Toxic pollution cause by burning e-waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana (in French)

(Translation coming soon). Video produced by Docland Yard for French television.

This story on the toxic pollution caused by burning e-waste in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, the second largest e-waste processing area in West Africa, includes an interview with Pure Earth's Yaw Osei, who talks about a new e-waste recycling center, which opened last year. The center, part of a Pure Earth project, houses machines that can strip or pull apart scavenged plastic coated cables and wires to extract copper and other valuable materials within without burning. As Osei explains, the burning is what causes much of the toxic pollution.

Yaw Osei: "The pollution affects water, the air and the soil, and the pants that grow on it are also contaminated with heavy metals and also with dioxins and other pollutants... For instance, when you burn cables to recover metal, you are going to emit dioxins. Dioxins are one of a group of highly toxic substances known. And this also goes far so the whole neighborhood is at risk. We know even the banks around complain that when their workers come to work.. some of them, those that are asthmatic, have to stay indoors because when they come out they will get an attack... the situation is that serous."

Here, Osei talks about the recycling center.

"The scrap dealers bring their cables here and then it is stripped for them. Now the copper that comes out is clean and not burnt so it has higher price... we do it almost free of charge for them. So that they will be bring all cable here... and then the cables are given back to them to go and sell."

"We are continually looking for simple, appropriate technologies. We have no other option than to go low tech. Where are we going to get money for any high tech facility and how do we maintain them? So that's the challenge. We can't afford high tech."

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