Waste Wars: Read an exclusive excerpt from the book by Alexander Clapp

Your first cell phone, the VCR player you gave away after the advent of the DVD, the DVD player you donated to Goodwill after the arrival of Blu-ray, the Blu-ray player you never used, the college laptop you tossed away because it was ransacked by viruses—it all may very well have passed through Agbogbloshie, submitted to the stroke of a hammer and shucked of its valuables, the last chapter of a journey (What did happen to your childhood Game Boy?) You’ve probably never paused to contemplate in the first place. Photos of Agbogbloshie are invariably enlisted to demonstrate Ghana’s grim fate as one of the world’s greatest recipients of Western electronic waste. But the reality is more complicated and, in certain respects, darker. For Ghana was never meant to turn out like this. It was never supposed to become a dumping ground for foreigners’ unwanted electronics. And contrary to many descriptions of Agbogbloshie, not a single country or company on Earth ships, or has ever shipped, broken phones or busted televisions to the place as a matter of policy. No, none of this arrives in Ghana as waste per se. What foreigners do send—and this is not merely legal but incentivized by global institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund—are old electronics they claim do work. When recycling firms or waste brokers in countries like Canada or Germany ship millions of broken cell phones or ceiling fans to Ghana, it’s probable they may not think they are outsourcing pollution to West Africa. They may really believe they’re bestowing the tools of enlightenment and progress upon a poor corner of the world’s poorest continent. How did any of this start happening? How did Ghana—a country that scarcely possessed a functioning computer a generation ago—emerge as the recipient of thousands of tons of busted electronics and appliances every year? ...None of this was getting “dumped” in Ghana. It had been shipped for the purpose of getting purchased by Ghanaians. Dozens of containers packed with thousands of electronic devices of one sort or another reach Tema every day. Some are sent by waste brokers in Western countries who specialize in collecting secondhand electronics from recycling centers or dumps; others are donated by hospitals, universities, NGOs; others are sent by expatriate Ghanaians who, during the famine and tribal conflicts of the 1990s, relocated to the great metropolises of the north—London, New York, Toronto—and now wander their streets in search of old appliances piled on sidewalks that they can ship to relatives who work the street bazaars of Accra back home. By the time they are packed up and shipped off to the port of Tema, one thing is true of all these secondhand blenders and ceiling fans and desktop computers, regardless of who sent them. Study after study has revealed how at least one-quarter of them don’t actually work—and within three years of their arrival in West Africa, the majority of those that did work no longer do. Someone in Canada or Slovakia was determined for good reason to dispense with that blender or fan or computer in the first place. They are, if not trash already, trash on the make, albeit trash packed with valuable materials. A crude calculus gets them from the quays of Tema to the market stalls of Accra. In West Africa’s secondhand electronics business, one can purchase a ton of untested products for approximately six hundred dollars. But for half that amount one can purchase a ton of untested electronics, meaning cell phones and TVs that have been imported from Europe or the United States but are not necessarily guaranteed to work. A TV at twenty bucks instead of forty? A consignment of desktop computers at five hundred dollars instead of a thousand? Most Ghanaian vendors are willing to take the risk…. By the time an old television or laptop or cell phone reaches Agbogbloshie, it is deemed neither technology nor trash; it is a tangle of raw materials that happen to have been soldered and glued and drilled together, and that now must be separated… The point of Agbogbloshie is not just to be a destination for “condemned” phones—not to be a “dump” in the conventional sense—but to separate and extract as much of these inner materials as possible, as quickly and cheaply as possible. It is difficult work. Beyond the long-term health consequences of operating a great scrapyard in the midst of sixty thousand people with negligible access to healthcare, there are reminders all over Agbogbloshie of the dangers of shucking and hammering broken electronics for ten hours a day. The slum is full of hands missing fingers, feet shorn of toes, limbs pocked with burns, and the occasional one-eyed dismantler. (Excerpted with permission from Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp, published by Little Brown & Co; February 2025)