Foreign Media describe Agbogbloshie as not a good place to live and world’s largest e-waste dump

• Posted on March 26, 2014
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

A number of foreign media have carried a story defaming Agbogbloshie, a suburb of Ghana’s Capital, Accra. The story carried in almost all popular websites in Europe sourcing The Guardian said Agbogbloshie is ‘not a place to live.’ 

The Guardian in their Reportage about the suburb wrote;

The orange flesh of a papaya is like an oval gash in the landscape at Agbogbloshie, Ghana‘s vast dumping site for electronic waste, where everything is smeared and stained with mucky hues of brown and sooty black. A woman kneels among the carcasses of discarded computer monitors, scooping the fruit’s flesh for workers hungry from a morning’s work scavenging to eat.

If the appliances at Agbogbloshie were not being dismantled – plucked of their tiny nuggets of copper and aluminium – some of them could almost be technology antiques. Old VHS players, cassette recorders, sewing machines, computers from the 1980s and every period since lie haphazardly on large mounds in the dump, which stretches as far as the eye can see.

“Electric waste comes here from all over the world – but especially from Europe,” says Karim, 29, who, like almost all the scrap dealers at Agbogbloshie, originally comes from northern Ghana but has been salvaging, buying and selling at the dump for 10 years. “We get a lot of health problems here, but we manage, because we need the money.”

Last week, the UN’s “Solving the E-Waste Problem” initiative (Step), which was set up in 2007 to tackle the world’s growing crisis of electronic waste, warned that the global volume of such refuse is set to grow by 33% over the next four years. Much of it will be dumped in sites such as those in Agbogbloshie, increasing the risk of land contamination with lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and flame retardants.

Agbogbloshie seems chaotic, apocalyptic in places, but there is an order to the large, desolate, rubbish-strewn site. At one side, boys and young men gather in groups, picking their way through piles of old hard drives, untangling wires, and breaking up old air-conditioning units and even irons.

The following pictures were as well added to beef the reportage