The study notes that the world discards about 62 million tons of electronic waste every year, yet under a quarter of this material passes through regulated, formal recycling systems. Most e waste is handled informally, without oversight or protective equipment, and roughly 15 percent of the global total is shipped to Ghana, often under false labels that suggest charitable donations or usable secondhand electronics.
Lead author Brandon Marc Finn, an assistant research scientist at the U M School for Environment and Sustainability, and his colleagues focused on Agbogbloshie, a settlement that grew beside one of the world's largest informal e waste hubs in Accra. Drawing on 55 interviews with residents and workers, Finn documented how dismantling and burning discarded electronics shapes daily survival strategies while also degrading air quality, soil, and nearby water bodies.
Co authors Dimitris Gounaridis of SEAS and Patrick Cobbinah of the University of Melbourne found that as more people moved into and around Agbogbloshie, levels of air pollution, particularly fine particulate matter, rose in step with population growth. Their analysis, published in the journal npj Urban Sustainability and supported by the Graham Sustainability Institute and the African Studies Center at U M, links this trend directly to the open burning and processing of e waste around the site.
Workers at Agbogbloshie recover metals by burning plastic insulation off wires and components or by using acid baths to leach out copper and other valuable materials. Smoke and fine particles from open fires spread over nearby neighborhoods, while other pollutants seep into surrounding soils and a local lagoon, even as workers sell the recovered metals to intermediaries who feed them back into global supply chains that support everyday electronics and low carbon energy systems.
According to the study, many of the workers in Agbogbloshie are migrants from northern Ghana, where poverty and conflict leave few alternatives for paid work. E waste flows into Ghana from countries across the Global North and from elsewhere in Africa, with obsolete or nonfunctional devices frequently misdeclared as donations or usable goods.
"We have these long-term unequivocally dangerous social and environmental outcomes, but the paradox is that people are using this as perhaps the only way to earn money, or the only way to actually pursue upward socioeconomic mobility," Finn said. "If circular economies rely on exploitation and exposure to toxicity, as our research shows, they cannot be assumed to be sustainable. We need minerals for the energy transition, but the integrity of their supply chains is just as important as the outcome of clean energy itself."
Gounaridis, a geospatial data scientist at SEAS, assessed the scale of pollution using long term spatial datasets. He examined links between population change around Agbogbloshie, concentrations of fine inhalable particles with diameters of 2.5 micrometers or less, known as PM 2.5, and the footprints of some 200,000 buildings surrounding the recycling hub.
"We found a positive relationship between urbanization and particulate matter, which means that over the last decades, air pollution increased and so did the population," he said. "This relationship was most pronounced in Agbogbloshie, where people moved for work and were exposed to severe air pollution from open e-waste burning.
The team concludes that economic necessity is driving urban population growth in the district while the concentration of e waste work intensifies the pollution burden faced by those same residents. In their view, the activities that provide income and shelter are tightly entangled with the environmental risks that threaten workers' long term health.
"The paper raises the broader question of how to regulate informal economies and settlements across the Global South," Finn said. "Previous efforts either alienate people from their housing and livelihood through brutal evictions or create inaccessible higher barriers to market entry, or they completely ignore the problems and fail to intervene at all."
Finn argues for a middle ground approach that recognizes informal livelihoods while seeking to reduce harm. Suggested measures include providing wire stripping tools that allow workers to access copper without burning, along with financial and technical support to lower toxic exposures while leaving economic opportunities in place.
He also proposes establishing a central processing site where e waste can be handled under some level of control. Such a facility, he says, could improve transparency over who purchases recycled materials and how they reenter global supply chains, and could strengthen worker safety and environmental protections in the recycling process.
"Interventions into the informal paradox, in Ghana and more broadly, are desperately needed," Finn said. "However, the nature of these interventions is uncertain, and there are very real risks that policies that fail to understand these contexts and challenges worsen the outcomes for some of the world's most vulnerable people."
Research Report:The Informal Paradox: Electronic waste and the toxic circular economy in Ghana
Related Links
University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability
Africa News - Resources, Health, Food
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