The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you’ve never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It’s a luxury. What begins as a failure of the imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.
The coastal road that runs east from Accra, the capital of Ghana, is washed tan with the dust and sand of the beach it parallels. On both sides, business thrives in small sheds and storefronts. A few advertise food—I see dried fish and signs shaped like fish hanging from awnings and roofs. But by far the chief business on this busy stretch of highway is secondhand. Used tires are stacked high in clusters; washing machines are long streaks of silver and white; office chairs, leather sofas, and display cabinets sit close to the road, beckoning passersby.
To the east are some of the world’s biggest and most dynamic secondhand markets. In Togo, Lomé’s used-shoe markets are famous; in Benin, Cotonou’s car markets are notorious; and Nigeria is the single biggest market for used goods in Africa. But before traveling onward to those destinations, travelers must pass through the thicket of truck traffic that starts miles before Tema, the biggest port in Ghana.
I’m seated in the back seat of a sedan with Robin Ingenthron; Wahab Odoi Mohammed is in the driver’s seat; and Leticia, a customs clearing agent who works with Wahab, is in the passenger seat. “You can’t bring your cameras into the port,” Wahab tells us as we turn left into the Golden Jubilee Terminal. “The officers don’t like it.”
To our right, hundreds of shipping containers are piled four and five high in a fenced-off yard, empty and awaiting shipment. Beyond them, towering cranes slowly remove full containers from a just-arrived ship. We park and walk to an office where we pay the equivalent of sixty cents to enter the container yard where Wahab receives the goods he buys and packs in New England.
“Half the cargoes are secondhand,” Leticia says as we walk through the container yard gate. “It’s the biggest business here.” She isn’t referring to just Tema. In Ghana, secondhand goods are more common than new ones, and secondhand retailers far outnumber new ones. In Tamale, Wahab’s hometown and the third largest city in Ghana, the ratio could be as high as 100 to 1.
It’s a phenomenon that government statistics fail to record for a number of reasons. First, most of the trade is “informal” and conducted via cash and barter, which is difficult to track. Second, few developing countries have the resources to gather and publish quality data about used goods. Factory orders are a crucial metric for governments seeking investors; used television imports are not, despite their deep explanatory powers.
As Wahab and Leticia lead Robin and me into the Golden Jubilee Terminal, the scale of the trade reveals itself. By my count, at least six hundred shipping containers are laid out, extending for hundreds of feet. A few dozen are open, and goods are being unloaded by hand. “Usually those are the people who imported,” Wahab says. In the distance I see two sets of port officials with clipboards and pens in hand. They examine the contents of each container and assess duties. The fees can be steep: Wahab tells me that the duty on a shipping container full of monitors, televisions, and computers can range from seven thousand to eight thousand dollars, on top of the roughly five thousand dollars it costs to ship the container from Vermont to Accra, and the thousands of dollars he pays for the monitors.
If Ghanaians weren’t hungry for used televisions, and willing to pay for them, the export business would be financial suicide for Wahab and the thousands of other West African entrepreneurs who account for most of the devices that arrive on the continent. As of 2019, the recyclable value of the metals and plastic in Wahab’s average load of electronics (for example, his upcoming load of 400 monitors, 1,200 laptops, and 120 iMacs) is in the range of two thousand dollars, minus the considerable labor and time necessary to extract those metals and plastics, and the thousands of dollars it costs to buy them from Robin. It would be cheaper for Wahab to pay a New England recycler to recycle that container. Fortunately for him, Ghanaians are willing to pay a premium for imported secondhand stuff. It lasts longer and is cheaper than much of what’s shipped to Ghana as new product. Drive around his hometown of Tamale, and Wahab will point out the hospital that uses his computers, the school, and the bank, in addition to the individuals. They want to buy durable stuff that lasts.
Wahab isn’t alone in importing quality used goods into Ghana. In 2011, a consortium of research organizations, including the United Nations Environment Programme, sponsored a study of Ghana’s e-waste situation (as of 2019, it remains the only study of its kind).1 When they surveyed electronics arriving in Tema, they found that 60 percent were in working condition, 20 percent could be made to function with repair and refurbishment (good thing Ibrahim Alhassan’s Savelugu shop has thousands of counterparts across Ghana), and the remaining 20 percent could not function and would go to waste (after being cannibalized profitably for parts).
It’s a good business—if you can get the stuff. Wahab says that the quality laptops and desktops that Ghanaians covet have become harder to buy overseas in recent years, as recycling programs in the United States and Europe swallow up more reusable material for recycling into raw materials. “If I bring a load of laptops to Tema,” he told me, “I’ll have people rushing over from around the container yard asking to buy them. There’s so much demand.”
A typical Tema stall selling a variety of imported secondhand goods, including refrigerators, stereo speakers, and DVD players.
It’s not just secondhand electronics that people covet. The first container we pass carries—among other things—the following used goods: twelve televisions, four car bumpers, one dozen children’s bicycles, two baby car seats, a used propane-powered generator, and a La-Z-Boy. The container next to it holds four sofas, a crib, sixteen televisions, five large stereo speakers, a treadmill, and unopened boxes of other stuff. There are, conservatively estimated, at least two dozen other containers undergoing inspection as we stroll. And hundreds more containers are being off-loaded from boats on the water.
After leaving Golden Jubilee Terminal, we take a walk beyond the container yard. Along the streets, tents and stalls packed with used goods recently off-loaded from containers line the streets, right up to the curbs. Various tents and stalls are devoted to used refrigerators, used office chairs, used bicycles, used clothing, and, of course, used televisions, computers, and other electronics.
It’s a trade that should be celebrated. It’s a guarantee that somebody, somewhere, values old stuff. From an environmental perspective, it’s reuse on an industrial scale, the green economy made real. Better yet, no legislation or regulation was required to create it. A globalized trade in secondhand goods evolved on its own, connecting those who have stuff with those who don’t. Goodwill and Greenpeace couldn’t have devised a better system if they’d tried.
So why, if I show an image of African men and women standing beside disassembled computers, televisions, or bales of used clothes to a university or recycling-conference audience (as I’ve done), do they recoil at the e-waste dumped on Africa? Why doesn’t it occur to such audiences that small African entrepreneurs like Wahab are importing these devices to sell to technology-hungry folks across West Africa?
Longer-lasting, repairable products are key to promoting a secondhand future. But if the affluent people who own that longer-lasting stuff hesitate to sell it to particular classes of people—for example, West Africans—then there’s really no point in creating longer-lasting, repairable products. Manufacturers might as well just make products that work only for their original owners and then spontaneously combust.
Wahab doesn’t sell his electronics in Tema. Instead, he sends his shipping containers four hundred miles north (trucking fee: $1,200) to Tamale. There he divides the inventory between customers, including Steve Edison of Bugi Computers in Accra, who flies to Tamale for his share and then pays a truck to drive it back to Accra.
When I met Steve for the first time in 2015, Bugi Computers was just a single small shop off Oxford Street in Osu, a thriving residential and commercial neighborhood that’s become Accra’s cultural and commercial center. Then, as now, the shop’s walls were lined on two sides by display cases filled with used computers and a few accessories; two thirds of the way into the shop was the counter, and behind it was a repair shop. Back then, Steve had an earnest but shy presence. He’d come to work in a white lab coat and spend most of his time in the back doing complex repairs on laptops and desktops. When customers turned up, it seemed he wanted nothing more than to get back to fixing.
Today, Bugi Computers has three shops in Osu, and Steve’s lab coat has been replaced by fashionable formfitting shirts that display his gym-toned physique. When I arrive at the shop with Wahab, Robin, and Wahab’s cousin Oluu Orga (who works for Wahab), Steve shakes hands, slaps backs, and banters. And why not? Ghana’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, and Accra is home to a young population keen to own technology. Secondhand (and Bugi Computers) is the first rung on the ladder.
Wahab and Steve back away to talk business, so Robin and I examine the inventory. Robin recognizes some secondhand iMacs he sold to Wahab and points them out to me. Later, he nods at the locked display cabinets and several new, still-in-the-box Nokia phones. “Steve’ll sell more and more new stuff,” he predicts. “It’ll take a while, but that’s how it goes in every developing country. One day, it’ll be Best Buy.”
But not too soon. “People in Ghana, they don’t want the new computers from China,” Wahab says, interrupting. “If you give them a choice between a new Chinese laptop and a three-year-old used laptop from the U.S., they will always buy the used one. They know it will last.” At that, Wahab asks Robin to show Steve the database of used TV parts that Good Point built in Middlebury; they’re keen to start exporting the parts. I’ve already heard this pitch, so I step outside to the dirt lane next to Bugi. There’s a small shed there, and the door is open to two young men in lab coats. They’re Steve’s techs, and one is removing the broken screen from a laptop that a customer just sold back to Steve. He’ll replace it with a screen cannibalized from one of the dozens of laptops on the shelves above the work area.
Music plays from down the street; the smell of fried food comes from the opposite direction. Pedestrians walk by chatting on feature phones, animated at the end of the day. It’s Accra’s best hour.
Amid it all, a young man in his late teens or early twenties slowly moves down the street pulling a wooden cart the size of a large kitchen table. It’s balanced on a custom-built steel suspension and four large car tires. It carries a few pieces of rusty sheet metal, a large steel bracket, a beat-up VCR, one large tube television, and several hollowed-out steel desktop computer cases. I stand to get a better look: there are also a handful of computer motherboards scattered on the cart’s surface. The cart and its load must weigh several hundred pounds, and the young man’s Baltimore Ravens T-shirt is drenched in sweat.
Throughout this hilly, sprawling city, hundreds—maybe thousands—of young men pull wooden carts just like this one, paying for the unwanted junk (rusted gutters, broken televisions, dead laptops) of the city’s growing middle class and businesses. Most of these cart pullers work dawn to dusk, walking miles to pick up stuff that they can sell for reuse or recycling.
“I used to do that, oh yeah.”
I didn’t notice that Oluu Orga, Wahab’s cousin, has been standing nearby. I look back at him. “Really?”
“After I finished school, I left Tamale and moved to Accra, then Cape Coast,” he says in his soft, low voice. “Oh yeah, I did the scraps. I needed to earn money. We’d go around and collect everything.”
Oluu is in his midthirties, tall, a sharp dresser. Back in Tamale, he has a wife and children for whom—in his own words—he’s “always hustling” to earn money. I can’t see him pulling a cart through the streets of Accra. But that’s my failure, not his. “What kind of life was it?”
He shrugs and gives me a disarming smile. “I worked with my brother. Oh yeah.”
It’s early evening, and the shadows are growing long as Oluu, Robin, and I step out of a taxi and into a dusty parking lot across the street from a place that the Guardian labeled “the world’s largest digital dump,”2 CBC called “the world’s largest e-waste dump,”3 Al Jazeera called “the world’s biggest e-waste dump,”4 and PBS’s Frontline declared the final destination for “hundreds of millions of tons”5 of e-waste annually (a volume that, if true—and it’s not—exceeds the volume of waste computers, phones, and televisions generated every year on a global basis by a factor of five, at least). Other news organizations, environmental organizations, and government bureaucracies have repeated these same statistics, turning them to flawed conventional wisdom.
More than any other place on earth, this place, Agbogbloshie, has defined the Western image of a globalized trade in secondhand goods. If, when you read the words “used computers Africa,” you conjure an image of young black men tending to smoking clouds of electronics, you’re probably thinking of Agbogbloshie. If the words “electronics dumping” generate feelings of indignation based on a documentary you saw or story you read years ago, odds are that story was about or at least included mention of Agbogbloshie.
But the funny thing about a place that Time once called one of the ten most polluted places on earth is that it doesn’t look or feel that way from a parking lot across from the street. Instead, I see the famous yam market’s roadside wooden stalls stocked with yams and red onions, and diesel trucks loaded down with even more yams slowly navigating choking traffic. After the yams, the most noticeable things about Agbogbloshie—at least from across the street—are a bus station that conveys Ghanaians all over West Africa, a Pepsi bottling plant, a meat market, several banks, dozens of used computer shops, used-car dealerships, and a church overseen by Ghana’s most influential preacher. We are also engulfed in the dust of Ghana’s dry season, and an acrid cloud of smoke that billows from the other side of the yam market.
We dash across the street, avoiding impatient, angry taxis, heaving yam trucks, and two women walking with sacks of yams atop their heads, immune to the commotion. Between onion stalls, a driveway is formed by three large concrete blocks that gives way to a muddy path sloping toward the smoke. As we enter, we pass a young man pulling a wooden cart piled with six desktop computers.
“Oh yeah,” Oluu says as we walk up the path. “At first, pushing the cart was so hard for me. I’d start early in the morning and go all around Accra looking for scrap. Metal, computers—it didn’t matter. Then come here and sell.”
“Here” spreads out before us as the muddy path widens into a space that’s roughly 650 feet long and 1,450 feet wide (accounts suggesting it’s larger seem to mistake the city dump abutting it as being a part of the scrapyard). At that scale, it’s not the world’s biggest anything, much less its “biggest digital dump.” I am personally familiar with recycling facilities in China, Europe, and North America that are significantly larger.
Which makes sense if one looks at the data.
The scrapyard at Agbogbloshie.
According to the most recent data available, Ghana imported 215,000 metric tons of secondhand electronics in 2011. For the sake of argument, let’s say that number tripled over the next decade (unlikely, but let’s argue it), to 645,000 metric tons. Meanwhile, the UN estimates the globe generates 44.7 million metric tons of e-wastes annually. Which, if accurate, means that Ghana’s e-waste imports accounted for no more—and likely far less—than 1.50 percent of the world’s e-waste.
Still, there’s not much pleasant at Agbogbloshie. To our right is a trash-strewn field where junk cars, vans, trucks, and buses are piled up haphazardly, waiting to be torn into their individual parts for resale or recycling. That’s no accident: Agbogbloshie is mostly devoted to recycling automobiles and selling the parts. In fact, that’s been the primary business here since the early 1990s.6 The roughly five hundred workers at Agbogbloshie (many also call it home) crowd dirt-floored stalls, mostly hammering away at greasy automobile parts, whether axles or motors. Other workers dismantle whole vehicles using hand tools. Environmental protection isn’t a concern: oil and other fluids drain off into the soil and the nearby Korle Lagoon. Human health matters even less: safety equipment is nonexistent, and the air is riven with the smell of burning plastic.
Of course, Agbogbloshie isn’t just cars. We walk past an empty plastic television case, a stack of ten to twenty desktop computer cases, a pile of circuit boards, stacks of steel desktop computer cases, a small hill of rusty steel scrap, a smaller stack of still-wet paint cans, a spaghetti-tangle of burnt rubber-encrusted wire extracted from burnt tires, and three large electrical transformers (presumably from a local utility) leaking their toxic oils onto the soil. Nearby, two men pry microprocessors from circuit boards with screwdrivers and break apart aluminum window frames with hammers. Individuals who work at the site report that it recycles between thirty and fifty televisions per day.
“Is any of this junk trucked here from Tema?” I ask Oluu.
“Tema?” he asks.
“Yeah. The port. Do people bring it from Tema to dump it here?”
“Oh no. Too far,” he answers (Tema is twenty miles away). “Everything here is thrown away by people in Accra. The things in containers at Tema are too valuable for Agbogbloshie.”
“Really?”
He laughs. “When I worked here, we wanted things from Tema. That’s big money. Instead we have to scrap in the neighborhoods.”
As any Accra taxi driver will be happy to explain, Agbogbloshie is where Ghanaian things go after they’ve been used until they can’t be used or repaired (some will also tell you it’s a place where stolen property can be fenced). Most of that Agbogbloshie-bound junk was, in fact, imported into Ghana, then used, repaired, and reused, often for decades. What little data exists supports the claim: according to a survey of West Africa’s e-waste, as much as 85 percent of the used electronics in Ghana were generated in Ghana itself, from devices that were purchased new or used in Ghana or were imported as working or repairable.7 Computers and televisions too old for Accra make their way to smaller towns, where they last for years, even decades (Ibrahim Alhassan isn’t the only repair tech in Ghana working on a twenty-five-year-old television).
It’s not hard to find this information. It’s available online or by taking a taxi. Yet, for more than a decade, reporters have failed to ask these questions or search for these answers. Why? It’s not my place to impugn the motives of other reporters. What I do know (based on conversations with reporters) is that many reporters are sent to Agbogbloshie by editors in hope of replicating a story in the Guardian or on BBC. For Europeans in particular, Ghana is a short and relatively inexpensive reporting trip, and Agbogbloshie is easily accessible. Nonetheless, it’s still an investment, and few reporters—especially television reporters—are going to risk calling an editor and saying, “By the way, the BBC got it wrong. It’s actually an auto junkyard.”
Now, to be clear: I’m not excusing anything that happens at Agbogbloshie. As someone who grew up in the recycling industry and has covered it for years as a reporter, I can state with confidence that there’s a safer and cleaner way to do pretty much everything that’s done there. Meanwhile, what happens in Agbogbloshie has devastating consequences on the environment and human health (it’s not uncommon to hear deep hacking coughs as one walks around Agbogbloshie).
But that’s not the only lens through which one should understand Agbogbloshie. A wider lens that takes in a West Africa beyond Agbogbloshie—that incorporates Accra’s up-and-coming middle class, its countless secondhand shops, and the port of Tema—suggests hope amid the dinge. In that picture, Agbogbloshie, a slum that’s home to forty thousand people, has risen above poverty and pollution and functions as a perfectly circular economy where things are used and then reused—in effect, injected back into middle-class African life as refurbished products—in ways that rich countries simply never achieve.
You just have to look for it!
Walk out of the dump, take a right, cross the bridge, and you find businesses selling goods made from junk sold in the junkyard. There are aluminum cooking pots and stoves made from scrap aluminum; steel barbecue grills made from scrap steel; new electrical transformers made from scrapped transformers; stall after stall of refurbished automobile parts; and businesses that repair computers and make “new” ones from parts recovered from old computers. They are the “thirdhand market,” super-low-end counterparts to Bugi Computers and the secondhand market. It’s all possible because, at some point, somebody imported used stuff from a wealthier country. That stuff circulated through Ghana, round and round, until it landed here.
“How many people were pushing carts around Accra when you were working here?” I ask Oluu.
“So many. We’d all be looking for the same thing. That’s how the computers come here. We’d buy them from businesses and homes.”
After a year of pulling carts, Oluu moved up. A cousin (not Wahab) secured a contract with a Chinese trader interested in buying and shipping Ghanaian circuit boards back to China for recycling (the market for old boards is much stronger there than in Ghana). Oluu left his cart behind, hopped on a motorcycle, and spent his days driving around Accra buying electronics from the men with whom he used to pull carts. Oluu also picked up computers and sold them to the many repair shops around Agbogbloshie that took these machines, fixed them, and resold them. If a computer couldn’t be fixed, they’d recover the parts and build a machine from those. Even today, Agbogbloshie’s jerry-rigged machines remain a popular and affordable technology for students, businesses, and, in Oluu’s words, “regular people.” Only if a part can’t be fixed (and in Ghana, skilled circuit board repair is common) is it recycled—often in China or Nigeria. Soon, Oluu was making enough money to afford an apartment of his own.
We emerge from the scrapping zone into an open space that abuts the landfill and comprises perhaps one fifth of what is known as Agbogbloshie—and 99 percent of what’s written, photographed, and broadcast about it. Trash is strewn everywhere; my feet crunch it as I walk. A few hundred feet away a group of perhaps twenty people stands around three smoky, noxious fires sending black clouds of poison across Agbogbloshie. There are two groups among them. The larger one, comprising perhaps a dozen people, are Agbogbloshie scrap workers and business owners who arrive with ten-pound balls of insulated wire extracted mostly from cars. To sell that wire for scrap, they need the insulation burned off. So they pay the smaller group here, the one that tends the fires, to do just that. Every day, a few hundred pounds of charred copper are sold out of Agbogbloshie, preceded by toxic smoke.
A small wooden shed sits roughly a hundred feet from the burning. It’s a kind of clubhouse for the burner crew, and Oluu and Wahab approach it confidently (they are members of the same tribal group as the burn crew). Awal Muhammad, a burly leader of this group, has a family and employment opportunities in the Northern Region, but he prefers this life. He’s the boss and—to be honest—I think he enjoys the attention he receives as the face (literally) of Agbogbloshie. When photographers visit the site, he’s the one whose photo is often taken next to the flames (if you’ve ever seen a photo of an African man burning wire, the odds are good it’s Awal). If a photographer tips him properly, he’ll add a bit of extra fuel to the fire to make it more photogenic, put his safety at risk and wave a burning tire over his head, or, at a minimum, ensure his crew of burners is available. These are all services provided to the producers of a 2017 video for the British rock band Placebo, who certainly got what they paid for. Placebo promoted the video on social media as being “filmed on location at Agbogbloshie, the world’s largest e-waste dump.”
In the years since Agbogbloshie was “discovered” by European and American environmental activists and journalists, hundreds of stories have been published about the place. I’ve read or watched most of them. They have a few things in common: fires, nameless young African men, the phrase “primitive recycling,” and a claim that Agbogbloshie is the “largest” something. Few, if any, include data, much less images of repair. Interviews with the repair businesses around Agbogbloshie are nonexistent. Implicit in these editorial choices is the assumption that Ghanaians are incapable of doing anything with foreign technology other than burning it. That’s a failure to see the computer workshops in Agbogbloshie and around Ghana. And in many cases, it’s a failure to recognize that the developed world has something to learn from the developing world about managing stuff.
What makes that failed reporting so damaging, beyond its impact on the public, is its impact on secondhand traders, consumers, researchers, and policymakers. Introduce Wahab to a government official in the United States (as I’ve seen Robin do), mention that he’s a secondhand-electronics trader, and the presumption of guilt is palpable. “Well, there have been documentaries,” I heard one official say to Robin, with Wahab present (as if he were not). No follow-ups were directed to Wahab, the Ghanaian trader. All questions were addressed to Robin, the white man who does business with the Ghanaian.
This sort of prejudice has real-world consequences for what humans can actually know. For example, in 2017 the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a globally renowned British charity that researches and promotes repair and reuse policies, published A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future, a 148-page report suggesting ways to make clothing more sustainable, reusable, and recyclable.8 It was widely covered in the global media (especially the contribution that high-end British fashion designer Stella McCartney had in shaping it). Yet despite the fact that Africa—and East Africa, in particular—is the largest market in the world for secondhand clothes, the report mentions Africa a mere four times in passing and includes no African authors or contributors. A casual reader could easily come to the conclusion that—in the view of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation—Africa’s used clothing traders and users have nothing to teach the world and have nothing meaningful to contribute to the future of clothing. That’s not only incorrect; it’s bigoted.
In summer 2008 an employee of the British branch of Greenpeace, the global environmental organization, and a journalist with Sky News, the British television news network, acquired an old tube television. Rather than enjoy it, the two gentlemen hired a mechanic to open the case, remove a part so that it no longer worked, and—before closing it back up—attach a satellite tracking device to the interior. Then they dropped it off at a government-run collection site that promised to recycle it safely in the U.K. or another developed country.
That wasn’t what Greenpeace and Sky News hoped would happen. Instead, they hoped to track it to a developing country, and—ideally—a digital dump.9 With a little luck and lobbying, their reporting might even result in the criminal prosecution of whoever sent it there.
What’s the crime?
In the 1970s and 1980s, journalists began to uncover cases in which companies and governments in the developed world dumped hazardous waste in countries in the developing world to save on disposal costs. In response, environmental groups and interested governments drafted national and international laws and treaties to restrict and ban that trade. It was a good thing to do. But there were problems, starting with the way that some of the advocates and the resulting laws divided the developing world from the developed one. In Europe, for example, the developed countries are defined as the thirty-six countries belonging to the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, the twenty-eight states of the European Commission, and Lichtenstein. These are, collectively, among the world’s wealthiest nations (all but three of which—Japan, Korea, and Mexico—are majority white), and they reserve for themselves the right to recycle and reuse their waste.
Preventing rich countries from exporting hazardous waste to developing countries is a good thing. Toxic ash removed from a Swedish power plant, for example, doesn’t belong in places that don’t have the technology to process it. But the problems start when it’s time to define what, precisely, is waste. Toxic ash from an incinerator is clearly waste. But what are we to make of a television with a missing part en route to Nigeria? Under European guidelines, if an electronic device—a monitor, a phone, a microwave—isn’t tested and working, it’s automatically waste (and hazardous, at that). Never mind that in Nigeria and Ghana, a nonworking television isn’t automatically viewed as waste but rather as a resource to be fixed or mined for parts and sold to people who can’t afford new. And never mind that Nigeria (and Ghana, for that matter) not only don’t prohibit these imports but have actually opened their doors more widely to them in recent years.10 African wishes be damned, Europe has decided that its definition—the rich man’s definition of his broken thing—is what matters.
Not long after Greenpeace dropped off its sabotaged television in Hampshire, BJ Electronics, a company owned by a Nigerian trader named Joseph Benson, purchased it (along with other electronics) and loaded it into a container bound for Nigeria. Neither the Greenpeace television nor most of the other appliances were tested before shipping. So putting them on the water was, under U.K. law, instantly a criminal act. Or, in the words of the Sky News correspondent: “It’s only illegal to export broken appliances from the U.K. to certain places, like Africa.”
Greenpeace and Sky News tracked Benson’s container to the Alaba electronics market in Lagos, the largest secondhand-electronics market in Nigeria (and probably the largest in Africa). It’s home to more than five thousand small shops and—reportedly—more than one million visitors per day. Alaba’s repair technicians are renowned for being some of the most talented and experienced in all Africa. They don’t just fix televisions; they make refurbished televisions from parts scavenged from old ones. If a circuit board is faulty, they don’t instantly throw it away; they take out their magnifying glasses, microscopes, soldering irons, and spare-parts boxes, and they fix it. Indeed, when a Sky News correspondent arrived at Alaba to search for the tracked television, he observed “fairly skilled electrical engineering work being carried out on appliances,” according to documents from Benson’s subsequent U.K. criminal trial.
Unfortunately, Sky News didn’t include footage of those skilled technicians in its report, much less inquire into whether one of those techs could fix the sabotaged television (invariably, the answer would’ve been yes, assuming the parts were available). Instead, it showed a Greenpeace activist paying around forty dollars for the television (roughly ten times the television’s value as scrap metal and plastic) and driving it to a garbage dump.
That unidentified dump looks a bit like Agbogbloshie, minus the cars, trucks, buses, televisions, computers, and other whole electronics, and the smoky fires in which wire is burned. There are, however, pieces of broken glass, some bits of copper and circuit boards, and lots and lots of garbage. That was enough for Sky News to declare the dump the “likely” destination for the sabotaged television (before Greenpeace and Sky News rescued it).
In spite of the shoddy reporting, the four-minute segment was a viral sensation. The British government, sensitive to public outrage, indicted Joseph Benson, several of his colleagues, and BJ Electronics for waste trafficking. In 2014, Benson was sentenced to sixteen months in prison and a £142,145 fine. The U.K. Environmental Agency hailed the verdict as a blow against criminal waste trafficking, and the global press covered it—and continues to hail it—as a landmark. Among the only critics was Robin Ingenthron, who blogged furiously about the trial and verdict, rightly pointing out that Benson’s crime was the temerity to ship from an affluent country to a less wealthy African one.
Few people cared—particularly the prosecutors.
Benson’s prosecution was largely managed by Howard McCann, principal counsel at the U.K.’s Environment Agency. Shortly after the conviction, I contacted McCann to ask if he thought it possible Benson was actually accomplishing an environmental good. Was it possible, I asked, that Benson’s goods were actually reused? And for much longer than they would’ve been used in the U.K.? McCann answered candidly:
Ostensibly it might have been for re-use. We didn’t have any evidence that it was going to be dumped. We make no reference to dumping, even though we know it takes place in Africa. There are waste heaps in Africa and Ghana where electrical waste can be dumped … It’s possible, but there’s no evidence that we have, that the items might have been repaired for re-use or some of them may have been cannibalized for re-use.
That lack of evidence didn’t bother McCann. As he explained to me, Benson’s intentions and the ultimate fate of those devices were irrelevant to the case, no matter how environmentally sound repair and reuse might be. What mattered, McCann emphasized several times, was that Benson did not recognize how the U.K. and Europe define “waste.” “The items were waste materials when they left this country,” he explained. “That’s why we tried it.” When you think about it, insisting that Africa’s secondhand traders adopt Europe’s definition of “waste” or risk prosecution—in Europe—is a kind of colonialism. Waste colonialism.
Barriers that give moral and legal standing to businesses, governments, and individuals who choose to discard their goods—electronic or not—rather than have them used by people of lesser means, aren’t good for the environment, and they certainly don’t help clean up clutter. Rather, they become short- and long-term incentives to buy new and cheap—especially for those who can’t afford quality.
So what can be done? Is there a legal solution that ensures exporters of secondhand stuff—everyone from Joseph Benson to Shoe Guy in Nogales to Goodwill International—aren’t viewed as morally suspect? Is there a treaty or law that ensures Africans who want to import and repair stuff from rich Europeans and Americans can continue to do so? Is there some way to convince reporters to start looking beyond the pile of burning wires at Agbogbloshie, and start visiting the repair shops down the road?
Before attempting to answer these questions I want to acknowledge something that I’ve touched on throughout this book. Generally, the globalized trade in secondhand stuff takes place between rich and poor. Due to a range of historical factors, including the lasting legacy of colonialism, income (and the state of national development) is often directly correlated with race, and thus the globalized trade in secondhand goods is typically between different races. Whether acknowledged or not, debates over whether certain countries and peoples can import or export “waste” are, at their core, debates over whether certain racial groups should have access to material goods, and whether they should be required to use and dispose of them in ways that richer, usually white countries prescribe.
As a white U.S. citizen, I’m wary of presenting solutions that might make me appear to be assuming the mantle of a white savior. But I am also a business journalist with a career spent covering the global recycling and reuse industry. In that capacity, I’ve learned that ignorance, racism, and other prejudices are among the most intractable barriers to the development of globalized secondhand and recycling (often known as a “circular economy”). I hope my observations and recommendations will be considered in that spirit.
Legal solutions are the easy ones. Step one is ending laws and prejudices that bar the trade in secondhand goods between countries based on their level of economic development. That approach might have made sense in the 1980s and 1990s, when Europe, Japan, and the United States were the world’s largest generators of used stuff (not just electronics), and the income gaps between developed and developing countries were much wider. But in 2019, developing China is the world’s largest generator of secondhand stuff—and one of its fastest growing exporters as well. “It used to be one billion people selling to three billion people,” Robin Ingenthron once said to me. “Now it’s three billion selling to three billion.”
Laws, regulations, and treaties that fail to recognize that shift are not only archaic, but, if enforced, will create two worlds: one in which Europe trades secondhand with rich Europe, the United States, Japan, and a handful of other countries whose economies grew in the immediate aftermath of World War II; and one in which a much larger developing world trades among itself. Long-term, that’s good for the developing world, and bad for everyone left behind.
My critics will point out that it’s not just developed countries that want to restrict the trade in secondhand. True enough: plenty of developing countries, too, have signed on to international treaties or enacted national laws that restrict it. For example, in 2018, Rwanda imposed tariffs on imported secondhand clothes that have made them effectively unaffordable to its citizens. The tariffs were designed to boost Rwanda’s once-proud domestic textile industry. Whether such an effort is desirable, or attainable, remains in doubt. In South Africa, a similar ban merely served to boost importers of low-cost, low-quality Chinese apparel, and there are signs that Rwanda is experiencing something similar. Meanwhile, the smuggling of secondhand is rife and growing throughout the country.
Rwanda isn’t the only country to experience a burst in secondhand trade after banning or restricting secondhand. India bans the import of secondhand clothing, yet it’s everywhere; Nigeria restricts and taxes the imports of secondhand everything, yet the consumer economy remains, in many places, secondhand. Meanwhile, the specter of corruption that haunts many developing economies ensures that the benefits of restricting secondhand go to manufacturers, not consumers. Developed-world advocates for secondhand barriers in developing countries would be wise to consider whose side they are taking. White saviors have a history of failing to save anyone.
Next, the global media has an obligation to stop stigmatizing the trade in secondhand—especially the immigrant and ethnic-minority businesses that make up most of it. Instead, it needs to recognize secondhand as a globally significant industry and start covering it as such. From Mexico to Ghana to India, secondhand is the consumer economy. But good luck finding any quality, consistent news coverage. On a monthly basis, more English-language stories have been written about the iPhone in India (a product with a price that exceeds most Indians’ annual incomes) than have been written about recent dramatic changes in the price, quality, and availability of used garments that clothe hundreds of millions of Indians. That’s editorial malpractice, a journalism designed for the affluent and comfortable, not the curious.
Worse, it’s journalism that fails to see, identify, and comprehend the actual issues faced by developing countries with inadequate waste-management systems. For example, the burning waste at Agbogbloshie isn’t the consequence of indiscriminate dumping by Western countries. Any reporter who visits one of Accra’s homes knows that the city of 2.5 million has enough stuff to keep Agbogbloshie’s fires burning for years without additional imports. Instead, Agbogbloshie’s problem is one that faces many developing countries: safe, clean garbage disposal and recycling is extremely expensive, accounting for half of all municipal costs in some poor countries. As a result, roughly three billion people, globally, lack access to any kind of organized waste management. When that fact collides with the explosion of stuff, globally, places like Agbogbloshie are the result.
Media organizations (and environmental activists) that want to do something for developing countries with waste problems would do themselves and those developing countries a favor by focusing on the need for modern waste management,11 and by not repeating stories that serve to—among other injustices—criminalize immigrant and ethnic-minority businesses.12
Finally, consumers and donors of stuff in the developed world need to get past their “waste provincialism.” At Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona, employees often hear from donors that they want their stuff “reused in our community.” That’s a good and proper goal. Taking care of one’s neighbors should be a primary concern of any citizen, anywhere in the world. But it’s invariably the case that one’s neighbors tend to be roughly equal to you in terms of taste and, most important, income and demographics.
If that’s the case, and you still want to donate your stuff, you’ll need to accept that your old stuff (and the identity tied up in it) might end up in the hands of somebody very different from you. In fact, that person might not view your donation as charity: she might buy it; she might view it as a rich person unloading a perfectly good thing for cheap; and when it finally breaks, she might feel there’s no better option than selling it to a guy with a cart like Olu used to pull. If that bothers you, it might be time to invest in a bigger storage unit.
In late winter I join Wahab Odoi Mohammed in the warehouse at Good Point Recycling in Middlebury as he tests piles of laptops that he’ll carry back to Ghana in suitcases. The warehouse is heated, but it’s still cold inside the capacious space, and Wahab is bundled tight in a bright orange down coat he’d never have occasion to wear in Ghana.
Wahab isn’t new to the cold. In 2001, after completing high school, he was sponsored to live in Cape Cod, moved to New Jersey, and then Vermont. He had a steady job working as a social worker when, one afternoon, a friend who fixed used computers took him to his favorite place to buy them: Good Point Recycling. That trip sparked something in Wahab. For years, his friends and family in Ghana had expressed to him an interest in importing used electronics for sale there. In this warehouse was the chance.
“Let’s call Steve,” Wahab declares and dials up Steve Edison on WhatsApp. It’s ten P.M. in Ghana, and a grainy face on a dark street appears on Wahab’s Samsung Galaxy Note 7. “Steve!” he yells out. “Look what’s in Robin’s warehouse.” He pans the phone over hundreds of laptops and monitors that have little value in Vermont except as scrap, or—perhaps—parts. But in Ghana, they’re worth a fortune. Wahab picks up a five-year-old Dell that Steve can sell for much, much more than Wahab pays for it. “A Dell, Steve!”
Steve smiles, then catches himself. “Very nice.”
Wahab picks up a beat-up Fujitsu laptop. “A Fujitsu, Steve!”
“Also very nice.”
Wahab says goodbye, picks up a boxy old Samsung laptop, and points to a scratch across the screen. “Grade B,” he declares. “We can fix that in Ghana with some rubbing alcohol and a fingernail. Make it look like new.”
“How much will you make?”
He tells me the margin—I agree not to reveal it—and I quickly understand how used laptops can finance a round-trip lifestyle between Ghana and Vermont. But Wahab is about much more than suitcase volumes. Tomorrow, he’ll be at Good Point’s new warehouse in Brockton, Massachusetts, where he has enough computers and monitors to fill a shipping container bound for Tema.
Today, it’s about smaller volumes. Wahab takes that Samsung and places it in a suitcase filled with ten mostly worthless-in-America laptops and piles of dirty laundry to cushion them. “It’s one hundred dollars for each extra bag beyond the first two on Delta,” he explains. “Already I have eight bags.” He looks over at an additional pile of computers that he’s yet to evaluate for shipment. “I need more suitcases,” he says. “You want to go to T.J. Maxx?”
Wahab borrows the keys to Robin’s Honda and takes the wheel. “Someone back in Ghana asked me, ‘How much do you spend on travel each year?’ I said, ‘Maybe fifteen thousand dollars.’ And they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s more money than I make in a year. Do you make money?’ ” Wahab scoffs angrily as he navigates expertly through town. “Of course I make money! Would I do this for free?” He nods at the snowy, frozen landscape. “That’s why I get so mad when I see stories about dumping e-waste in Ghana. You think Robin would pay me to dump his computers in Ghana?”
I’ve been in the room when Robin and Wahab have negotiated the price of goods that Wahab buys and ships to Ghana. The men are close friends, but you wouldn’t know it based on those heated discussions. So no, I don’t.
Wahab Mohammed and Robin Ingenthron discussing computer parts that Wahab is shipping back to Ghana from Good Point Recycling’s warehouse in Middlebury, Vermont.
Wahab continues. “What I don’t understand is why, if I buy some goods and have them in my possession, I shouldn’t be able to repair and sell them?”
“People who want to stop exports say that used goods don’t last very long and become hazardous waste,” I explain carefully. “They’re worried they’ll end up in a dump, burning.”
“But then nobody should be able to sell new goods in Ghana either!” Wahab says. “All the new China goods don’t last very long either. They should try and stop those. Then Ghana should have nothing. That’s what they want?” He pulls into a strip mall with a T.J. Maxx at one end and changes the subject. “I buy so many suitcases and they’re all sitting in my house in Tamale. People always ask if they can buy them. I need to open a store.” He pauses, thinks about it, then laughs. “Maybe I will do it.”