In a giant factory in California, thousands of screens, PCs and other old or unwanted gadgets are picked apart for materials. But what about the billions of other defunct (or not) devices<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I<\/strong>n the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on the nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand Sequoia national park. But you can\u2019t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a planter (not to mention the ceiling clearance issue), so the tourist board has deemed it fit to build these towering, convincing copies. I pull out my phone and take a picture, amused and somewhat appalled. What will live longer, I wonder: the real trees or the fakes<\/p>\n\n\n\n I haven\u2019t come to Fresno to see the trees; I\u2019ve come about the device on which I took the picture. In a warehouse in the south of the city, green trucks are unloading pallets of old electronics through the doors of Electronics Recyclers International (ERI), the largest electronics recycling company in the US<\/p>\n\n\n\n Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its unfortunate acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Electronic waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure growing at about 2% a year. Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that\u2019s ignoring the millions of consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered devices we buy every year. Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity, tucked away, forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer, kept \u201cjust in case\u201d. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail and refurbishing service, tells me: \u201cOur biggest competitor is apathy\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Globally, only 17.4% of electronic waste is recycled. Between\u00a07% and 20% is exported, 8% thrown into landfills and incinerators<\/a>\u00a0in the global north, and the rest is unaccounted for. Yet Weee is, by weight, among the most precious waste there is. One piece of electronic equipment can contain 60 elements, from copper and aluminium to rarer metals such as cobalt and tantalum, used in everything from motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. A typical iPhone, for example, contains 0.018g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and a tiny fraction of platinum. Multiply by the sheer quantity of devices and the impact is vast: a single recycler in China, GEM, produces more cobalt than the country\u2019s mines each year. The materials in our e-waste \u2013 including up to 7% of the world\u2019s gold reserves \u2013 are worth \u00a350.9bn a year<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aaron Blum, co-founder and chief operating officer of ERI, arrives wearing the corporate uniform of a tech executive: navy hoodie and jeans. \u201cYou\u2019ll need these,\u201d he says, handing me a pair of bright orange earplugs. Blum and a friend started ERI back in 2002, after leaving college. California had just banned electronics from landfills due to hazardous chemical contents \u2013 but little recycling infrastructure existed. \u201cI didn\u2019t know anything about electronics. I was a business major,\u201d Blum says. Today, ERI has eight facilities across the US and processes 57,000 tonnes of scrap electronics a year<\/p>\n\n\n\n To get to the factory floor, we pass through a scanner. Security is tight for a reason: millions of dollars\u2019 worth of still-functioning or repairable electronics passing through make it a tempting target for thieves. In the loading bay, a goateed guy named Julio is unloading pallets of shrink-wrapped monitors from a Salvation Army truck \u2013 charity shops are a major source of ERI\u2019s product. Everything that arrives is scanned before being dismantled and sorted. \u201cYou can\u2019t shred certain materials, so you\u2019ve got to do a sort,\u201d Blum says<\/p>\n\n\n\n Electronics are piled everywhere: flatscreens, DVD players, desktops, printers, keyboards. At a set of tables, nine men are taking apart large TVs, their electric screwdrivers emitting a low whiz. Another is smashing a monitor from its casing with a hammer (\u201cDue to the adhesive\u201d). The dismantling crews, Blum says, will handle up to 2,948kg (6,500lb) of devices a day<\/p>\n\n\n\n We pass a noticeboard marked Focus Material, on which actual parts have been pinned as visual aids: motherboards, wire scraps, monitor casings. \u201cThis hits home more than reading a document,\u201d Blum says<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scrap recycling contains so many different materials that the industry has developed its own shorthand: light copper is \u201cDream\u201d, No 1 copper wire is \u201cBarley\u201d, insulated aluminium wire is \u201cTwang\u201d. There\u2019s no such poetry here, however. Instead, the extracted pieces are thrown into boxes scrawled with things like Copper and CAT-5 wiring. Inside one I notice a coil of LED Christmas lights. \u201cDuring the holidays we get a ton of these. This is all copper, in the wire,\u201d Blum says, grabbing a handful. \u201cWe have to go through and manually cut the bulbs off\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paranoid about losing industrial secrets to China, companies would rather have their old machines wiped and shredded<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some materials \u2013 paper, batteries \u2013 must be removed for safety reasons. \u201cIf something gets through that can\u2019t be shredded, you can have a fire or an explosion,\u201d Blum says. \u201cWhen you\u2019re shredding metal, it gets really hot.\u201d Heat-sensing cameras constantly scan the factory floor for hot pockets, and the workers wear masks and gloves: e-waste contains toxicants ranging from lead and mercury to polybrominated flame-retardants and\u00a0PFAS<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The centrepiece of the facility is the shredder, a hulking beast that stretches the length of the building, three storeys high, making a prodigious racket. (Hence the earplugs.) Once the waste has been sorted, a worker in a Bobcat telehandler carries it over to the conveyor\u2019s gaping maw, where ultra-hardened spinning blades cut through aluminium and plastic like ice in a blender. \u201cWhen you\u2019re shredding electronics, you\u2019re creating dust that contains lead from the circuit boards, so we have collection hoods sucking up all the dust,\u201d Blum hollers. The dust has to be disposed of as hazardous waste. I nod, exhilarated by the sheer violence of it<\/p>\n\n\n\n Magnetic belts, air-sorters and filters separate the materials as they pass along the shredder, dropping them into giant \u201csuper sacks\u201d. We stop at one and look down at a treasure haul of silver-grey flecks. \u201cWe call this precious metal fines,\u201d Blum says. \u201cIt\u2019s gold, silver and palladium from the circuit boards.\u201d A single sack\u2019s contents are probably worth enough to buy a decent car<\/p>\n\n\n\n Farther along the line, the conveyor splits off into tributaries. A robot arm whirrs above one, picking up parts. \u201cWe used to have 15 pickers on this line. Now we have two or three,\u201d Blum says. The company spent a lot of money training the robot, which picks far faster than any human could and is now 97% accurate. Blum seems to prefer it to people. \u201cIt comes to work every day and never got Covid,\u201d he says. I can\u2019t tell if he\u2019s joking<\/p>\n\n\n\n Near the end of the line, more metals roll into their super sacks. ERI\u2019s biggest material streams, by weight, are steel, plastic, aluminium and brass. The circuit boards are sent to LS Nikko, a metals manufacturing giant based in South Korea; the aluminium goes to the US smelting giant Alcoa. \u201cThe steel might go to your large steel buyers in the US \u2013 they might send it to mills in Turkey, but otherwise, everything stays domestic\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n ERI charges customers a fee for disposal, dismantling, data removal and recycling. Most are motivated not by reducing waste, Blum says, but by cybersecurity: \u201cNinety-nine per cent of the electronics you have today have your data on them. So data has become very, very important.\u201d Paranoid about losing industrial secrets to China, companies would rather have their old machines wiped and shredded. \u201cWe have Homeland Security come to our facilities. They will escort the material to the shredder, stand watching while we run the material through, and sometimes even take the shred out\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many manufacturers argue that repairs must be done by professionals or even by them \u2013 for a hefty fee, of course<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: \u201cThey don\u2019t want this product resold and competing against their new products, so they want it all destroyed\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain iFixit<\/a>, tells me, these \u201cmust-shred\u201d contracts are the \u201cdirty secret\u201d of the recycling industry. (\u201cThe recyclers are desperate for manufacturer contracts, so they\u2019ll do anything and keep their mouths shut,\u201d Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in the UK found Amazon was sending<\/a> millions of new and returned items a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the practice.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2020,\u00a0Apple sued a Canadian recycler<\/a>\u00a0for reselling some of the 500,000 devices it had sent for shredding. The recycler, GEEP, blamed rogue employees \u2013 but the implication that the devices had been working well enough to sell set off a wider scandal. The unfortunate truth is that companies destroy new and nearly new products all the time. Luxury and technology brands are reluctant to discount or donate unsold items that might undermine sales of new models.\u00a0Burberry, for one<\/a>, admitted to incinerating \u00a3105m of unsold items in the five years to 2018, to stop them being sold at discounted rates (Burberry also says it has ended the practice). In other cases, the financial upside of processing unsold items or returns is not worth the costs, so it\u2019s cheaper to write it off. Burn it or bury it, wasting is cheap<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s an old axiom that they don\u2019t make things like they used to. Goods cheaply bought are cheaply made \u2013 no surprise there. But when it comes to e-waste, a more serious allegation is \u201cplanned obsolescence\u201d, by which industries design products with artificially short lives, so they need to be replaced more quickly<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some obsolescence is good: replacing cars for models with more fuel-efficient engines, for example. Similarly, we know the rapid churn of smart devices in the last decade has been driven not by faulty products, but by the relentless pace of technological progress<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even so, the electronics industry has faced allegations that planned obsolescence is contributing to our rising tide of e-waste. In 2017, for example, Apple\u00a0admitted<\/a>\u00a0it had been using software to slow older iPhones. After multiple lawsuits, including a $500m civil action it\u00a0settled in 2020<\/a>, the company eventually apologised. But it has also engaged in a pattern of behaviour critics allege undermines its self-image as a sustainable business: the iPhone 13, introduced in 2021, initially included a feature that would disable the Face ID unlock system if the screen was replaced with one not made by Apple<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of us would have no idea how to fix our phone and even if we did, many manufacturers have removed the ability for consumers even to replace batteries, arguing that repairs must be done by professionals or even by the company itself \u2013 for a hefty fee, of course. iPhone owners in the US who want to repair their phone, for example, must pay a $1,200 deposit to hire Apple\u2019s special tools. I find this disheartening, because as a teenager in the mid-2000s I spent my weekends working at a mobile phone repair stall in the local shopping centre, happily swapping out dud batteries and broken screens from old Nokias and Motorolas for new ones<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it isn\u2019t just amateurs who find modern electronics hard to repair. As our devices have become thinner and cheaper, they have become trickier to fix: once-removable parts printed on to circuit boards; screens held in place by adhesives; tiny earbuds that can\u2019t be opened; software locks that render older devices unusable. This fight over repair has come to a head, thanks to organisations such as iFixit (which, in addition to its repair shops, publishes How To guides online for free), the\u00a0Restart Project<\/a>\u00a0and Europe\u2019s\u00a0\u201cright to repair\u201d<\/a>\u00a0rules. In France,\u00a0new electronics must now be labelled<\/a>\u00a0with a \u201crepairability index\u201d score, which rates products on categories such as spare parts and ease of access<\/p>\n\n\n\n While most of us are probably not going to attempt to fix our phones, even with a $1,200 repair kit, the issue of repair has real-world consequences farther afield \u2013 often in places where technical support is much harder to find<\/p>\n\n\n\n R<\/strong>ich countries have been exporting e-waste to poorer countries for almost as long as there has been any to send. But the trade didn\u2019t earn much attention until 2002, when the Basel Action Network released\u00a0Exporting Harm<\/a>, a now-infamous documentary about the environmental crisis e-waste was inflicting on recycling towns in southern China, particularly Guiyu. The film showed desperately poor workers, including children, breaking down electronics by hand, burning the casings off wires and separating components with acid baths, to access the valuable scrap metals inside<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ecological and human toll was heartbreaking. Soil and water samples in the recycling zones contained lead and other heavy metals that exceeded every World Health Organization threshold; in one study, 81.8% of children under six surveyed were suffering from lead poisoning. The Chinese government has since cleared many of the informal recycling shops in Guiyu and concentrated e-waste inside allocated industrial zones. But while China\u2019s imports have fallen, the amount we produce has only grown. For the last few years, the most notorious destination for western electronics has been not China but a slum in Accra, Ghana. Dubbed \u201cthe world\u2019s largest e-waste dump<\/a>\u201d, Agbogbloshie has been the subject of harrowing press coverage, as well as many viral YouTube films (most shot by white westerners)<\/p>\n\n\n\n I remember being horrified by the images: barefoot \u201cburner boys\u201d torching scrap wire as toxic fumes billowed from scorched earth; others cracking open imported phones against the backdrop of a dilapidated slum. Once again, it seemed, western waste electronics were being dumped on the world\u2019s poor, who were reaping the toxic consequences. I decided I needed to see it for myself, and it turns out the reality is not quite so simple<\/p>\n\n\n\n I<\/strong>t\u2019s a glorious day in Accra when I arrive outside Evans Queye\u2019s electronics shop. \u201cWelcome!\u201d Queye, who is expecting me, steps out to offer a warm handshake. A spectacled man with a bright smile and a taste for even brighter shirts, Queye is an electronics importer who buys used laptops from the Netherlands to resell in Accra\u2019s thriving secondhand market<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur biggest market is schools,\u201d he says, gesturing into an open-fronted unit with sun-baked brickwork and faded signage, on the end of a row of similar shops. Inside, I spot several dozen new-looking Dell boxes, stacked chest high. Children have recently returned to classrooms after the pandemic and orders are picking up again. \u201cSome of these have come from schools in Holland and will go to schools in\u00a0Ghana<\/a>. Come,\u201d Queye says, gesturing at the high sun and perhaps noticing the sweat pooling at my neck. \u201cWe\u2019ll talk in my office\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Queye\u2019s office is a few blocks away and as we drive there in his Volvo, I notice more repair shops. Outside one, rows of old Sony TVs hide in the shade of an awning. At another, kitchen appliances \u2013 almost all imported \u2013 spill into the street. Ghana\u2019s economy, like many in this part of\u00a0Africa<\/a>, is built on the secondhand trade. Every year, more than 1.2m containers pass through the nearby port of Tema, loaded with pre-owned goods from the US, Europe and Asia. Not only electronics, but clothing and cars, too. In 2009, the last year with solid data, Ghana imported 215,000 tonnes of electronics, 70% of it used. The imports are by necessity, as much as anything: the minimum wage in Ghana is just 12.53 cedis (90p) an hour, so few people can afford to buy new. That\u2019s where repairers like Queye come in<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plastic melts away like marshmallow, giving off smoke. The air is singed with the wretched stench of burning solder<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n His office is a cool, welcoming place, the desk dotted with old laptops, a ceiling fan looping lazily overhead. Queye has worked in the secondhand trade since he left school, in 2002. These days, he is a rep for Snew BV, a \u201ccircular telecoms\u201d company based in the Netherlands, which collects used electronics from across Europe for resale. The newer models are resold in Europe, the older ones in Africa, where prices are lower. \u201cThe standard model we receive is five years old. But we can use a machine for as much as 15 years. I have a Pentium IV … \u201d He pulls out a Dell laptop that must be at least a decade old (Intel stopped making the Pentium IV in 2008). \u201cI\u2019ve been using it a very long time and it\u2019s working perfectly\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, Queye drives me across town to Danke IT Systems, a small repair shop on the second storey of a strip mall. It\u2019s a tiny place, internet cafe-style, with a handful of machines set up for customers. The manager, a bright-eyed, bald 39-year-old named Wisdom Amoo, sits behind his desk with a laptop on his lap and a screwdriver in his hand. The cubbyholes and drawers around him are brimful of laptops and parts: Dells, mostly, but also machines from HP, Lenovo, Asus, Apple<\/p>\n\n\n\n Amoo has just finished with the HP in his hands, which had a broken charging port. The part is soldered down, so he has improvised by converting a display port to accept a charging cable. \u201cI need to cut a hole here and replace it with parts from another machine,\u201d he says, gesturing with a precise finger. Certain models tend to have the same issues \u2013 screen burn in one, faulty trackpads in another \u2013 and repair work is a delicate skill: a single slip with a soldering iron can ruin a laptop rather than fix it. When he\u2019s soldering, Amoo holds his breath<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Accra, Queye explains, the scrap recyclers from dumps such as Agbogbloshie are part of the repair ecosystem. \u201cIf the repair shops had a machine that could not be repaired, then the scrap boys would pick it up and take it to Agbogbloshie. Then the repair shops would go down there to see if they could source parts. If I need a part for a TV with a working screen but a broken power system, by chance, I might find the same TV with a broken screen but the power system working.\u201d Only after usable parts had been extracted would the remainder be dismantled and sold off for scrap<\/p>\n\n\n\n This, Queye explains, is the context often overlooked in western media stories about Agbogbloshie. E-waste is not coming to Ghana to be dumped; it\u2019s coming to be used. In that sense Agbogbloshie was not \u201cthe world\u2019s largest e-waste dump\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a neighbourhood, home to schools, markets, churches and to a large informal settlement, Old Fadama, which houses an estimated 100,000 people, many immigrants from the poor northern regions of Ghana. The \u201cdump\u201d was a scrapyard \u2013 albeit a very large and well documented one, where the environmental controls were tragically lacking<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m writing in the past tense because Agbogbloshie no longer exists \u2013 at least, not in the form it once did. In 2021, the Ghanaian police raided and demolished the scrapyard. A couple of days after meeting Queye, I head there to see it for myself. From Old Fadama, I can look out across the Odaw River to where it once stood. The site has been razed. Bare earth covers the area of the former scrapyard and shops, a handful of heavy earth movers still dragging topsoil around. The government supposedly plans to build a hospital there<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t intend to minimise the pollution caused at Agbogbloshie, which was nothing short of horrifying. The toxic toll of burning and dismantling the e-waste polluted the soil, the groundwater, the workers and even the food. In 2011, a\u00a0Ghanaian researcher found<\/a>\u00a0soil at a nearby school exceeded European safety standards twelvefold; in another study, eggs from chickens living in the settlement contained\u00a0220 times the tolerable daily intake of dioxins<\/a>. Agbogbloshie might not have been the largest e-waste dump in the world, but it was almost certainly among the most polluted<\/p>\n\n\n\n With Agbogbloshie gone, many of the scrappers have simply crossed the river into Old Fadama, itself a sprawling place: colourful wooden dwellings separated by thin mud lanes, so close as to be almost on top of one another. Inside, some inhabitants sleep eight to a room. Few of the buildings have toilets or running water. The scrap workers have set up shop around the edge of the slum, on the river beach. There, several dozen men are dismantling waste: hammering apart old engine blocks and tearing down refrigerators. Here, a teenage boy is cutting up a gearbox while an older man prises the springs from an old car seat. With nowhere to keep their stocks, the scrappers store them in the open. One tangle of old bicycles looks like the aftermath of a collision on the Tour de France. The ground is flecked with snapped fragments of TV casings and old motherboards, which chickens and goats pick through, looking for lunch<\/p>\n\n\n\n The burner boys have set up as far from the houses as possible, out beyond the children playing football. A dozen are gathered around a makeshift fire pit, carrying nests of wire on metal poles, which they press into the flames. The plastic melts away like marshmallow, giving off smoke. The air is singed with the wretched stench of plastics and burning solder. I want to talk to some of them, but my colleagues advise me not to. Since the government clearance, some of the scrap workers have become angry with western interlopers, whom they justifiably blame for the government\u2019s decision to knock down their old homes. \u201cThey have given thousands of interviews,\u201d Queye says. \u201cThey were still evicted\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Queye has known many of the scrap boys for years and offers to introduce me to some at his office. When I turn up next day, half a dozen young men \u2013 some of whom I\u2019d still consider children \u2013 file in, looking down, wearing flip-flops and the tattered shirts of rich European football teams: Juventus, Chelsea, Real Madrid. Most are not from Accra. \u201cWe\u2019re all from the north,\u201d Yakubu Sumani, a wiry young man in tired black jeans and a brown T-shirt says<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sumani had worked in the scrapyard since he was 15, earning 15-20 cedis (\u00a31.10-\u00a31.40) a day, buying and selling material. It wasn\u2019t easy or glamorous, but it paid better than other jobs in the informal sector; many of the young men were able to earn enough to send some money back to their families<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sumani recalls the clearing of Agbogbloshie: \u201cThe police came with weapons. They were arresting us. They beat some of us.\u201d The scrappers scattered, some returning home, to scrap jobs in the north. \u201cWe have a lot of people who are displaced,\u201d Queye says, quietly<\/p>\n\n\n\n By destroying Agbogbloshie, the government has not eliminated the e-waste, but spread it. \u201cThe waste is still in the system. But where is it now? You can\u2019t find it because it is scattered all over.\u201d Queye and other scrap traders argue that it would be better to formalise the trade in Ghana: allocate an industrial zone, provide health and safety rules, give workers formal recognition and social support, such as pensions. \u201cNone of them have any savings,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat they make, they eat that night.\u201d He fears the country will soon follow in the footsteps of others, including China, India, Thailand and Uganda, and ban the import of used electronics entirely. \u201cIf it happens here,\u201d he says, \u201cwe are doomed\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Too often, the way we talk about e-waste falls into a kind of guilt trap: aren\u2019t we terrible, for inflicting our waste on others. But the story is rarely that simple. To see exports as \u201cdumping\u201d ignores the local importers and the reasons they do it. That isn\u2019t to say we should permit dumping, but rather recognise that, for consumers in the global north, our role in this story is more difficult. (And that we aren\u2019t always the protagonist.) A more serious attitude to e-waste might ask why\u00a0extended producer responsibility<\/a>\u00a0schemes \u2013 in which technology companies pay into a central fund that goes towards recycling and product end-of-life programmes \u2013 aren\u2019t sending far more money into the global south, where their devices end up. When we discuss the right to repair and obsolescence, we rarely see the last links in the chain, the people who often use those products the longest. Who is listening to their voices? Where are they at the table? As the journalist Adam Minter writes in his scrap travelogue\u00a0Junkyard Planet<\/a>: \u201cWhen you think about it, insisting Africa\u2019s secondhand traders adopt Europe\u2019s definition of \u2018waste\u2019 … is a kind of colonialism\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I step out of Queye\u2019s office into the bright sunlight, I\u2019m reminded of something he\u2019d said that first morning we met. \u201cEvery machine one way or the other will die.\u201d Then he\u2019d grinned that irresistible grin. \u201cLike humans: everything has a lifespan\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00a0This is an edited extract from Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis, published by Simon & Schuster on 22 June<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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