EUROPE IS SMUGGLING ITS E-WASTE TO NIGERIA INSIDE USED CARS

SOURCE: MOTHERBOARD

The consumer electronics we use everyday often don’t degrade well. A landfill is a terrible place for old smartphones, televisions, or computers. Electronic waste can be composed of heavy metals, rare earth metals, and other potentially hazardous material. Much of it is hard to recycle, and disposing of e-waste is costly and dangerous. So, for decades, Europe and the United States have shipped e-waste to Africa and Asia, sometimes illegally. In a new twist on an old problem, Europe is starting to hide some of those electronics inside used cars.

The European Union has laws against exporting e-waste and dumping it in Africa, but the problem persists and, according to a new study, Nigeria is one of Europe’s prime dumping grounds. The United Nations University (UNU) and the Basel Convention Coordinating Centre (BCCC) for Africa partnered co-authored the study and found that 66,000 tons of used electronics shipped to Nigeria contained 16,900 that didn’t work.

Shipping non-functioning electronics from Europe to Nigeria is illegal but lax enforcement and clever importers skirted inspectors by loading up used cars with electronics then shipping it across the ocean. “To our surprise, the most important import route was not the containers but the roll on / roll off motor vehicles,” Otmar Deubzer, an advisor at UNU and co-author of the study, told me over the phone. “Around 70 percent of equipment came in via this route.”

To be clear, not all old electronics coming over are bad, and Nigeria does want some of them. “It’s very important for us to distinguish between used electronic equipment and waste electronic equipment,” Percy Onianwa, a BCCC Africa official and co-author of the study, said over the phone. “What is prohibited is the export and import of the e-waste, the non-functional equipment. It is still allowed to import used electronic equipment.”