In his brilliant new book, Waste Wars, Alexander Clapp investigates a thriving trade in Ghana – and the threats it poses to our security How are you with your recycling? Conscientious or slack? Do you sometimes, as you separate your plastics and your cardboards, ask yourself if there’s any point to it, or if operation at the individual level means anything at a larger, country-wide or worldwide scale? When you get a new phone, or laptop, do you give any thought about what happens to the old one you discard? When I walk the beaches of Koh Samui I see lots of waste and Thai people going through the dumps to make some cash.
Trip to Agbogbloshie
Take a trip to Agbogbloshie, in Accra, Ghana, a dump where unbelievable amounts of electronic waste are sent and then dismantled by thousands of people living there, often in tin shacks. Or rather, don’t go: it’ll be bad for your health. Read Alexander Clapp’s investigative book, Waste Wars, instead Agbogbloshie, a name hitherto unfamiliar to me, is, however, very well known to both security analysts and environmental agencies all over the world. As Clapp writes: “For the US State Department, Agbogbloshie has proved a headache for security and intelligence safekeeping ever since it made itself known to Western authorities nearly two decades ago.
” The reason it’s a headache is because the enterprising recyclers go through the hard drives of all the laptops and recover all sorts of sensitive data, such as Homeland Security memos and Defense Intelligence Agency files. The value of the data has been said by a Harvard study to be worth up to $13 billion a year.
And that’s without considering the value of the raw materials prised from the innards of the machines themselves. Somehow, because businesses are clever like that, people have found a way to make money from taking your rubbish away and putting it somewhere you won’t see it. Out of sight, out of mind: Waste Wars puts the picture very much in your mind, and it’s hard to imagine any reasonably affluent Western reader – and compared to the people in the places where garbage ends up, every Western reader is affluent – reading this and not having their conception of the world fundamentally changed.
Where Is Your Junk
That is, unless you knew about all this already – but I bet there are few who know more than Clapp does now, having spent years travelling round the slums of the planet to see what’s happening for himself. He has come to the conclusion that the default human activity for much of the world now is not farming: it’s picking through vast heaps of toxic rubbish. And because it’s unsightly, and most of us would prefer not to think about this depressing subject, the people who make big money off it prefer to stay in the shadows. It’s becoming a large source of revenue for criminal gangs, being considerably safer than the drug trade, and the supply is endless; indeed, government agencies are practically begging them to take it away. The biggest and murkiest trade, though, is that of ship-breaking. Every cheap consumer good you own came to you on a ship, probably from the other side of the world; when those ships wear out they have to be taken apart, reintroducing to the environment unpleasant materials “ranging from asbestos to polychlorinated biphenyls to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons to heavy metals to paints infused with arsenic.
” (I wouldn’t know a polychlorinated biphenyl if it was served to me on a plate with parsley round it, but it doesn’t sound as if it would be exactly good for you.) When breaking down a ship, you’re not only exposed to the dangers in these materials; you’re exposed to the risk of being killed rather more quickly by a massive sheet of steel falling on you.
According to Clapp – a very experienced journalist, by the way, and not one given to the easy assignment: I remember his name because he went undercover to report on the Greek neo-fascist party, Golden Dawn – this all started in the post-war American economy.
Disposability became a central feature of the business model: a concerted effort to make people buy things they didn’t know they wanted or needed, and then to make them throw it away and buy something else just as semi-pointless the next year.
Buy By Choice
Our convenience, as Agbogbloshie’s very existence shows us, comes at a price. It is when Clapp is on the ground that he’s at his most startling: as he watches people disembowelling computer monitors, flattening old fridges, ceiling fans, air-conditioning units, you name it; with gavel hammers while wearing open-toed sandals; beneath five-storey-high piles of rubbish. “And while a streamlined process of automation”, he writes, “might have manufactured most of these products, it is human labour – of an almost unimaginably archaic kind – that remains one of the few ways to get rid of them.”
What to do about this is a very large question? It’s not even a matter of signing international protocols, as these are all more or less completely ignored. Where there’s muck there’s brass, as Clapp doesn’t say in so many words. It’s sobering to think that when you sort out your recycling, you’re still contributing to the problem. But if you don’t, it’s even worse.
You must be logged in to post a comment.