I just read this article and it is very disturbing to me. I love Africa.
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/06/23/tech-e-waste-ghana-data-british-columbia-journalism-students.html
Africa should not be our toxic dumping ground!
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Of course it's unfair, disgusting and just filling some despotic ruler's pockets.
Also the profit which is involved with shipping waste around the world must be stopped - means all these subsidies paid by European Tax payers money to keep that waste export alive should be abolished rather today than tomorrow!
The Germans have got a brandnew idea: plastering the Sahara with solar modules so that they get cheap energy.
Doing this and serving the Africans by sending them fridges/freezers and use the energy for that would make sense to me
But plastering the Desert to feed these multies appetite for additonal revenue is simply insane!
The third world countries being it in Africa or Asia are abused for all kinds of insane reasons.
Too sad!
SV
i agree - Africa shouldn't
Africa is abused by the western civilization in many more ways
I agree that this sort of thing is terrible. There was a "60 Minutes" segment that ran last fall about this issue in China. 60 minutes followed a container filled with computers donated during an electronics recycling drive to China, where it was illegally required (it's actually illegal in the U.S. to ship things like CRT monitors to be dumped in other countries without proper handling). The TV crew tracked the contents of their container to a "recycling center" that looked absolutely horrific. The film crew was actually assaulted by some of the locals when they were caught filming. Apparently this place was being run by some locally powerful people.
Let's take the devil's advocate position, rom the point of view of the people in these countries. Why shouldn't they be allowed to take this stuff? They're making money by taking it. Jobs are created when these recycling centers start running. Sure, prospecting for the valuable elements in leftover electronics is dangerous for one's health, but they're already desperate for money. The African/Asian concept of trash disposal is also not anywhere near what it is in many North American/European countries.
And what about you out there? How often do you replace your computer? What do you do with the old one? Don't think that recycling it does any good, because most of it is getting shipped to Africa or Asia.
Check out the U.S. GAO report on this: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-08-1044