Is e-waste a sleeping monster? Why should South Africans be wary of electronic waste?

Electronic waste or e-waste is the largest growing waste stream in South Africa. With increasing dependency on electronic appliances, the waste from electronics or electrical equipments also increases. Sreerupa Sanyal investigates into the current situation of this increasing, potentially harmful waste stream in South Africa.

Imagine a cluster of small huts with women cooking in open fires and infants rocking in makeshift cradles.

Further imagine, these huts surrounded by vast, barren tracts of lands, the size of three football fields. Thousands of tons of scrap fill the barren land and some hundred people are working amongst these heaps of trash.

Scrap collectors at the Hatherly landfill in Pretoria

Fires are burning here and there and toxic black smoke rises thick and fast in the sky.  A heavy stench of rotting vegetables, burnt tyres and circuit boards hang in the air. The churn of heavy truck tyres and scarp crushers crushing the discarded waste fill the atmosphere.

This is a reality that can be observed in the Hatherly landfill near Pretoria East.

Five years ago, there were no settlements near the landfill. Most of the scrap consisted of rotten vegetables, plastic, glass and paper, which were mostly dumped in the soil.

Hatherly landfill from above a dump site in Hatherly

These days circuit boards, refrigerators, computer screens, printer cartridges, broken cellular phones and all sorts of small and large electrical appliances far outnumber rotten vegetables, plastics and glass.

Electronic waste or e-waste is the new form of waste stream that is rapidly growing in South Africa’s major landfills. With no legislation in place and extremely low level of awareness, e-waste is mostly handled by informal recyclers such as those in Hatherly. This increases the potential risk to their health and surroundings. [Read more in http://concernforewaste.blogspot.com/2014/11/informal-recyclers-backbone-of-e-waste.html]

A flowchart below represents the current e-waste management system in South Africa:

According to an estimate by Dr. Koebu Khalema of the Africa Institute, (http://africainstitute.info/) South Africa recycles less than 25 per cent of the 5 million tons of e-waste it generates every year. The National Waste Management Act brought into force in 2008 makes no specific mention of electronic waste. There are no legislations in place regulating the activities of e-waste recyclers. Also there are no inventory of how much e-waste is generated within the territorial borders of the country or how much of it is recycled.

This increase in e-waste and the absence of data should be seen in the backdrop of the fact that, in March 2014, according to a Business Tech report, more smart phones were sold in the country than newspaper. About 40 million South Africans have access to the internet and new vehicle sales are growing at an annual rate of almost 12 per cent each year. Consumer electronics in South African homes amount to anything between one to three million tones, most of which is likely to enter the waste stream in the next 5-10 years. [Read more in http://concernforewaste.blogspot.com/2014/11/e-waste-ethical-concern-for-information.html]

Currently all e-waste is bracketed under the term ‘hazardous waste’.

Most e-waste recyclers argue that categorizing e-waste as ‘hazardous’ is misleading and creates fear in the minds of people when they hear about e-waste recycling.

Metals to be extracted from circuit boards

According to Ulze van Dyk, Director Africa E-Waste: “A computer monitor sitting in one corner of a room is not hazardous. Electronic goods become hazardous only when it is broken down and crushed without the proper technical know-how.”

South African recyclers specializing in electronic waste send most of their waste to European countries to extract the precious metals found in discarded circuit boards and central processing units because local companies either do not have the technical know-how or the technology available is at an infant stage. [Read more in http://concernforewaste.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-science-behind-recycling.html]

Almost all formal e-waste recyclers and information technology practitioners feel awareness about electronic waste, their generation and management is the need of the hour. One of the major reasons why e-waste is not regarded as a ‘priority waste’ is because of the lack of knowledge about e-waste.

Prof. Marlene Holmner, specializing in electronic waste and a professor of information technology from the University of Pretoria says: “South Africa is neglecting the issue of e-waste at its own peril. If nothing is done now, e-waste will prove to be the major environment and health hazard of the future.” 

Informal Recyclers: The backbone of e-waste management in South Africa: Part 1

Nofoto Sikewega, an informal recycler

Nofoto Sikewega’s morning starts at 5:30 a.m. amidst vast tracts of barren land. Sikewega, 31, clad in heavy boots, overalls, and a hat goes in search of illegal fires that might have been left burning the night before.

She is one of the 2,000 informal recyclers carving out a living at Pretoria’s largest landfill in Hatherly, a short distance from Mamelodi. Amidst all the humdrum going around, she concentrates on rescuing an electronic alarm clock from an illegal fire that had been left burning.

Covering an area of 72 hectares, the size of four football fields, Hatherly is the largest landfill in operation in Pretoria. Simon Baloyi, the manager of the landfill looks out over the vast wasteland and says: "It is beautiful, isn't?"

The ‘beautiful’ landscape consists of vast tracts of dry dust and mud and thousands of tons of every kind of scrap, one can think of. Scores of men and women clad in garments like Sikewega sort the rubbish into piles and bundles. The commodities that we tend to throw away in our bins so carelessly, end up here and is carefully sorted into heaps, bundles and piles before being carted off to the recyclers. Those, which cannot make it to the formal recyclers, are buried in the landfill.

Hatherly was declared a landfill under the Tshwane Municipality in 1993. It also has an archaeological importance. The burial grounds of the Ndebele tribe, who lived here years ago are situated just near its now encroaching borders.

Baloyi himself started out as an informal recycler before becoming the manager of the landfill.

Scrap packed in bags for recyclers

“When the landfill began, we had hardly 200 employees,” says Baloyi. "Now the number of registered informal recyclers working at the landfill is 2,000. Add to this the number of unregistered recyclers, who work here illegally and most of the time steal commodities from the landfill to sell into the second hand good shops in town. These people make the most illegal fires."

The term ‘illegal fires’ refer to the burning of waste, most often electronic waste illegally. There are designated burning spots located within the landfill and a strict scheduling of when scrap is to be burnt. Waste cannot be burnt in undesignated spots and at unscheduled times.

Scrap piled in bags for recyclers

Burning waste seem to be final option taken by the recyclers. The first choice is to separate the scrap that can be recycled. Almost 90 per cent of the plastics and glass are recycled from the landfill. However when it comes to electronic goods a fairly small  amount makes to the formal recyclers.

Sikewega seem adept at spotting the hazardous waste from the non-hazardous ones. She has at her fingertips a long list of what are considered hazardous e-waste under the Waste Management Act 2008. Her knowledge about this waste stream seems to surpass the knowledge of many academics who are working on waste management.

Says Sikewega: "E-waste can be any electronic scrap. But it is important to realize that electronics do not just comprise of electronics but rather plastic, glass, copper and all sorts of metals. Electronics is the most difficult trash to sort out because we have to separate all the elements."

Waste has become an integral part of these informal recycler’s lives.

A fire that was made illegally

It is 17:30 in the evening... Sikewega’s and Baloyi’s day starts to wind down. As she heads off to the communal washroom to take the grime and the dust off her face, Baloyi says: "

Most people just throw their trash off and do not care what happens to it. We take care of it here. If we weren't here, what do you think would have happened to all the trash?"

Why the concern for electronic waste?

Environmental activist Jim Puckett once wrote:

"Wherever we live, we must realize that when we sweep things out of our lives and throw them away, they do not disappear, as we might like to believe. We must know that 'away' is in fact a place likely to be somewhere where people are impoverished, powerless and too desperate to be able to resist the poison for the realities of poverty. 'Away' is likely to be a place where people and environment will suffer from our carelessness, our ignorance and our indifference."

As our lives become more and more dependent on electrical appliances, the waste generated from them also increases. In fact if one thinks far back, do we know or remember where our first generation mobile phones ended up?

Agbogbolshie dump site, Accra, Ghana

In our race to become electronically savvy, we have forgotten that our discarded electronic or electrical appliances end up somewhere... this somewhere is mostly large landfills or dump sites in developing or underdeveloped economies, where the proper technical know-how to recycle these waste barely exists.

South Africa too suffers from such a situation. The country generates about 40 million tonnes of electronic waste each year. About 60 per cent of heavy metals found in landfills comes from electronic waste and e-waste has become the largest waste stream in the country since the beginning of the new millennium.

Electronic scrap at Hatherly landfill in
Pretoria East

Among international treaties and conventions dealing with waste management and recycling, South Africa boasts of being a signatory to all three international UN conventions; the Basel, the Rotterdam and the Stockholm. In spite or despite of being a signatory to all UN international treaties and conventions dealing with waste management, its own management of electronic waste is rather shrouded in mystery.

There is hardly any accurate data on how much electronic waste is generated or how much of it is being recycled. Also the country suffers from a lack of legislation dealing specifically with electronic waste.

This blog is thus an attempt to find out what the current situation of electronic waste is in South Africa and where we are headed in the future.