Duh: Traffic Jams at the Environmental Zoo
What if the “mystery” of African e-waste is best explained by the wonder of African electronics use?
The mystery of used electronics appearing in African cities may be best explained by the wonder of Africans using electronics.
Duh.
Accra. Lagos. Nairobi. Cairo. Cape Town. Pretoria.
What is the first thing almost every tourist, researcher, aid worker and white savior encounters after leaving the airport?
Traffic.
Your first hour in Accra should disabuse you of Greenpeace’s image of Agbogbloshie as some remote fishing village where Europeans secretly dump computers. Agbogbloshie is about 20 minutes from the airport—which, in Accra traffic, means it is extremely close to the airport. You could practically walk there.
Those traffic jams are full of automobiles. Automobiles contain steel, aluminum, batteries, catalytic converters, motors, circuit boards and copper wiring harnesses. They wear out. They are repaired. Their parts are harvested. Eventually, they are chopped into scrap.
Automobile scrap is far larger than electronic scrap. Yet when researchers photograph copper wire burning at an African scrapyard, the wire is routinely presented as evidence of imported electronic waste. The Smithsonian’s Adam Minter reported from Agbogbloshie that the burning wire included everything from automobile wiring harnesses to tire threads, that automobiles were being dismantled throughout the scrapyard, and that electronic waste was only a small part of the material being processed there.
The traffic jam creates automobile scrap whether or not a European spreadsheet records it.
But what if automobile scrap is held to the same standard of accounting as Kiener applies to E-Waste?
