This story isn't so much about "we need to stop consuming new electronics" as it is "we need to ensure that electronic waste doesn't end up being dumped on random impoverished towns in Africa".
These guys are burning off the insulation from wires when there are simple cheap machines that automatically strip it all off. This is more a portrayal of extreme poverty than anything.
Like this is Marie Antoinette tier behavior of someone so out of touch with reality from their own privilege they can't even see it. "Hello, I, a benevolent westerner have bestowed upon you a dirt cheap tool so you can keep digging through cancerous muck for pennies. Am I not a gracious god? Thanks bye"
To be fair, the article cites "occupational" hazards in addition to the "ecological" ones, albeit with less (IMO) emphasis. I would hope that the actual campaign efforts in the field focused largely on those during outreach to recyclers.
"Hello, I, a benevolent westerner am tasked with explaining how poor you are to others but will never think of you after today or do anything to improve your condition. However, I am very serious about my role of explaining how anyone that trys to help or implement incremental solutions is a bad person."
C.f. Mpesa; westerners generally wouldn't think of payment over SMS, because they don't have the right lenses.
But the world is run by greedy bastards who don’t care about anything else than their own pockets. That’s how plastic gets ditched in the ocean. That’s how electronics get shipped to this e-waste dumping ground. Or old ships end up in Bangladesh.
I red probably too many science fiction books about future utopias, that the present makes me sad. Heck they can’t get the damn local commuter train line to run according the schedule in apparently wealthy part of Germany. Just shaking my head.
I'd love to learn more about this. What's the state of the art? How do the economics work out?
For now, I take my end-of-life electronics to the local BestBuy. They have pretty good recycling standards, which include attempts to reuse & refurbish devices:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/recycling/recycle-guidelines/pc...
And there should be two viewpoints: one is the cheapest way of getting the raw materials for production of other things. And the second is the clean way of getting rid of tons of electronics waste. Think about shelves of 17” first generation LCDs. Still not broken, but just outdated. The second one imho justifies the higher costs of materials. But if someone will pay let’s say 5% more for a television that was produced from recycled material… I don’t know. I see everywhere around greenwashing and I would not trust this anymore.
Of course, you should also price in the environmental costs of manufacturing, shipping, and using the thing.
So many challenges with this.
How do you quantify the environmental cost for an object over its entire life cycle?
How do you efficiently route the new funds to actually mitigate the damage?
How do you handle the inevitable black markets?
How do you avoid regressive effects?
I don’t have answers for all these. I just think “The Biome” is the scarce resource we should be using money to allocate.
They manage in neighboring Switzerland though.. Less greed and more pride for a job well done maybe?
At twice the ticket price, probably :)
But even ignoring the exchange rate (this is easy to do: just assume 100 yen = USD$1, like in the mid-2010s), most of the trains (or subways) are really cheap compared to costs I've seen in other countries (US/EU), and far better run on top of that.
The people who do the actual dumping tend to be poor, not the world running rich.
Wouldn't this further impoverish those who get work from said dumps?
The real issue seems to be that they have no alternatives. If they could get a $5000/Yr job making textiles there'd be no appetite for diving into rubbish.
Lots of places try to ban 2nd hand imports, but I think that just leads to poor quality “new” imports from even cheaper countries that have industrialized textile manufacturing.
Unsure what it would take for them to become competitive textile producers but that’s what would work the best in the end.
Maybe I’ve taken too many (one) economics courses…
That like saying "people should understand that eating cake is also an option, you don't have to eat dirt".
Because then answer me why most e-waste dumping gets shipped off to those impoverished countries instead of being processed locally using the "cheap and clean" ways you mention, directly in the rich western nations who are buying all those electronics in the first place.
Throwing the blame back on the poor countries getting exploited by corporate interest of rich western countries doing greenwashing, feels like gaslighting.
And at least in India it doesn't look like a burning hell hole of toxic waste.[1]
This is from the first link[1] in the npr article. It doesn't say that it is the primary destination but does say that it is high.
1. https://www.fondationcarmignac.com/en/ANAS-AREMEYAW-ANAS-MUN...
If we use the numbers from the article (250k tons) and from the site your provided (62 million tons), "extensive quantities" is 0.4% of e-waste.
That's not what the person you're replying to said at all:
> we need to ensure that electronic waste doesn't end up being dumped on random impoverished towns in Africa
The point is that recycling isn't the problem, it's the companies who direct the waste. Nobody is blaming the third world countries for these problems. Holding these examples of terrible conditions up as evidence that recycling doesn't work just gives recycling a bad reputation rather than showing the irresponsibility of the companies that put the waste there in the first place. Neither the producers nor the recipients of the waste decided for it to be this way, it's the people in the middle.