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Employees sort through waste at the Electronics Recyclers International
facility in Fresno, California

Employees sort through waste at the Electronics Recyclers International
facility in Fresno, California. Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

‘I spot brand new TVs, here to be shredded’: the truth about our electronic
waste

Employees sort through waste at the Electronics Recyclers International
facility in Fresno, California. Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

In a giant factory in California, thousands of screens, PCs and other
old or unwanted gadgets are picked apart for materials. But what about
the billions of other defunct (or not) devices?
by [78]Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Sat 3 Jun 2023 08.00 EDT
*
*
*

In the lobby of Fresno airport is a forest of plastic trees. A bit on
the nose, I think: this is central California, home of the grand
Sequoia national park. But you can’t put a 3,000-year-old redwood in a
planter (not to mention the ceiling clearance issue), so the tourist
board has deemed it fit to build these towering, convincing copies. I
pull out my phone and take a picture, amused and somewhat appalled.
What will live longer, I wonder: the real trees or the fakes?

I haven’t come to Fresno to see the trees; I’ve come about the device
on which I took the picture. In a warehouse in the south of the city,
green trucks are unloading pallets of old electronics through the doors
of Electronics Recyclers International (ERI), the largest electronics
recycling company in the US.

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its
unfortunate acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the
world. Electronic waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure
growing at about 2% a year. Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an
estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs
of headphones. And that’s ignoring the millions of consoles, sex toys,
electric scooters and other battery-powered devices we buy every year.
Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity, tucked away,
forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer,
kept “just in case”. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail
and refurbishing service, tells me: “Our biggest competitor is apathy.”

Globally, only 17.4% of electronic waste is recycled. Between [79]7%
and 20% is exported, 8% thrown into landfills and incinerators in the
global north, and the rest is unaccounted for. Yet Weee is, by weight,
among the most precious waste there is. One piece of electronic
equipment can contain 60 elements, from copper and aluminium to rarer
metals such as cobalt and tantalum, used in everything from
motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. A typical iPhone, for example,
contains 0.018g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and a
tiny fraction of platinum. Multiply by the sheer quantity of devices
and the impact is vast: a single recycler in China, GEM, produces more
cobalt than the country’s mines each year. The materials in our e-waste
– including up to 7% of the world’s gold reserves – are worth £50.9bn a
year.

Aaron Blum, co-founder and chief operating officer of ERI, arrives
wearing the corporate uniform of a tech executive: navy hoodie and
jeans. “You’ll need these,” he says, handing me a pair of bright orange
earplugs. Blum and a friend started ERI back in 2002, after leaving
college. California had just banned electronics from landfills due to
hazardous chemical contents – but little recycling infrastructure
existed. “I didn’t know anything about electronics. I was a business
major,” Blum says. Today, ERI has eight facilities across the US and
processes 57,000 tonnes of scrap electronics a year.
Aaron Blum, co-founder and chief operating officer at the Electronics
Recyclers International facility in Fresno, California, wearing hi-vis
jacket and hard hat
‘I didn’t know anything about electronics. I was a business major,’
says ERI co-founder Aaron Blum. Photograph: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

To get to the factory floor, we pass through a scanner. Security is
tight for a reason: millions of dollars’ worth of still-functioning or
repairable electronics passing through make it a tempting target for
thieves. In the loading bay, a goateed guy named Julio is unloading
pallets of shrink-wrapped monitors from a Salvation Army truck –
charity shops are a major source of ERI’s product. Everything that
arrives is scanned before being dismantled and sorted. “You can’t shred
certain materials, so you’ve got to do a sort,” Blum says.

Electronics are piled everywhere: flatscreens, DVD players, desktops,
printers, keyboards. At a set of tables, nine men are taking apart
large TVs, their electric screwdrivers emitting a low whiz. Another is
smashing a monitor from its casing with a hammer (“Due to the
adhesive”). The dismantling crews, Blum says, will handle up to 2,948kg
(6,500lb) of devices a day.

We pass a noticeboard marked Focus Material, on which actual parts have
been pinned as visual aids: motherboards, wire scraps, monitor casings.
“This hits home more than reading a document,” Blum says.

Scrap recycling contains so many different materials that the industry
has developed its own shorthand: light copper is “Dream”, No 1 copper
wire is “Barley”, insulated aluminium wire is “Twang”. There’s no such
poetry here, however. Instead, the extracted pieces are thrown into
boxes scrawled with things like Copper and CAT-5 wiring. Inside one I
notice a coil of LED Christmas lights. “During the holidays we get a
ton of these. This is all copper, in the wire,” Blum says, grabbing a
handful. “We have to go through and manually cut the bulbs off.”

Paranoid about losing industrial secrets to China, companies would
rather have their old machines wiped and shredded

Some materials – paper, batteries – must be removed for safety reasons.
“If something gets through that can’t be shredded, you can have a fire
or an explosion,” Blum says. “When you’re shredding metal, it gets
really hot.” Heat-sensing cameras constantly scan the factory floor for
hot pockets, and the workers wear masks and gloves: e-waste contains
toxicants ranging from lead and mercury to polybrominated
flame-retardants and [80]PFAS.

The centrepiece of the facility is the shredder, a hulking beast that
stretches the length of the building, three storeys high, making a
prodigious racket. (Hence the earplugs.) Once the waste has been
sorted, a worker in a Bobcat telehandler carries it over to the
conveyor’s gaping maw, where ultra-hardened spinning blades cut through
aluminium and plastic like ice in a blender. “When you’re shredding
electronics, you’re creating dust that contains lead from the circuit
boards, so we have collection hoods sucking up all the dust,” Blum
hollers. The dust has to be disposed of as hazardous waste. I nod,
exhilarated by the sheer violence of it.

Magnetic belts, air-sorters and filters separate the materials as they
pass along the shredder, dropping them into giant “super sacks”. We
stop at one and look down at a treasure haul of silver-grey flecks. “We
call this precious metal fines,” Blum says. “It’s gold, silver and
palladium from the circuit boards.” A single sack’s contents are
probably worth enough to buy a decent car.
Piles of shredded copper at the Electronic Recyclers International
facility in Fresno, California
Piles of shredded copper at the facility …
Sacks of precious metals, aluminium, steel, plastic and copper at the
Electronics Recyclers International facility in Fresno, California
… and sacks of precious metals, aluminium, steel, plastic and copper.
Photographs: Philip Cheung/The Guardian

Farther along the line, the conveyor splits off into tributaries. A
robot arm whirrs above one, picking up parts. “We used to have 15
pickers on this line. Now we have two or three,” Blum says. The company
spent a lot of money training the robot, which picks far faster than
any human could and is now 97% accurate. Blum seems to prefer it to
people. “It comes to work every day and never got Covid,” he says. I
can’t tell if he’s joking.

Near the end of the line, more metals roll into their super sacks.
ERI’s biggest material streams, by weight, are steel, plastic,
aluminium and brass. The circuit boards are sent to LS Nikko, a metals
manufacturing giant based in South Korea; the aluminium goes to the US
smelting giant Alcoa. “The steel might go to your large steel buyers in
the US – they might send it to mills in Turkey, but otherwise,
everything stays domestic.”

ERI charges customers a fee for disposal, dismantling, data removal and
recycling. Most are motivated not by reducing waste, Blum says, but by
cybersecurity: “Ninety-nine per cent of the electronics you have today
have your data on them. So data has become very, very important.”
Paranoid about losing industrial secrets to China, companies would
rather have their old machines wiped and shredded. “We have Homeland
Security come to our facilities. They will escort the material to the
shredder, stand watching while we run the material through, and
sometimes even take the shred out.”

Many manufacturers argue that repairs must be done by professionals
or even by them – for a hefty fee, of course

As we pass back through the factory, something catches my eye: a pallet
of TV screens from a major manufacturer, still neatly boxed and
plastic-wrapped. They are brand new, but here to be shredded: “They
don’t want this product resold and competing against their new
products, so they want it all destroyed.”

I’d expected to see this at ERI, but not so brazenly. Manufacturers and
retailers routinely destroy returns and unsold items, known as
deadstock, en masse. As Kyle Wiens, founder of the repair chain
[81]iFixit, tells me, these “must-shred” contracts are the “dirty
secret” of the recycling industry. (“The recyclers are desperate for
manufacturer contracts, so they’ll do anything and keep their mouths
shut,” Wiens says.) In 2021, for instance, an ITV News investigation in
the UK found [82]Amazon was sending millions of new and returned items
a year to be destroyed. (Amazon says it has since stopped the
practice.)

In 2020, [83]Apple sued a Canadian recycler for reselling some of the
500,000 devices it had sent for shredding. The recycler, GEEP, blamed
rogue employees – but the implication that the devices had been working
well enough to sell set off a wider scandal. The unfortunate truth is
that companies destroy new and nearly new products all the time. Luxury
and technology brands are reluctant to discount or donate unsold items
that might undermine sales of new models. [84]Burberry, for one,
admitted to incinerating £105m of unsold items in the five years to
2018, to stop them being sold at discounted rates (Burberry also says
it has ended the practice). In other cases, the financial upside of
processing unsold items or returns is not worth the costs, so it’s
cheaper to write it off. Burn it or bury it, wasting is cheap.
Employees at the Electronics Recyclers International facility in
Fresno, California, finish their shift
ERI employees finish their shift. Photograph: Philip Cheung/The
Guardian

There’s an old axiom that they don’t make things like they used to.
Goods cheaply bought are cheaply made – no surprise there. But when it
comes to e-waste, a more serious allegation is “planned obsolescence”,
by which industries design products with artificially short lives, so
they need to be replaced more quickly.

Some obsolescence is good: replacing cars for models with more
fuel-efficient engines, for example. Similarly, we know the rapid churn
of smart devices in the last decade has been driven not by faulty
products, but by the relentless pace of technological progress.

Even so, the electronics industry has faced allegations that planned
obsolescence is contributing to our rising tide of e-waste. In 2017,
for example, Apple [85]admitted it had been using software to slow
older iPhones. After multiple lawsuits, including a $500m civil action
it [86]settled in 2020, the company eventually apologised. But it has
also engaged in a pattern of behaviour critics allege undermines its
self-image as a sustainable business: the iPhone 13, introduced in
2021, initially included a feature that would disable the Face ID
unlock system if the screen was replaced with one not made by Apple.

Most of us would have no idea how to fix our phone and even if we did,
many manufacturers have removed the ability for consumers even to
replace batteries, arguing that repairs must be done by professionals
or even by the company itself – for a hefty fee, of course. iPhone
owners in the US who want to repair their phone, for example, must pay
a $1,200 deposit to hire Apple’s special tools. I find this
disheartening, because as a teenager in the mid-2000s I spent my
weekends working at a mobile phone repair stall in the local shopping
centre, happily swapping out dud batteries and broken screens from old
Nokias and Motorolas for new ones.
Employees sort through waste at the Electronics Recyclers International
facility in Fresno, California
The Fresno facility is one of eight ERI has across the US, processing
57,000 tonnes of scrap electronics a year. Photograph: Philip
Cheung/The Guardian

But it isn’t just amateurs who find modern electronics hard to repair.
As our devices have become thinner and cheaper, they have become
trickier to fix: once-removable parts printed on to circuit boards;
screens held in place by adhesives; tiny earbuds that can’t be opened;
software locks that render older devices unusable. This fight over
repair has come to a head, thanks to organisations such as iFixit
(which, in addition to its repair shops, publishes How To guides online
for free), the [87]Restart Project and Europe’s [88]“right to repair”
rules. In France, [89]new electronics must now be labelled with a
“repairability index” score, which rates products on categories such as
spare parts and ease of access.

While most of us are probably not going to attempt to fix our phones,
even with a $1,200 repair kit, the issue of repair has real-world
consequences farther afield – often in places where technical support
is much harder to find.
__________________________________________________________________

Rich countries have been exporting e-waste to poorer countries for
almost as long as there has been any to send. But the trade didn’t earn
much attention until 2002, when the Basel Action Network released
[90]Exporting Harm, a now-infamous documentary about the environmental
crisis e-waste was inflicting on recycling towns in southern China,
particularly Guiyu. The film showed desperately poor workers, including
children, breaking down electronics by hand, burning the casings off
wires and separating components with acid baths, to access the valuable
scrap metals inside.

The ecological and human toll was heartbreaking. Soil and water samples
in the recycling zones contained lead and other heavy metals that
exceeded every World Health Organization threshold; in one study, 81.8%
of children under six surveyed were suffering from lead poisoning. The
Chinese government has since cleared many of the informal recycling
shops in Guiyu and concentrated e-waste inside allocated industrial
zones. But while China’s imports have fallen, the amount we produce has
only grown. For the last few years, the most notorious destination for
western electronics has been not China but a slum in Accra, Ghana.
Dubbed “[91]the world’s largest e-waste dump”, Agbogbloshie has been
the subject of harrowing press coverage, as well as many viral YouTube
films (most shot by white westerners).
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An employee at the Electronics Recyclers International facility in
Fresno, California plastic-wraps microwaves
An employee plastic-wraps old microwaves. Photograph: Philip Cheung/The
Guardian

I remember being horrified by the images: barefoot “burner boys”
torching scrap wire as toxic fumes billowed from scorched earth; others
cracking open imported phones against the backdrop of a dilapidated
slum. Once again, it seemed, western waste electronics were being
dumped on the world’s poor, who were reaping the toxic consequences. I
decided I needed to see it for myself, and it turns out the reality is
not quite so simple.
__________________________________________________________________

It’s a glorious day in Accra when I arrive outside Evans Queye’s
electronics shop. “Welcome!” Queye, who is expecting me, steps out to
offer a warm handshake. A spectacled man with a bright smile and a
taste for even brighter shirts, Queye is an electronics importer who
buys used laptops from the Netherlands to resell in Accra’s thriving
secondhand market.

“Our biggest market is schools,” he says, gesturing into an
open-fronted unit with sun-baked brickwork and faded signage, on the
end of a row of similar shops. Inside, I spot several dozen new-looking
Dell boxes, stacked chest high. Children have recently returned to
classrooms after the pandemic and orders are picking up again. “Some of
these have come from schools in Holland and will go to schools in
[96]Ghana. Come,” Queye says, gesturing at the high sun and perhaps
noticing the sweat pooling at my neck. “We’ll talk in my office.”

Queye’s office is a few blocks away and as we drive there in his Volvo,
I notice more repair shops. Outside one, rows of old Sony TVs hide in
the shade of an awning. At another, kitchen appliances – almost all
imported – spill into the street. Ghana’s economy, like many in this
part of [97]Africa, is built on the secondhand trade. Every year, more
than 1.2m containers pass through the nearby port of Tema, loaded with
pre-owned goods from the US, Europe and Asia. Not only electronics, but
clothing and cars, too. In 2009, the last year with solid data, Ghana
imported 215,000 tonnes of electronics, 70% of it used. The imports are
by necessity, as much as anything: the minimum wage in Ghana is just
12.53 cedis (90p) an hour, so few people can afford to buy new. That’s
where repairers like Queye come in.

The plastic melts away like marshmallow, giving off smoke. The air
is singed with the wretched stench of burning solder

His office is a cool, welcoming place, the desk dotted with old
laptops, a ceiling fan looping lazily overhead. Queye has worked in the
secondhand trade since he left school, in 2002. These days, he is a rep
for Snew BV, a “circular telecoms” company based in the Netherlands,
which collects used electronics from across Europe for resale. The
newer models are resold in Europe, the older ones in Africa, where
prices are lower. “The standard model we receive is five years old. But
we can use a machine for as much as 15 years. I have a Pentium IV ... ”
He pulls out a Dell laptop that must be at least a decade old (Intel
stopped making the Pentium IV in 2008). “I’ve been using it a very long
time and it’s working perfectly.”

Later, Queye drives me across town to Danke IT Systems, a small repair
shop on the second storey of a strip mall. It’s a tiny place, internet
cafe-style, with a handful of machines set up for customers. The
manager, a bright-eyed, bald 39-year-old named Wisdom Amoo, sits behind
his desk with a laptop on his lap and a screwdriver in his hand. The
cubbyholes and drawers around him are brimful of laptops and parts:
Dells, mostly, but also machines from HP, Lenovo, Asus, Apple.

Amoo has just finished with the HP in his hands, which had a broken
charging port. The part is soldered down, so he has improvised by
converting a display port to accept a charging cable. “I need to cut a
hole here and replace it with parts from another machine,” he says,
gesturing with a precise finger. Certain models tend to have the same
issues – screen burn in one, faulty trackpads in another – and repair
work is a delicate skill: a single slip with a soldering iron can ruin
a laptop rather than fix it. When he’s soldering, Amoo holds his
breath.

In Accra, Queye explains, the scrap recyclers from dumps such as
Agbogbloshie are part of the repair ecosystem. “If the repair shops had
a machine that could not be repaired, then the scrap boys would pick it
up and take it to Agbogbloshie. Then the repair shops would go down
there to see if they could source parts. If I need a part for a TV with
a working screen but a broken power system, by chance, I might find the
same TV with a broken screen but the power system working.” Only after
usable parts had been extracted would the remainder be dismantled and
sold off for scrap.

This, Queye explains, is the context often overlooked in western media
stories about Agbogbloshie. E-waste is not coming to Ghana to be
dumped; it’s coming to be used. In that sense Agbogbloshie was not “the
world’s largest e-waste dump”.

It’s a neighbourhood, home to schools, markets, churches and to a large
informal settlement, Old Fadama, which houses an estimated 100,000
people, many immigrants from the poor northern regions of Ghana. The
“dump” was a scrapyard – albeit a very large and well documented one,
where the environmental controls were tragically lacking.

I’m writing in the past tense because Agbogbloshie no longer exists –
at least, not in the form it once did. In 2021, the Ghanaian police
raided and demolished the scrapyard. A couple of days after meeting
Queye, I head there to see it for myself. From Old Fadama, I can look
out across the Odaw River to where it once stood. The site has been
razed. Bare earth covers the area of the former scrapyard and shops, a
handful of heavy earth movers still dragging topsoil around. The
government supposedly plans to build a hospital there.
African men disassemble electronic scrap and bulky waste on the largest
electronic scrap yard of Africa in Agbogbloshie, a district of Ghana's
capital Accra, May 2019
Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana, was dubbed ‘the world’s largest e-waste
dump’, then raided and demolished in 2021. Photograph: Anadolu
Agency/Getty Images

I don’t intend to minimise the pollution caused at Agbogbloshie, which
was nothing short of horrifying. The toxic toll of burning and
dismantling the e-waste polluted the soil, the groundwater, the workers
and even the food. In 2011, a [98]Ghanaian researcher found soil at a
nearby school exceeded European safety standards twelvefold; in another
study, eggs from chickens living in the settlement contained [99]220
times the tolerable daily intake of dioxins. Agbogbloshie might not
have been the largest e-waste dump in the world, but it was almost
certainly among the most polluted.

With Agbogbloshie gone, many of the scrappers have simply crossed the
river into Old Fadama, itself a sprawling place: colourful wooden
dwellings separated by thin mud lanes, so close as to be almost on top
of one another. Inside, some inhabitants sleep eight to a room. Few of
the buildings have toilets or running water. The scrap workers have set
up shop around the edge of the slum, on the river beach. There, several
dozen men are dismantling waste: hammering apart old engine blocks and
tearing down refrigerators. Here, a teenage boy is cutting up a gearbox
while an older man prises the springs from an old car seat. With
nowhere to keep their stocks, the scrappers store them in the open. One
tangle of old bicycles looks like the aftermath of a collision on the
Tour de France. The ground is flecked with snapped fragments of TV
casings and old motherboards, which chickens and goats pick through,
looking for lunch.

The burner boys have set up as far from the houses as possible, out
beyond the children playing football. A dozen are gathered around a
makeshift fire pit, carrying nests of wire on metal poles, which they
press into the flames. The plastic melts away like marshmallow, giving
off smoke. The air is singed with the wretched stench of plastics and
burning solder. I want to talk to some of them, but my colleagues
advise me not to. Since the government clearance, some of the scrap
workers have become angry with western interlopers, whom they
justifiably blame for the government’s decision to knock down their old
homes. “They have given thousands of interviews,” Queye says. “They
were still evicted.”

But Queye has known many of the scrap boys for years and offers to
introduce me to some at his office. When I turn up next day, half a
dozen young men – some of whom I’d still consider children – file in,
looking down, wearing flip-flops and the tattered shirts of rich
European football teams: Juventus, Chelsea, Real Madrid. Most are not
from Accra. “We’re all from the north,” Yakubu Sumani, a wiry young man
in tired black jeans and a brown T-shirt says.
Buy. Return. Repeat … What really happens when we send back unwanted
clothes?
Read more

Sumani had worked in the scrapyard since he was 15, earning 15-20 cedis
(£1.10-£1.40) a day, buying and selling material. It wasn’t easy or
glamorous, but it paid better than other jobs in the informal sector;
many of the young men were able to earn enough to send some money back
to their families.

Sumani recalls the clearing of Agbogbloshie: “The police came with
weapons. They were arresting us. They beat some of us.” The scrappers
scattered, some returning home, to scrap jobs in the north. “We have a
lot of people who are displaced,” Queye says, quietly.

By destroying Agbogbloshie, the government has not eliminated the
e-waste, but spread it. “The waste is still in the system. But where is
it now? You can’t find it because it is scattered all over.” Queye and
other scrap traders argue that it would be better to formalise the
trade in Ghana: allocate an industrial zone, provide health and safety
rules, give workers formal recognition and social support, such as
pensions. “None of them have any savings,” he says. “What they make,
they eat that night.” He fears the country will soon follow in the
footsteps of others, including China, India, Thailand and Uganda, and
ban the import of used electronics entirely. “If it happens here,” he
says, “we are doomed.”

Too often, the way we talk about e-waste falls into a kind of guilt
trap: aren’t we terrible, for inflicting our waste on others. But the
story is rarely that simple. To see exports as “dumping” ignores the
local importers and the reasons they do it. That isn’t to say we should
permit dumping, but rather recognise that, for consumers in the global
north, our role in this story is more difficult. (And that we aren’t
always the protagonist.) A more serious attitude to e-waste might ask
why [100]extended producer responsibility schemes – in which technology
companies pay into a central fund that goes towards recycling and
product end-of-life programmes – aren’t sending far more money into the
global south, where their devices end up. When we discuss the right to
repair and obsolescence, we rarely see the last links in the chain, the
people who often use those products the longest. Who is listening to
their voices? Where are they at the table? As the journalist Adam
Minter writes in his scrap travelogue [101]Junkyard Planet: “When you
think about it, insisting Africa’s secondhand traders adopt Europe’s
definition of ‘waste’ ... is a kind of colonialism.”

As I step out of Queye’s office into the bright sunlight, I’m reminded
of something he’d said that first morning we met. “Every machine one
way or the other will die.” Then he’d grinned that irresistible grin.
“Like humans: everything has a lifespan.”

This is an edited extract from Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We
Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver
Franklin-Wallis, published by Simon & Schuster on 22 June at £20. To
support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at
[102]guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Topics
* [103]Waste
* [104]Recycling
* [105]Ethical and green living
* [106]Computing
* [107]Ghana
* [108]Africa
* [109]extracts

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