowing into the zone makes it something that’s processed alongside other, more plentiful products. So, for example, a half dozen CRTs might be broken up at a stall that’s mostly devoted to automobile dismantling.
Despite news reports to the contrary, none of the end-of-life electronics or other scrap I see in Agbogbloshie came in shipping containers or trucks from the port. Rather, it came from local sources, delivered in taxis, trucks, and hand-pulled carts. Indeed, the Basel Convention secretariat estimated that 50 to 80 percent of the e-scrap in West Africa in 2011 was “domestically generated out of the consumption of new or used [electrical and electronic equipment] of good quality with a reasonable life-span.” Based on my assessment, those numbers are too conservative. In my visit to Agbogbloshie, I saw nothing that looked like the material just arriving in the country at Tema. Unprompted, Leticia, the customs clearing agent who joined us during our visit to Agbogbloshie, said, “This scrap is 15 to 20 years old. No customs officer would allow this into Ghana. It’s been here for years being used and reused by Ghanaians.”
One feature that’s hard to miss in AgbogÂbloshie: the clouds of acrid smoke that sweep across the site every few minutes from a small rise in the landscape at the east end of the processing zone. From a distance, I count perhaps two dozen young men tending to fires, enveloped in smoke. I want to talk to them, so Ingenthron and I enlist Muhammed’s help. He’s a native of Tamale, in northern Ghana—the home region of most of Agbogbloshie’s migrant workers. Muhammed speaks their language and shares tribal links, so they welcome him immediately and open up to us. As I look around their work zone, I notice that the source of the smoke isn’t imported e-scrap—as many news outlets have reported—but rather end-of-life tires. After burning the tires, the workers collect the tire wire to sell as scrap.
These workers do burn wire from electronics. Old electrical cords, printer cables, and automobile wiring harnesses arrive at the burners in tightly wrapped balls measuring about 1 foot in diameter and weighing roughly 5 pounds each. According to Muhammed Awal, the foreman at the burn site, the workers burn enough wire each month to fill a single shipping container. That’s 40 tons—not the thousands or hundreds of millions of tons claimed in international media.
Awal leads us down the burn hill to a small processing area with hard drives piled on a table. He shows me how to take one apart and then directs a worker to show me inside an adjacent shipping container. It contains small piles of circuitboards that take up perhaps 5 percent of the space. “We sell the circuitboards to the Nigerians, and they sell them to Europe,” he says.
The activity at Agbogbloshie isn’t unique to Ghana. There are similar sites across Africa. Some are bigger and some are smaller, especially inland, but what they have in common is an emphasis on recycling what can’t be reused domestically. Nobody would ever mistake Agbogbloshie for a certified, environmentally friendly recycling site but—at the same time—no one with any experience in scrap would mistake it for a site where overseas electronics are “dumped.”
Planning Ahead
So where else does Africa’s e-scrap go? One destination is Bugi Computers, a small electronics repair shop and retailer in central Accra. Wahab Muhammed has supplied the company with tested, working computers since 2010, and Robin Ingenthron supplies Muhammed—and, by extension, Bugi Computers. The owner, Steve Edison, greets us in front of the facility.
Bugi Computers looks like scores of similar shops in Accra. Out front are speakers playing music; chairs are piled with desktop and laptop computers in various states of repair; and parts are spread around the area. The display cases inside contain an array of computer cables and other spare parts as well as refurbished computers that look new. The repair area behind the counter is filled with laptop cases, keyboards, cables hanging from the walls, circuitboards, graphics cards, and other parts for repairing or assembling computers. “If something breaks, I keep the parts to use for repair or a new computer,” Edison says. He gives broken machines to the carters—the men who haul material on hand carts. He says he can repair three machines a day, and he’s training two techs to work with him. On a good day, his company sells about 10 machines.
Edison and Muhammed give me an informal tutorial in Ghanaian electronics. The market for imported used electronics—especially U.S. and European products—is growing, they say, due to Ghanaians’ rising interest in getting online and the belief that used machines from such Western countries are of higher quality than new, Chinese-manufactured units for sale in Ghana. “In Ghana, everyone believes the big brands save their worst quality for us,” Muhammed says. Edison nods and adds, “You can feel the difference in weight if you compare similar models of computers from the U.S. and Ghana. Ghana gets the lighter stuff.”
As I look around the shop, I estimate that more than half of its material would be considered too old or damaged for resale in the developed world. Yet in Ghana, not only is it displayed for sale in Edison’s shop, but demand for it is growing so much that he is opening a new showroom nearby that’s three times the size of his shop. Bugi has 200 or so imported monitors and desktops awaiting display in the showroom. “I can turn over these machines in four months,” Edison says. Muhammed laughs. “If I would sell him more, he’d take them.”
That might be the situation now, but everyone at the showroom knows the volume of end-of-life electronics is growing, and Ghanaians eventually won’t want to buy used equipment. For Muhammed, in particular, that trend presents a business opportunity. He’s actively planning to expand Chendiba Enterprises, a Tamale-based used computer repair, refurbishment, and retailing company in which he’s a major investor. (He also sells imported computers to Chendiba.) Ingenthron is visiting Ghana to advise Chendiba on what responsible U.S. e-scrap sellers seek in a buyer and to set up a supply agreement to promote the local, responsible recycling of electronic products. “We need this kind of service,” Muhammed says. He hopes to recycle machines that repeat customers will return in exchange for a rebate on a newer but still used machine. “That’s the future,” he says. “We have to do it.”
Meeting the E-Recycling Challenge
The Tom Mboya Primary School is a three-story concrete structure in Mombasa, Kenya, 300 miles southeast of Nairobi. On the third floor, a class of 10-year-old boys does math exercises on used Dell desktop computers. Camara Education (Dublin), a charity that supplies computers and other equipment to schools across Africa, imported the computers from Dell as tested, working equipment. This year, the group will provide approximately 3,500 machines to students in Kenya. (Camara also provides computers to students in several other African countries, as well as Ireland.) “There’s no way the schools could afford this on their own,” says Aseidas Blauvelt, the group’s chief technology officer for Africa. “They could buy from the informal market, but they’d have no guarantee anything would work, they wouldn’t have training from us, and they wouldn’t have a server.”
Back at Camara’s offices, Blauvelt shows me a room filled with Dell computers waiting to go to schools, another room where students are earning Cisco certifications in a networking academy, and another where employees test computers upon arrival and when schools return them. Schools use the computers for three years, then Camara takes back the equipment for recycling. That’s particularly important for Dell, which has touted its “closed-loop” recycling.
It’s also important to Camara, which doesn’t want to be associated with dumping and the documentaries on e-recycling in West Africa. Those documentaries and news stories, particularly about Agbogbloshie, “influenced all of Africa,” prompting Uganda to ban imports of used electronics in 2009 and leading to higher import duties on secondhand goods across the continent, which makes Camara’s work much more expensive.
Like many responsible recyclers in the developed world, Camara has an in-house tracking system for every machine it handles, from receiving to deployment to return, and it seeks out recyclers around the world that can accept its material. According to Blauvelt, the group has shipped electronics for recycling to South Africa as well as to Europe. In 2013, it played a key role in establishing East African Compliant Recycling, an end-of-life electronics processing facility in the Nairobi suburbs. While pursuing its path toward e-recycling sustainability, however, EACR must ensure its financial sustainability as well—the same challenge the WEEE Centre faces. “It’s a question of getting to the $2 million to $3 million dollars of revenue per year [we need] to make the operation self-sustainable,” Blauvelt says.
In this year’s down market, strong revenues are hard to find, especially in low-volume locations such as Kenya. But groups certainly are making the effort to improve their efficiencies, capture more scrap, and increase their profitability. At EACR, I see shredders, CRT disassembly booths, balers, and other processing equipment. It’s a modern facility, designed to meet the needs and demand of international brands and corporate customers that don’t want to be associated with substandard recycling. That demand for responsible recycling is going to grow, especially as Kenya’s producer-responsibility law begins to influence the flow of end-of-life material. The challenge for Africa’s e-scrap sector is getting the technology and expertise to handle it.
Vicky Nyaboke, regional director for EACR and a former Kenyan environmental official, makes that point over coffee one day. “You hear e-waste is being dumped in African countries. No!” she scoffs. From her perspective, electronic products are purchased, repurposed, and reused until they reach the end of their useful lives and must be recycled. Unfortunately, Kenya and other developing countries lack the ability to recycle those old electronics, regardless of whether they were imported as new or used. “Now we need solutions,” she tells me. “Technical solutions—to help fix [the problem.]” To her, the solutions must come from the electronic product manufacturers. “They made it; now it’s time for them to show us how to dispose of it properly.”
Adam Minter is a freelance writer based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and author of Junkyard Planet.
Electronics recycling in Kenya and Ghana is both primitive and promising. Despite their many challenges, e-recyclers in those countries are meeting local customers’ needs for inexpensive used products and international demands for accountability and responsible recycling.