Noxious Earth

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              "text": "A keyboard stripped of its innards floats in the oxygenstarved Korle Lagoon adjacent to the Agbogbloshie computer dump. The fish here are fighting a terminal battle against a slew of heavy metals leaching into the water from the lead-saturated land.",
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              "text": "At the edge of the Agbogbloshie dump, a man cycles across a stretch of what was once part of the Korle Lagoon but is now just a kitchen midden of computer junk. When the rains come (and they come twice a year here), much of this waste will be washed into the Atlantic.",
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              "text": "At the edge of Agbogbloshie, a cow chews grass that sprouts from between the all-pervasive e-waste.",
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              "text": "Children take a break from burning coaxial cables and copper-core wires by horsing around in the other hazard zone at Agbogbloshie—the graveyard of rusting machinery so heavy that it can’t be dismantled to any profitable purpose.",
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              "text": "All it takes is one needle-nose pliers to take apart a circuit board. But the toxic chemicals get in everywhere—through the skin, under the fingernails, even settle into and bond with the fingertip whorls and refuse to wash out. The poisoning is slow, and steady, and inexorable.",
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              "text": "At the weekly market, a man waits by his makeshift stall with a chaotic assortment of salvaged electronic hardware: keyboards, mouses, scanners, hard drives, RAID bays, SATA hard drive mobile rack drawers. He is located somewhere in the middle of the marketing hierarchy at Agbogbloshie: a lowgrade middleman who will sell up.",
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              "text": "Two boys on their way to loading more waste on their heavy-duty push-pull cart. This pushpull cart is very heavy: like all Ghanaian slum carts, its tyres, taken off a truck, are solid rubber, not air-filled. Scavenging can’t spare time for the luxury of dealing with punctures.",
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              "text": "CPUs and computer chassis are stacked at an importer’s warehouse in Accra. Most of them are inoperative and will be tossed as scrap— straight into Agbogbloshie. Ghana itself has deliberately not legislated hazmat import restrictions.",
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              "text": "CRT monitors are valued for their riot of wires and circuit boards: each contains two to three kg of lead, which is a neurotoxin. These children will eventually sell to middlemen, for a pittance. (Adults, stronger at ripping apart junk, make between eight and 10 Ghana cedis—roughly $4-5—a day.)",
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              "text": "Sitting amidst the flayed skins of computers that have long been carted off, a boy examines a piece of potentially valuable scrap that turned up in the dump.",
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              "text": "Two young boys manoeuvre a cart loaded with every possible kind of scrap for the taking. So venomous is the Agbogbloshie environment that the Accra Metropolitan Authorities declared two years ago that even wearing a Level B, a full-facepiece self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) hazmat suit at the dump would be no guarantee of 100 percent safety.",
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              "text": "This acrid, black smoke sears the lungs and blinds the eyes for days. But it’s where the money is: copper wire, stripped clean of plastic and adhesive, with an international price hovering around $7,500 a metric tonne. The salvagers don’t see a thousandth of that.",
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              "text": "As smoke rises from burning e-waste, goats are herded around Agbogbloshie dump. The dump contains polymers and organic chemicals such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), used as flame retardants in computer monitor and TV casings, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs, found in old condensers), phthalates (used as plasticisers in bendable PVC), dioxins and furans.",
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ITS 45,000-ODD RESIDENTS call it “Sodom and Gomorrah”. Officially named Agbogbloshie, this suburb of Accra is one of the worst urban toxic dumpyards in Africa, a 361-acre open-air gas chamber located over a computer graveyard landfill. The area is a perennial miasma of some hundreds of tonnes of lead, cadmium, antimony, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and chlorinated dioxins. The black smoke of copper wiring being burnt to expose the pure stuff under the sheath barely hides the spectres of dumpyard diggers—some as young as seven, thousands of teenagers, and a scattering of sexagenarians who’ve survived, somehow, years of irreversible lung damage.

Agbogbloshie, which comprises 0.7 percent of the 200 sq km Accra, and has 1.15 percent of the city’s 3.9 million population, nonetheless has a giant impact on the capital’s wellbeing—rather, the lack of it. The lead in the ground leaches into the Odaw River about 120 yards from the largest residential community in Agbogbloshie, and the toxin-carrying fish—77 percent of Accra’s economy is piscine—end up in the Agbogbloshie Food Market.

The traducers on Accra’s dumpyards—not just on Agbogbloshie but also smaller gas chambers like Galloway, Kpone-Kokompe and Ashiaman in the Greater Accra Region, and in Nigeria and the Côte d’Ivoire—are Germany, Korea, Switzerland and the Netherlands, all of them prohibited by EU rules from tipping their rubbish anywhere but at home.

But European, US and Ghanaian traders bypass international laws by labelling the junk as “secondhand goods” or “charity”; in truth, though, 80 percent of Ghana’s e-waste comprises broken or obsolete computers, or, occasionally, working discards of rampant consumerism. Sometimes, they are genuine donations—but since donations can’t be donated, when they die they go to Agbogbloshie.

There, they are cracked open like lobsters, and the marrow extracted: at the top of the value chain is copper, followed by aluminium and zinc. And tiny flecks of gold. The dirt-poor extractors sell at about four times less than the international market rate—to the next group up the food chain, the Ghanaian middlemen, known for their rapacity.

These middlemen hunt down hard drives, hundreds of which line the Agbogbloshie Food Market, and a handful of which are data-salvaged every month by Ghana’s internationally infamous cyber-scammers. These drives, insufficiently scrubbed by their previous owners, deliver up credit card numbers, account information and records of online transactions. Recently, an HDD purchased by a group of visiting graduate students from the University of Columbia—for 69 Ghana cedi ($35)—contained a $22 million Northrop Grumman military contract.