Trade
in e-waste is a largely unregulated sector. It is down to the
exporter to say what is contained within the shipment. Labels such
as; “Products for reuse” or “Donations” can be used to cover
up the true contents of a container. There is no legal president to
state qualitatively the contents of a shipment. This allows exporters
to pack out containers labelled as “Donations” with e-waste ready
to be shipped to developing nations. What is the motivation of doing
this? To put it simply, cost. To use an example, to recycle or
correctly dispose of a single CRT monitor costs upwards of $15, a
price both the consumer and manufacturer are not willing to pay. With
mandatory recycling schemes being introduced across the USA and
Europe the flow of e-waste to developing nations is only going to
increase.
In the
case of trade to Africa, exporters have become brokers of e-waste.
Importers will purchase a container on it's net weight of contents
(on average it costs up to $5000 to ship a container from the USA to
Nigeria). This purchase can take two forms. The first is an unopened
unseen container where the buyer cannot see the contents but the
exporter may reveal some of information on good faith. These are
known as blind purchases and pose a significant gamble to the buyer.
The second is known as the trade off purchase. This relies on
communication between the buyer and the seller. Working computers,
for example, hold a significant value within the African market. A 10
year old desktop PC can sell for upwards of $150. The foreign
exporter, armed with this information, will contact potential buys
and reveal roughly how many working PC's are within the container.
The importer will then work out the numbers and attempt to negotiate
more working computers into the shipment until a deal is made. The
exporter is then free to pack the remainder of the space within the
shipment with e-waste, which the importer has unwittingly agreed to
take on. Jim Puckett, working for the Basal Action Network (BAN),
documents his observations in a report called “The Digital Dump:
Exporting Re-use and
Abuse to Africa”. Contained within is a
description of e-waste being dumped straight from containers at the
port in Lagos into coastal lowland swamps.
Image: climatechangemedia.com, e-waste dump in swampland outside Lagos, Nigeria
By
these two methods, e-waste brokers can mix illegal irreparable waste
with genuinely reusable and donated products and sell both for a
profit with no regard to the environmental impacts doing so will
cause.
