1. The Campaign for 10 Million Lives A Three-year Strategy (2016-2018)
From Ghana to the West Bank, children affected by e-waste recycling
ELECTRONIC WASTE (E-Waste) and INDUSTRIAL POLLUTION
The Problem: The environmental and human health impacts of exposure to improperly handled electronic waste (old computers, appliances, electronics) are a serious and growing global crisis. Every year million tons of e-waste are disposed of globally consisting one of the fastest growing waste streams, as technology use increases and product lifespan decreases. Such materials (i.e., computer circuit boards, wiring, batteries, LED screens) contain a range of hazardous substances, including plastics, which release carcinogenic dioxins during unregulated burning to recover and recycle highly valuable elements such as copper, silver and gold. Contaminants from such sites can cause severe and long lasting health damage ranging from brain damage and cancer to respiratory illnesses and learning disabilities.
The dynamics of a globalized and uneven international economy result in developing countries being disproportionately affected, and playing host to the most toxic activities. E-waste recycling is a viable business, resulting in thriving, informal (and, at times illegal) e-waste industries, which extract valuable metals from scrap. Despite regulatory mechanisms encouraging the proper recycling of e-waste, a significant portion of the e-waste collected for recycling in industrialized countries ends up in crude recycling centers in China, India, Ghana, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Sadly, poverty often trumps environmental and health considerations for those earning a living via informal recycling. In these informal operations scrap is manually sorted and dismantled, followed by a set of crude procedures for the extraction of valuable components and the materials they contain—predominantly copper from cables and precious metals (gold, silver, palladium) from printed circuit boards and chips. The remaining material is disposed of through unregulated dumping and burning.

2. Agbogbloshie, Ghana Project
Agbogbloshie hosts Ghana’s largest center for e-waste recycling and disposal. Workers manually disassemble parts and burn off the plastic encasements on computer wires to recover profitable metals. The workers use tools with no protective equipment, leaving them susceptible to respiratory diseases and lead poisoning. Remaining waste after stripping wires is dumped into unlined pits and waterways. Black smoke continuously hovers over the site, resulting from piles of copper cables that are lit to burn off the plastic coatings. Air pollution from the burning affects workers as well as the families living and working nearby.
Pure Earth has been working in Ghana since 2010 when a partnership was formed with GreenAd Ghana, the Ghana Health Service, and the City University of New York School of Public Health to conduct an assessment of the occupational and environmental exposures of electronic waste recyclers in Agbogbloshie Market that showed workers and family members were exposed to hazardous levels of heavy trace elements. In 2014, Pure Earth began a pilot project by setting up a basic e-waste recycling facility that would enable recyclers to stop burning wire and instead strip it in a way that was efficient and profitable. Wire stripping machines were installed and workers were trained to use the appropriate machines to cleanly disassemble the materials and directly export the metals, plastics, and other sellable items. In this way, recyclers would maintain profits without polluting, and trained workers would increase profits by being in direct contact with exporters and selling clean materials that have not been burned. Pure Earth is monitoring the project and hopes it will be a model for other sites.
The Palestinian-Israeli Project
For almost a generation, over 30,000 inhabitants in the West Line Villages in the West Bank have been exposed to e-waste contamination; rising rates of disease, disability and mortality are now expected. Those working in the industry are directly at risk, and they often indirectly expose their families. Furthermore, the general population is exposed through airborne, and waterborne pollution of the key aquifer into Israel.
In addition, since the contamination sites are dispersed throughout an active agricultural landscape, uptake and transmission of contaminants through the food chain plays an important and still unassessed role. Chickens at nearby burning sites are laying yolkless eggs as seen here (similar cases have been documented in China), and the health impacts of these disturbing anomalies still need to be studied.
Pure Earth is collaborating with a team of Palestinian/Israeli researchers on the development and launch the first-ever long-term e-waste plan for an informal recycling sector. A trial remediation of a burning site in the West Bank was successfully completed. Now Pure Earth is scaling up a multi-faceted effort involving extensive remediation, converting the scrap sector from a reckless extraction industry to a clean, sustainable recycling industry. State-of-the-art equipment and technologies will be used to recover valuable metals vs. toxic burning, and increased community-based enforcement of a burning ban will enable widespread conversion to the clean practices.
Where
What
Impact
Cost
Ghana, West Bank/Israel, India, Kenya
Up to 4 projects to relocate and train informal recyclers, and then cleanup burn sites.
175,000 lives impacted
$1.05 million ($150,000/year/site) in private support, with
leverage potential of $4.2 million in government support