Africa choking on West’s waste

Faisal al Yafai

• Last Updated: October 24. 2009 1:36AM UAE / October 23. 2009 9:36PM GMT

Pep Montserrat for The National

It started with a story about nothing. Last week, Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted a short, vague article on its website about a question being asked in Parliament. But that was about it: the newspaper said it couldn’t reveal “who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found”. Worse, the paper couldn’t say why not, only that “legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret”.

A baffling story but one that, in the internet age, was soon fleshed out by intrepid bloggers. They uncovered so much of the hidden story that, by the next morning, the parties involved backed down before their court appearance with the newspaper.

So what was the story? It was this: three years ago, people around the coastal city of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, a small West African nation, started to fall ill. They developed ulcers and burns to their skin and lungs; the bodies of children were covered in lesions. The reason, investigators suspected, was toxic waste from Europe that had been dumped around the city.

That same year Trafigura, a Swiss materials company that charted the ship carrying the chemical waste, commissioned a scientific study into the effect of the dumping. The findings were damaging and the company tried to keep them secret. Trafigura said a local contractor had dumped the waste, and two people were later jailed in Ivory Coast over the issue. Without admitting liability, the company paid US$165 million (Dh606m) to the Ivorian government to remove the waste and, this year, another $50m to 30,000 claimants from Ivory Coast who said the waste had affected them.

The question asked in the House of Commons concerned the case and Trafigura sought an injunction, leading to British newspapers being banned from reporting what happened in Parliament – something they had been free to do for hundreds of years.

Naturally, it was this aspect of the case that exercised the British media most, freedom of the press being just about the one thing newspapers can collectively agree upon. And yet the hidden story that the case highlights is the sheer scale of the dumping of waste from the developed world in poorer nations, the horror of rubbish from the kitchen tables of Europe ending up in the backyards of Africans.

For Abidjan is not the first African city to be used as a dumping ground. The wide – and growing – disparity between the rich and poor parts of the planet, the relative powerlessness of poor African countries, often with shaky or non-existent legal systems, and the significant cost of safely disposing of vast quantities of chemical and electronic waste have made Africa an attractive final destination.

Electronic waste – or e-waste – is an enormous problem, with tens of millions of televisions, personal computers and mobile phones being discarded every year by the rich world. By one estimate, more than 100,000 used computers are entering the Nigerian port of Lagos every month. This tide of obsolete electronics, all containing small quantities of dangerous chemicals, has to end up somewhere.

One solution has been for the goods to be designated as “second-hand” and sold on to developing nations. But when these goods prove useless, developing nations, lacking the funds or legal infrastructure to deal with e-waste, simply discard them, allowing hazardous chemicals into the environment.

They end up in places like Agbobloshie, a dumping site outside Ghana’s capital Accra. Here, amid a vast sprawl of glass, plastic and metal, crowds of children, most not yet teenagers, pick through the rubbish looking for circuit boards and other salvageable material.

Thick black smoke fills the dump as the plastic coating of the computers is burnt off to get at tiny quantities of copper, iron and gold to sell on. But all the smashed electronic equipment drenches the earth and the air in toxic chemicals that cause cancer and that the young children, with immune systems already weakened by poverty, are more susceptible to.

Journalists who visit often point out the labels on the computers, showing their origins from schools, businesses and government departments from North America and Europe. And it is not just the machines that have been transported intact – their data has journeyed too. In June The National reported on how sensitive US government information had been discovered on discarded computers at the dump in Accra. Private information and photos of people were also found on old computers from Europe that the owners thought they had wiped clean. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in a 2007 joint report by the FBI and other US government agencies, Ghana was named as one of the main global centres for cyber-crime.

The moral argument for not making thousands of innocent, poor people sick is unassailable. It is our waste and we should dispose of it. In this respect, the UAE is leading the way, by finding ways to reduce and dispose of waste immediately, rather than shipping it around the world.

This summer the largest medical waste treatment plant in the Gulf region opened in Dubai, and the emirate is even looking at ways to generate power from burning waste. Waste management – not only household waste, but medical and manufacturing – will be one of the key issues addressed in next year’s environment audit of the Emirates.

Yet, as the discovery of sensitive government information shows, there are also compelling security arguments for managing our waste.

Listen, for instance, to one of the pirates operating from the lawless regions of Somalia, speaking about an $8m (Dh29m) ransom for a Ukrainian ship: “The Somali coastline has been destroyed, and we believe this money is nothing compared to the devastation that we have seen on the seas,” Januna Ali Jama told Al Jazeera. “[We are] reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually dumped on the shores of our country for nearly 20 years.”

No less an authority than the United Nations Environment Programme has pointed out that the practice of European companies dumping hazardous waste around Somalia began soon after that nation’s descent into chaos in the early 1990s.

After the tsunami that devastated coastal areas around the Indian Ocean in 2004, rusting containers of toxic waste began appearing on the shores of Somalia – nasty stuff like radioactive uranium, cadmium and mercury, the sort of chemical waste that can devastate human bodies.

After having their seas and fishing stocks ravaged by foreign waste, Somali fishermen began to use their boats to hunt larger prey.

Such blowback ought to give the developed world pause for thought, because the waste that is thrown out to far-away parts of the world has a habit of reappearing, its consequences reaching into the courts and boardrooms of the industrialised world.

Companies should be responsible for the entire lifecycle of their products, from conception to disposal, with the price tag reflecting the product’s total impact, not simply its manufacturing bill. Because there is a high cost to rubbish: as the Trafigura story demonstrates, something that begins as nothing can end up having far-reaching consequences.

Faisal al Yafai was named Journalist of the Year at the 2009 Muslim Writers Awards. He is a Churchill Fellow for 2009/2010