Carmignac photojournalism award: Ghana and e-waste | Ghana

Sixty-two million tonnes. That is the volume of electrical and electronic waste generated worldwide in 2022, according to the latest Global E-Waste Monitor report published today by the UN. According to the study, if this trend continues, global electronic waste will reach 82m tonnes by 2030. Having long invaded Asia, e-waste from Europe and the US is arriving in extensive quantities in the ports of West African countries such as Ghana, in violation of international treaties. A country renowned for its political stability, Ghana is faced with the proliferation of informal open-air landfill sites.

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It was against this backdrop that the investigation by Anas Aremeyaw Anas and photojournalists Muntaka Chasant and Bénédicte Kurzen began. Departing from the dramatic imagery often used by the media to portray Ghana as “the dustbin of the world”, they spent a year documenting this ambiguous and complex exchange, which is a crucial economic opportunity for thousands of people in Ghana but has a considerable human and environmental impact. Together, combining a national and international approach, the team studied the ramifications of e-waste trafficking between Europe and Ghana, revealing the opacity of this globalised cycle, highlighting the embedded paradox of the e-waste economy.

Flea markets are the traditional places to buy electrical and electronic goods, although the internet has become an increasingly popular forum. Most professional exporters travel across Germany, Denmark, Holland and Belgium to get these items, which are then shipped out of Hamburg, one of the main export hubs in Europe. Exporters must financially balance expensive high-quality devices with cheaper used (but functioning) items, which will find buyers in Accra.

Delving into the complex world of second-hand electronics in Ghana and Europe, photojournalist Bénédicte Kurzen documented the e-waste flows and the communities that activate them, challenging negative stereotypes of exporters and highlighting the inefficiency of European e-waste bureaucracy.

At the other end of the chain, in Accra, the capital of Ghana, photojournalist Muntaka Chasant immersed himself in a sociological analysis of an economy on which many communities depend. He analysed the social groups of e-waste workers, revealing a hierarchical organisation and the mechanisms of migration from north-east Ghana.

In the UK, Bénédicte Kurzen documented Sam Osei’s yard in Rainham, Kent. The yard serves as a storage area, shipping agency and a haulage, loading and container delivery service to the port. It is also an informal electronics marketplace.

Anas Aremeyaw Anas | Journalist

“It was about asking: ‘Where does the e-waste go? Where does it come from?’ This is what brought us undercover in the companies that recycle. First of all, you want to see the individual who goes through the long process of getting rid of this waste. You want to follow him to see how much he makes in a day. Then you want to ask yourself, ‘When he sells these items to those companies, what do they do with it?’”

Anas insisted that while the Ghanaian e-waste and catalytic converter recycling industry “offered enormous economic opportunities”, it was also “involved in criminal activities that were dangerous to the environment and health”. The fact that the players in this sector were “obscurely connected to an international network for recycling and purchasing precious metals” should prompt greater control and “more stringent legislation to regulate the trade in hazardous waste”, he said.

In Zorko in north-east Ghana, Emmanuel Akatire’s work as a picker involves roaming around e-waste processing areas with a sack collecting discarded pieces of metal and any unwanted e-waste components. He’ll spend the rest of the day separating them into various materials, including copper, iron and aluminium. Akatire sold what he processed on 16 February 2023 for 900 Ghanaian cedis (£45).

Authorities have deployed the latest technology and systems to facilitate X-ray screening for both import and export traffic transiting through the port of Tema, near Accra. The drive-through portal is capable of scanning 100 to 120 vehicles an hour for explosives, drugs and weapons and provides manifest verification to reduce the need for manual inspections. The Port of Tema scans all containers that pass through it.

Bénédicte Kurzen | Photojournalist

My research started in Accra, where I contacted the secondhand dealers’ association to understand the market and needs. The majority of the end-of-life waste coming into Ghana is composed of secondhand items collected by the Ghanaian diaspora and shipped by Ghanaian agents and Ghanaian exporters. Through the association, I managed to meet some importers, mostly Ghanaians who were based in Europe.

I then went to the UK, where the yards I visited are owned by Ghanaians. There, I was trying to understand where those importers were getting their goods from. So I followed them into a secondhand market, some hidden, weird, retail places in the middle of the English countryside, which refused to be pictured.

Sam Osei: “I arrived in the UK in 1986, aged 17, to study. While running a cleaning company, I created this business in 2013. I cleaned at night, and by day worked for a shipping company. Africans are always shipping things. I looked into the business side of it and a friend showed me what to do. I didn’t even finish my degree, and dropped out two years later. A lot of Ghanaians went bankrupt with the weakening of the national currency, which jumped from 8 cedis to 18 cedis to the pound. Whether we export or not, people seem to have forgotten that European and Chinese people still use their TVs, telephones and fridges, and in the end, they have to find a place to dump them. That’s the problem we need to solve, the problem our leaders need to tackle. If they helped us and provided us with recycling facilities, that would be great.”

Georges Sarfo: “My business costs me so much in overheads that I can’t afford to take any risks. I prefer to buy better goods. Some people don’t have enough funds: it takes £10,000 to fill a container. I lived in Austria for 15 years, before moving to Britain with my wife and children and working in north London. Starting your own business is difficult for a foreigner, but I managed to earn a taxi licence and I started saving, saving, saving … But everything has changed since the days when I started exporting products. In 2011, customs clearance in Accra cost £600; now it costs £4,000. I used to manage three containers all at the same time and fill them in two weeks. But last year, I almost stopped everything. I’m too old now – I’ll be 60 next year. I have a house in Accra and a house here. I thought a lot about exporting products from Accra to Europe, but it’s difficult.”

Lapaz is the Accra neighbourhood where containers offload their electronic devices and electrical appliances from all over the world, imported mostly by Ghanaian businesspeople. There is a predominance of TV screens, which are an extremely popular item. Entire families are frequently involved in the business, some in Ghana and others living abroad and shipping containers loaded with UEEE (used electrical and electronic equipment). Goods are chosen based on demand.

In Amsterdam, I met Jerry, who actually helped build the yards in Accra. They operate first as centres where people bring and sell goods: they act as market, storage and shipping facility. Above all, they constitute an economic model that is providing work for a lot of people from the African diaspora beyond Ghana, predominantly Nigerians, Guineans and Senegalese people.

Jerry Sekou Adara: “I had a dispute with the environment department here in Holland and we went to court. I asked them: ‘How do you come to the conclusion that these goods are waste? Who checks them?’ Deciding that something is waste is like going to the doctor. You’re told what illness you have. Don’t say a television is waste beyond repair just because you plugged it in and didn’t see any image. The judge in court was a lady and a very good judge. I said to her: ‘Look, this laptop is not waste when it’s on your table, but it is waste when in African hands.’” She knew I was telling the truth. The economy is good for the people here – they don’t suffer – and what they think of as waste here, somebody will use in Africa.”

Then I went to the port of Rotterdam, the biggest in the world, because when those containers leave the yard, they go straight to the port. Rotterdam was, by far, the European port with the largest activity in the fourth quarter of 2022. It handled 111m tonnes of gross weight for all types of goods and cargo, with the exception of ro-ro mobile units.

The final step was to understand the role of the institutions. There are a lot of laws structuring this economy, but they don’t seem to be enforced, and this is why so many things are leaving for West Africa. All those countries, including Ghana, signed the Basel convention, but they don’t enforce it. I thought that instead of pointing the finger at the exporters, the smugglers, the trackers, it was interesting to point it at the European institutions, which are actually not reaching their own targets. For instance, Holland has a target of 65% of electronic waste collection. We are talking about items that are still repairable, and this is the loophole that needs to be addressed. Not everything is end-of-life. People need those electrical and electronic appliances, and before they end up in the dump site, they actually have a second life in the households of Ghanaian people.

We are not in a fluid, transparent system and the economy of exportation is very specific to each country. In the UK, the liberal model is very brutal, very competitive. In Holland, it is a lot more structured. The Germans have been particularly difficult to reach, and particularly silent. They refused to provide data on what they actually do to prevent end-of-life waste from leaving Europe. The German customs were like, “Oh, we can’t give you the numbers of inspection that we did because there was Covid.” But in Hamburg, the second largest port of Europe, only two customs agents are scanning containers.

Muntaka Chasant

Over the last decade, two main narratives have dominated the conversation about Ghana: massive e-waste dumping and the burning of waste cables to recover copper. My work here is to show how e-waste provides opportunities for the young people who burn it. At the same time, they are also agricultural workers and all they have is rain-fed agriculture. If there is no rain, they have to move. The issue is about youth unemployment in Ghana and, most importantly, about youth saturation, the biggest problem in the global south. For instance, more than 50 % of Ghana’s population is below the age of 25. Another aspect is that, as agricultural workers, they use e-waste resources to fund agriculture.

Agbogbloshie is also home to the largest open food markets in Accra, largely supplied by northern Ghana’s agricultural areas. This is not something people are aware of, not even the authorities. When the Agbogbloshie scrapyard was violently demolished in July 2021, it displaced the workers and undid years of efforts of training them and minimising exposure. Now, we have multiple sites resembling Agbogbloshie as a result of this haste in utopian urban renewal and change.

There is some form of social organisation around the site. The point, in sociological terms, is to understand the lives of these young people and also to differentiate pickers from burners. Pickers, who are mostly from a specific tribal group, have to work their way up to become burners; these Frafra people use their bare hands to dig into the toxic soil. This is something that Dagomba people will not do. So we have these strong visuals of young pickers who migrate from some of the most underdeveloped parts of Ghana, on the frontlines of the climate crisis, to these marginalised geographies.

Simon and hundreds of other young people migrate from his village, Vea, and other areas in the Upper East to Accra to engage in e-waste work as a means to achieve upward social mobility.

In images these places might look ungoverned, but actually there is a constant presence of political and state power around them. The states decide where and when to provide basic social services and infrastructure. The absence of that is an expression of their power. Burners and pickers were my inspiration. Yesterday, one of them sent me a video. He was back in the north. He used to be a picker of electronic waste, and now he is digging up plants.