You can see thick plumes of smoke rise from the Agbogbloshie dumpsite from miles away.
The air at the vast dump, in the west of Ghana’s capital Accra, is highly toxic. The closer you get, the harder it is to breathe and your vision starts to blur.
Around these fumes are dozens of men, who wait for tractors to unload piles of cables before setting them on fire. Others climb up a toxic waste hill and bring down TVs, computers and washing machine parts and set them alight.
The men are extracting valuable metals like copper and gold from electrical and electronic waste - or e-waste – much of which has made its way to Ghana from rich countries.
“I don’t feel well,” says young worker Abdulla Yakubu, whose eyes are red and watery as he burns cables and plastic.
“The air, as you can see, is very polluted and I have to work here every day, so it definitely affects our health.”
Abiba Alhassan, a mother of four, works near the burning site sorting out used plastic bottles, and the toxic smoke does not spare her either.
“Sometimes, it’s very difficult to breathe even, my chest becomes heavy and I feel very unwell,” she says.
E-waste is the world’s fastest-growing waste stream, with 62 million tonnes generated in 2022, up 82% from 2010, according to a UN report.
It is electronisation of our societies that is primarily behind the e-waste rise — ranging from smartphones, computers and smart alarms, to automobiles with electronic devices installed, whose demand is steadily on the rise.
Annual smartphone shipments, for instance, have more than doubled since 2010, hitting 1.2 billion in 2023, according to a UN Trade and Development report this year.
The UN says only around 15% of the world’s e-waste is recycled, so unscrupulous companies are seeking to offload it elsewhere, often through middle men who then traffick the waste out of the country.
Such waste is difficult to recycle because of their complex composition including toxic chemicals, metals, plastics and elements that cannot be easily separated and recycled.
Even developed countries do not have adequate e-waste management infrastructure.
UN investigators say they are seeing a significant rise in the trafficking of e-waste from developed countries and rapidly emerging economies. E-waste is now the most frequently seized item, accounting for one in six of all types of waste seizures globally, the World Customs Organisation has found.
Officials at Italy’s Naples port showed the BBC World Service how traffickers mis-declared and hid e-waste, which they said made up around 30% of their seizures.
They showed a scan of a container bound for Africa, carrying a car. But when port officials opened the container, broken parts of vehicles and e-waste were stacked inside, with oil leaking from some of them.