On this last post of “The Land of Electronics”, I will be examining what Nigeria’s government has done to control and regulate the challenge of electronic waste in the informal sector.

In 1988, the exportation of hazardous wastes to developing countries garnered global attention after 3,800 tonnes of toxic wastes were found to be dumped in a dirt lot in Koko, Nigeria, as a deal arranged by an Italian waste trader (Liu, 1992). In response to this incident, the Nigerian Government has subsequently enacted the ‘Harmful Wastes Decree’, which provides a legal framework to regulate the disposal of toxic and hazardous waste into the environment of Nigeria, creating the Federal Environment Protection Agency (FEPA) in the process (Ideho, 2012). Under their National Policy on Environment, Nigeria further states that appropriate agencies are responsible to set up a regional framework and standard to combat against the transboundary movement of hazardous waste, which electronic waste falls under (Ideho, 2012).

However, there are certain significant limitations to this policy that reduce its effectiveness in managing the environmental pollution of electronic waste. Firstly, the hazardous electronic wastes imported into Nigeria are often imported under the ‘guise’ of them being second-hand goods. Furthermore, Amechi and Oni (2019) has found that these ‘second-hand goods’ are brought into Nigeria through used vehicles, of which are not subjected to inspection and control by regulatory agencies as compared to import routes through containers.

Most significantly, the challenge with ridding the country of the  hazardous and polluting electronic wastes derives from the fact that much of the informal Nigerian community depends on the transnational trade of e-waste for their livelihoods. For example, it was found that the formal refurbishing sector in Nigeria provided income to more than 30,000 people (Amechi and Oni, 2019). This suggests that the illegal importation of electronic waste has provided even more jobs for those operating in the informal sectors. Through the importation of these e-wastes, trades such as dismantling, repairing and refurbishing emerge as new opportunities for settlers that are unable to find formal employment.

In hindsight, the challenges of managing electronic waste are more complicated than perceived due to the conflicting socioeconomic benefits that electronic waste trade provides. Furthermore, it can be observed that policies can only do so much to regulate the on-the-ground realities of waste regulation. Through these observations, I believe that in order to truly curb the environmental pollution in these marginalised countries, the accountability lies in the hand of the consumers that make the decision to consume such products and services.

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In my previous post, I touched on how the disposal of electronic waste has very damaging effects on certain marginalised communities in the world, emphasising the environmental injustice of environmental pollution. Today, I would like to examine the impacts of electronic waste disposal and the subsequent socio-economic impacts of Nigeria.

Nigeria is a major destination of electronic waste, importing over 60,000 tonnes of used electronics and electrical equipment via the ports of Lagos alone (Galan, 2019). After sifting through the electronics and dumping those which are unusable, individuals in the informal sector in Nigeria are then tasked to collect and dismantle the electronics by hand to extract out the sellable components. Many of these dismantlers have reported injuries on their hands and feet from the sharp waste fractions, as well as an inhalation of the cadmium-containing internal phosphorous that is released as dust upon dismantling (Manhart et al., 2011).

The remnants of the e-waste that are deemed unusable are burnt, where ‘over 52,000 tonnes of brominated (flame retardant) plastics, 4,000 tonnes of lead, 80 tonnes of cadmium and 0.3 tonnes of mercury are burned or dumped in Nigeria every year’ (Galan, 2019). Furthermore, the highly acidic pH of 3.4 observed in some water bodies of the industrialised areas of Lagos may accelerate the dissolution and mobility of heavy metals from disposed waste items  toward water bodies used for domestic purposes (Nnorom & Odeyingbo, 2020), creating toxic and hazardous water bodies that endanger the locals who depend on these water bodies for water and sanitation purposes.

The adverse health impacts illustrate the negative social implications that e-waste has on the local community in Nigeria. The unfortunate paradox to this is that the locals are highly dependent on the informal electronic waste sector for their income. As such, this forces them to choose between their health or their income, of which the lack of awareness to these health implications would lead them to choose the latter. The extreme injustice observed here where these communities are systematically coerced into a “suffer now or suffer later” situation highlights the marginalisation of certain communities through environmental pollution, of which consumers hardly see the entirety of the implications of their consumption.

References

When I was younger, I had always thought that I was doing the environment a favour as I was saving dozens of trees by using my computer to take notes when I study. Evidently to me, there was a direct relationship between the existence of my computer to the declining usage of paper sheets and paper notebooks. I was definitely saving the world. Right?

Unbeknownst to my naive younger self, I had not heard of electronic pollution. So what is electronic waste pollution?

Electronic waste pollution occurs when electronic waste is dumped in landfills. The marginalisation of pollution effects can be significantly observed here as about 80% of e-waste from developed countries have been and is still continuing to be illegally exported to developing countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Pakistan (Awasthi, 2015). This suggests that many of the electronics that we have bought, used and eventually ignorantly discarded may have had ended up in landfills in one of the above-mentioned countries.

As these electronic waste often contain hazardous substances such as Copper, Lead, Tin, and Nickel (Adesokan et al., 2016), the disposal of these types of waste become extremely problematic when the toxins from the electronics enter the soil. In a study done on the soil pollution caused by e-waste in Nigeria by Adesokan et al., (2016), it was found that Nigeria receives an estimate of around 40,000 tonnes of e-waste every month, of which, much of these waste are then subjected to environmentally unsound scavenging methods such as the unprotected acid leaching of Printed Wiring Boards (PWBs) and the unprotected dismantling and burning of the electronics to recover precious metals by the informal sector. Through this, the toxins from the burnt metals are released into the soil, air and water from surface runoff (Ahmed, 2016), creating an extremely toxic environment for the informal settlers near these landfills. Song and Li (2015) further found that there were ‘increases in spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, premature births, reduced birth weights and infant lengths in pregnant women exposed to heavy metals from e-waste sites’, illustrating the harmful health implications of e-waste pollution.

Definitely, we as consumers don’t think too much about what happens to our personal items once they’re discarded. Just imagine the number of times we have discarded a perfectly functional phone or laptop because of our consumer mindset to replace it with the next new best model. The idea of using laptops or smartphones as “green” was truly such a misguided opinion, of which consumers like myself should be more accountable for.

Subsequently, the following few posts will go more in-depth into how the challenge of e-waste affect the marginalised groups more significantly and how these groups are handling these environmental challenges.

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