DIGITAL DUMP

By Elisangela Oliveira, summed up from the magazine Newsweek

On the outskirts of Accra lies the Agbogbloshie slum, this place is the Ghana’s biggest eletronic-waste dumps, the locals already gave a nickname for this place: “Sodom and Gomorrah”, because of the black smoke and stench of burning plastic, this things made the landscape look ugly.

Behind all that, there was a good intention, for decades Western countries have been donating computers to West Africa. They thought that this action was developing world into the digital age. Instead, the efforts were not enough, all this action became a digital disaster.

The problem began with the computers, many of them were outdated, broken, unusable and besides, they arrived in a greater number that anyone could expect.

So now, in these recent years people have been thinking in alternatives to change this situation, but they have been unsuccessfully. The results has been unregulated shipping containers, marked “donations”,  that land in developing countries, packed with e-waste.

Some Project was tried but quickly devolved into a scheme for get around national regulations and cheaply dump dangerous garbage into poor rural villages. After that, Agbogbloshie is a treacherous treasure hunt, the locals burn the discarded electronics to extract cooper and other importante metals, the local manufacturers buy the products, offering one of the only steady income stream in town.

The smoke from the burning is extremely toxic, with high concentration of lead, Mercury, thellium, hydrogen, cyanide and PVC, not only that, Ghana is also the stop sources of cybercrime in the world.

The only thing someone can conclude with this story is that sometimes good intentions don’t work out, and when they don’t, the big companies (in this special case) in the world have to try hard to fix the situation they created on their own, because a lot of innocent people can die or get sick, besides living in clandentinity or outside the law.