The term “digital divide” has become so hackneyed that it's almost considered an established feature of society, rather than a challenge to overcome. But there's a surprising amount of electronic equipment coming into the continent - it just ends up in landfills instead of classrooms.
The global appetite for all things electronic has resulted in a massive pile-up of discarded gadgets, as better and faster versions are released almost daily. This mountain of e-waste - which includes anything from old PC monitors to mobile phones - is quickly becoming a major problem and raises questions about who is ultimately responsible for where these digital dinosaurs end up.
Major economies have implemented regulations around the recycling and export of hazardous waste, notably the Basel Convention, which has been ratified by 170 countries. Several initiatives aiming to prevent masses of techno-junk being shipped abroad have followed, such as Europe's WEEE Directive, which holds manufacturers responsible for the total life cycle of their equipment.
But, in reality, much of the world's electronic trash winds up littering the landscapes of developing countries, where discarded screens and circuit boards are picked apart or burnt to extract their valuable metal innards.
According to a 2008 Greenpeace report, an estimated 20 million to 50 million tonnes of obsolete electronic products are generated worldwide each year, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime says African countries risk becoming “the rubbish dumps of the planet".
These sites, growing in China, Ghana and Nigeria, are haunting in their hopelessness - a miserable indictment of the excess the developed world, where locals scavenge heaps of defunct technology, and disembowel the very devices that could have been a gateway to a vastly different life.
This is largely due to these countries' weak governance structures, which make it easy for exporters to ship containers of e-waste masquerading as donations - to bridge that infamous digital divide - to their ports.
As Greenpeace puts it, when developed nations realised the cost of managing and disposing of this waste stream, governments began sending the problem to the developing world, where environmental and labour laws are often lax and unenforced.
Dirty business
In an effort to address this, a US Bill was introduced last month that aims to prevent defunct or untested electronic goods from being exported to developing nations. The US, while responsible for scrapping around 400 million electronic devices each year, has not ratified the Basel Convention, and laws on hazardous waste exports are far from stringent.
The Government Accountability Office released a report in 2008 warning the Environmental Protection Agency that regulations are riddled with loopholes, and not being adequately enforced.
While consumers are trying to do the green deed by taking their old gadgets to be recycled, unscrupulous recyclers find it easier to sell to exporting waste traders than to actually process it locally, which can be expensive.
Locals disembowel the very devices that could have been a gateway to a vastly different life.
Lezette Engelbrecht, copy editor and journalist, ITWeb
If passed, this Responsible Electronics Recycling Act would oblige companies to be more vigilant about the recycling agencies they send e-waste to.
The fact is the same devices that help us run our daily lives also contain an array of toxic chemicals like chromium, lead, mercury and arsenic. And in dump sites they are hacked apart, burnt up, hammered and prised open in ways that pose great risks to people and the environment. Often, local children bash cathode-ray tubes and burn plastic casings in open fires, pouring poisonous fumes into the air, while hazardous chemicals are left to run into nearby rivers.
Of course, manufacturing devices that are almost completely free of hazardous substances is the ultimate goal, but until that happens, ensuring ethical recycling is paramount.
While industrialised nations are largely the culprits of this digital dumping, they are at least giving the problem attention. But why are the governments of the people who live and work on these scrap heaps not doing more? If e-junk is being offloaded in these areas, because environmental and workplace regulations are either inadequate or unenforced, doesn't that also put an onus on developing nations to ensure they protect their own people by tightening up these laws?
Wasted opportunity?
In February, the UN Environment Programme released a report revealing that in SA, as well as China, e-waste would have risen by 200% to 400% by 2020, compared to 2007 levels.
The report cites SA as one of the places, along with Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Morocco, with great potential to introduce top-notch recycling technologies, because the informal waste sector is relatively small.
Despite this, our government has identified e-waste as a relatively new waste stream (with an aside that it's also the fastest growing). And, as the E-waste Association of SA is quick to point out, we don't yet have a single local recycler capable of end-to-end e-waste processing that meets European standards.
With a rising tide of tech rubbish heading our way; a need for accredited, responsible recycling facilities; a sky-high unemployment rate and a pledge to green our economy, this presents ample opportunity for SA to step in and create a thriving waste management industry.
Not only will it hopefully reduce the incidence of primitive “recycling” methods, but also help channel reusable materials into society, and contribute to restoring the environment.
There's much talk in government about technology's potential to uplift the economy, to advance learning, and to bring us up to speed with the rest of the world. Why not capitalise on this opportunity for development? By introducing sophisticated recycling technologies and implementing effective legislation, the country could help curb the tide of e-waste, generate jobs and small businesses, and position SA as a major, ethical recycling player in Africa.
It's easy to say there are bigger problems than e-waste - crime, job creation, healthcare - but these are the very elements bound up in the e-waste ecosystem. Unless we start imposing proper controls over waste, and capitalising on the opportunities, we'll find the rest of the world will continue its technological evolution, while we are left to sift through the mess that is the very means of their advancement.
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