Poisoning Africa
By Edoardo Totolo for ISN
Despite international community efforts to prohibit the transboundary movement of hazardous waste, developed countries have relentlessly dumped toxic materials in sub/Saharan Africa for the past three decades.
The threat of the toxic waste market became apparent in the 1980s when containers full of poisonous industrial waste provoked environmental disasters and killed thousands of people in East and West Africa.
This illegal dumping represented an enormous source of profits for criminal organizations, corrupt politicians and unscrupulous businessmen, both in African and developed countries. However, in recent years, the remuneration for firms in industrialized countries has increased even further, as they have been able to sell toxic waste to African countries under the label of "second-hand goods."
Obsolete computers, mobile phones and electronic appliances containing toxic substances have been sold by industries claiming to promote the "digitalization" of Africa. The large majority of these devices, however, are no longer usable when they reach the continent and end up in open-air dumping sites, where waste-pickers burn them to extract metals such as copper or aluminium, and get poisoned by a cocktail of chemicals and toxic metals.
High quantities of toxic waste are also dispersed in the environment, contaminating the soil and the food chain.
Besides being an infringement of the law, the market of hazardous waste must be considered a severe violation of human rights and a shameful exploitation of poverty and despair.
The transboundary movement of hazardous waste contravenes two major treaties: the external pageBasel Convention, an international treaty entered into force in 1992, and the external pageBamako Convention, a regional treaty signed by the Organization of Africa Unity in 1996. However, as the market for toxic waste has continued for over 30 years, the efficacy of the current legal framework needs to be put into question.
The African competitive advantage
Disposing toxic waste in Africa can be extremely inexpensive.
In a external pagepaper written for American University in Washington, DC, Irene Bomani argues that disposing hazardous waste in developed countries can cost more than US$3000 per tonne, whereas in Africa it can be disposed for less than US$5 per tonne. Moreover, it is an easy way for deceitful businessmen to earn hard currency with relatively little effort. In some African countries, the import of hazardous waste in the 1990s was even higher than their GDP.
Hazardous dumpsites have been found throughout sub-Saharan Africa, especially in countries characterized by conflict, widespread corruption and bad governance. However, it is not possible to determine accurately the magnitude of the problem because illegal exports are discovered only in case of accidents or when authorities conduct independent investigations.
Among the many incidents that emerged in the past years, disconcerting examples are those of Somalia and Ivory Coast.
After the Somali state collapsed in 1991, unknown European firms made agreements with local warlords for the disposal of toxic waste along the coast. The case emerged when the Swiss company Achair and the Italian firm Progresso were caught signing a contract with a corrupted Somali minister for the exportation of 500,000 tonnes of toxic waste a year. The deal never took place.
However, the UN and Italian media made field investigations in the 1990s and found over 15 dumping sites that killed hundreds of people and provoked malformation and cancer in the local population, especially children.
The damage increased even further when a tsunami devastated the Somali coast in 2004 and barrels of highly toxic waste were dispersed in the environment.
In 2005, a former mafia boss confessed that a shipment was commissioned by an Italian minister who asked to dispose waste generated in public hospitals. The minister rejected the accusations.
In 2006, in Ivory Coast, the Dutch oil-trader company Trafigura was accused of provoking one of the biggest environmental disasters in the history of the country. Over 500 tonnes of toxic waste was dumped in 18 different sites around the capital Abidjan, killing at least 16 people and causing diseases to hundred of thousands. The cargo ship was supposed to dispose the waste in Amsterdam, but changed plans because the costs were too high. Two people involved in the disposal were sentenced to prison terms by an Ivorian court.
Trafigura has never accepted the charges, maintaining that the material in question was illegally dumped by a licensed Ivorian disposal agency Compagnie Tommy, and not by Trafigura. (The company also maintained that the dumping of the material from the Probo Koala could not have resulted in deaths or illness, and that the material in question was not ‘toxic waste’ but so-called "slops" – the liquid residue of cleansing storage tanks, commonly transported by those involved in the petroleum business.
Trafigura was never indicted, and in March this year, the Ivorian Court of Appeal dropped all criminal charges due to lack of evidence. However, in February 2007 Trafigura agreed to pay US$198 million to the Ivory Coast government for those who allegedly suffered as a result of the dumping, though the company insists this was not an admission of liability.
From industrial waste to e-waste
While in the 1980s and 1990s a grand part of the toxic trade involved industrial and chemical wastes, in the past few years the main threat for African countries has become obsolete electronic and electric equipment, also known as "e-waste."
The amount of e-waste produced globally every year is alarming. The UN estimated that industrialized countries produce 20 to 50 million tonnes, but less than 25 percent is recycled. Obsolete electronic equipment is also the fastest increasing type of hazardous waste. In 2006, every European citizen produced on average 20 kilograms of e-waste.
A recent external pagereport published by Greenpeace shows that a major dumping site for the global e-waste is Ghana.
"Tons of e-waste is sold in Ghana by recycler companies that do not differentiate between broken and functioning devices," Kim Schoppink, toxics campaigner for Greenpeace, told ISN Security Watch. "Exporting old electronic equipment to developing countries is often hailed as 'bridging the digital divide.' But in reality it means dumping toxic waste on the poor."
The report states that containers full of old electronic equipment often leave from Antwerp, in Belgium, and from the US, and reach the enormous scrap markets around the capital Accra. At the dumpsites, informal workers, often children, disassemble the equipment and burn it to extract metals that they can re-sell. Copper is sold locally for US$0.22 per half kilo and aluminium for only US$0.01 per kilo. Plastic components cannot be recycled in Ghana, and are often sold to Asian businessmen, who sell them to companies in their own countries.
The scam with these illegal exports is that the electronic equipment shipped to Ghana is categorized as a commodity and not as waste; therefore it manages to circumvent the legal regulations imposed by the Basel Convention and the EU law. In the US, the exports of toxic e-waste do not even represent an infringement of the law.
International regulations: a failure?
The most important global treaty regulating the transboundary movement of hazardous waste is the Basel Convention. It entered into force in 1992 and nowadays it counts 170 parties, even though the US and few other states have not yet ratified it. The three main goals of the Basel Convention are to minimize the generation of hazardous waste, to dispose hazardous waste as close as possible to the source of generation, and to minimize its international movements.
In 1994, the parties also agreed on a complete ban on transports from OECD to non-OECD countries (i.e. external pageBasel Ban Amendment). However, the ban has been ratified by the EU, but not by the US, which is the world leading producer of e-waste. The ban will fully enter into force when three quarters of the parties will ratify it.
Unsatisfied by the failure of the Basel Convention to implement a complete ban, the Organization of African Unity decided to work on a new treaty addressing specifically the needs of the region. The Bamako Convention, entered into force in 1996 and now ratified by 20 African countries, imposes stricter regulations compared to the Basel Convention, as it bans the imports of hazardous waste also from non-signatory countries, it extends the ban on artificially created radioactive wastes (which are not regulated in the Basel Convention), and it requires contracting parties to establish national institutions fully devoted to the implementation of law.
More stringent regulations, however, have not produced the expected results.
According to Schoppink, the Basel Convention cannot be considered a failure because it managed to provide a global legal framework on the disposal of hazardous waste. However, the e-waste problem can only be tackled by giving more responsibility to the producers.
"Increasing inspection on exports and banning toxic chemicals from electronic equipment can reduce the impact of illegal exports," said Schoppink. "But these are short term solutions.
"Greenpeace advocates for the Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR). This means that producers must become responsible for the collection and the recycling of their own-branded products. If producers have to pay for the recycling of their own products, the incentive to produce products that are less toxics, have a longer life-span, and are easier to recycle will increase, because this will reduce their recycling costs."
At the present day, producers of electronic goods are only partly responsible for the products they generate. Out of the estimated 20 kilos of e-waste produced by EU citizens every year, companies are responsible for only 4 kilos.
We lose track of the rest of the waste. Some of it may remain in the basement of our houses, some might end up in European dumping sites, but the large majority becomes a severe threat for health and environmental security of the world's poorest communities, especially those living in sub-Saharan Africa.