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.” 

The science behind recycling: Refurbishing Computers: Part 1

DESCO's office at Kempton Part

In Kempton Park, Johannesburg, amidst vast tracts of unattended land, stands the largest e-waste recycler of South Africa, DESCO.

A first time visitor here can easily confuse the place with that of a secret laboratory where scientific experiments are carried out. Anyone without a prior appointment is not allowed inside the huge iron gates. A camera at the gate takes a photograph of the vehicle you are riding in and then a machine scans your fingerprints.

Once inside the compound, the visitors are told to declare any electronic items that they might be carrying like smart phones, tablets, personal computers, cameras etc. Thereafter they go through a machine which detects if the visitor has any undeclared electronic items in their possession and finally they are allowed inside a huge steel gate.

Once inside, they are given safety glasses, earplugs and orange colored safety vests.

Says John van Coller, the corporate sales executive of the company: "one of the main purposes of our company is to educate and inform people about e –waste recycling."

Beginning its journey in 1992, the company has gone on to become the largest e-waste recycler not only in South Africa, but in the entire African continent.

Mother Boards are segmented in three divisions

Says Coller: “We have clients ranging from provincial governments to SANDF to corporate houses such as HP, Dell, IBM  and even universities such as Wits, UJ, UP etc.”

The first stop is the computer-refurbishing centre. Here all types of computers and accessories, those which have reached end of their normal life cycles are repaired and refurbished. Refurbishing differs from recycling as the device does not need to be broken down into parts. The part or accessory which seem to have stopped working are fixed and the computer is then donated to schools around Johannesburg.

A computer has the capacity to be repaired at least thrice before it finally gives away and a refurbished computer can work for as long as 6 years before breaking down. Giving away refurbished computers to schools and technical colleges also form part of DESCO’s ‘community outreach programme.’ Representatives from the company regularly go to schools around Gauteng to enlighten students and teachers about e-waste and the need to recycle them.

Below is a video of the refurbishing computer centre of DESCO.

The centre boasts of having a cutting edge software which can delete all and any information that is stored on the hardrive of the computer. According to Malcolm Whitehouse, manager of the refurbishing unit, DESCO receives a lot of computer equipments from SANDF and other corporate houses. Often there is sensitive information stored on the machines. DESCO does not release any computers without first rewriting the entire hardrive.

For computer units which cannot be repaired any longer, the mother board, the screen and the central processing unit (CPU) are taken apart for recycling. The rest of the computer consisting of plastic, glass or other material goes to recyclers who specialize in recycling those items.

The mother boards and processors are also segmented into three different categories: the low, medium and high. The highest grade is the most valued one as there is a large amount of gold, copper, aluminum that can be extracted from them. Most high grade mother boards are sent to foreign countries such as Switzerland, Finland and Norway. These countries have the mechanism and the know-how to extract optimum amount of metals from the equipments.

Circuit boards waiting for metal extraction

Only a third of the monitors and CPUs which come to DESCO are recycled by the company themselves. This is because the technology at DESCO is not sufficient to extract metals from a large number of processors and circuit boards. 

Computer refurbishing is a major recycling component of the Company. 

Informal Recyclers: The lure of electronics: Part 2

Simon Baloyi, Manager, Hatherly Landfill

The road leading to the Hatherly landfill is littered with plastic, garden residues, broken glasses and other scrap materials, some which have been trampled by passing trucks. Mounds and mounds of dirt and dust add to the atmosphere.

Seven old dishwashers stand in one corner, the end of their life cycles clearly visible  with corroded metals jutting from their ends. Large leather suitcases also line up on the side of the road and freshly trampled pieces of tube lights welcome visitors to the largest landfill of Pretoria.

Scrap in Hatherly landfill, Pretoria

Simon Baloyi, 54, manager of the Hatherly landfill says: “Theft of electronic goods are very common here. All kind of trash is supposed to end up here, instead some people, stop

the trucks while entering and steal the scrap, mostly electronic equipments."

Unregistered informal recyclers who indulge in these thefts mostly target electronic goods. Refrigerators, electronic weighing scales, alarm clocks and printer cartridges are the most sought after goods. Weighing scales seem to be the favorite as they are deemed instant cash. E-waste or e-trash has increased at a rapid pace in the past five years but their recycling rates have not.

Alex Wasangarai, an informal recycler and the deputy manager at the landfill, specializes in e-waste recycling. According to him, the recyclers often overlook electronics. In fact the largest recycler to buy scrap from Hatherly, ‘Remade’ does not deal with electronic scrap. The municipality, which is responsible for teaching these recyclers on ways to handle trash, started teaching methods to handle e-trash only since 2011.

Baloyi complains that the methods to handle e-waste that they were taught in the earlier phase remain the same without any change. However, electronic equipments have undergone sea change.

Piles of electronic trash

He has two teams that look into cases of illegal fires and robbery of electronic trash. According to Baloyi, illegal fires and theft are the two biggest problems being faced by the Hatherly landfill. 

Regarding theft Wasangarai observes: “Theft has been on an increase over the past three years. Most unregistered recyclers are not even recyclers in the first place. They are often unemployed young men from Lusaka (a nearby township that border the landfill). The electronics that they scavenge here are sold in small shops in the town.”

The surveillance teams are made up of senior

recyclers like Wasangarai who have been working on the landfill for some years. The teams take turn each morning to come, inspect cases of illegal fires, if any, and keep an eye out for unregistered recyclers who often stop by the landfill to make a quick buck.

Site of an illegal fire being burnt

Regarding illegal fires, Baloyi explains: “All landfills have a high amount of methane in the soil. This methane has been built over years and years of land filling. There are designated spots where methane content is low so when fires take place the embers do not reach the methane level in the soil. Illegal fires that are left burning at undesignated areas have the ability to spread to places where the methane content is high. These fires can blow up the entire landfill if they are not put out in time.”

E-trash or e-waste has become a potential problem for recyclers at Hatherly. While large companies specializing in e-waste like DESCO or Africa E-waste buy most e-waste from informal recyclers, there is also a large grey market for the goods. Also electronics that end up in Hatherly is often separated into plastic, glass, metals like copper, platinum and sometimes even gold by the informal recyclers working on the landfill.

Most formal recyclers like to buy whole appliances from the informal recyclers; however, recyclers like Wasangarai feel that more money can be made if the electronic appliance is broken down into parts and then sold. This gulf between the informal and formal recyclers often creates a gap and the electronic appliance is made redundant.

Ulze Van Dyk, Director of Africa E-waste says that often when informal recyclers bring appliances, there is nothing left but the outer shell of the appliance which is hardly of any value to the recycler. It is then re-sent to other landfills.

Baloyi feels that the municipality should take up some responsibility towards electronic trash that has been growing in recent years. Instead, the municipality often urges recyclers at Hatherly to take home electronics goods if found in good condition.

The pipe through which methane gas can come out in case of fire

Wasangarai recalls that two years ago, Hatherly received 12 plasma television, all in brand new condition. They had absolutely no idea how to deal with the package and ended up taking them home. Baloyi and Wasagarai both still have them at their house and working in perfect condition.

E-waste in South Africa currently is not considered a ‘priority waste’ and hence their primary collection for recycling is left to the informal recyclers working in landfills. As the amount of electronic trash grows in landfills every day, cases of illegal fires and theft of electronics also increase.