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On the
outskirts of Ghana's biggest city sits a smoldering wasteland, a slum
carved into the banks of the Korle Lagoon, one of the most polluted
bodies of water on earth. The locals call it Sodom and Gomorrah.
Correspondent
Peter Klein and a group of graduate journalism students from the
University of British Columbia have come here as part of a global
investigation -- to track a shadowy industry that's causing big problems
here and around the world.
Their
guide is a 13-year-old boy named Alex. He shows them his home, a small
room in a mass of shanty dwellings, and offers to take them across a
dead river to a notorious area called Agbogbloshie.
Agbogbloshie
has become one of the world's digital dumping grounds, where the
West's electronic waste, or e-waste, piles up -- hundreds of millions of
tons of it each year.
The team meets with Mike Anane, a local journalist who has been writing about the boys at this e-waste dump.
“Life
is really difficult; they eat here, surrounded by e-waste,” Anane tells
them. “They basically are here to earn a living. But you can imagine
the health implications.”
Some of
the boys burn old foam on top of computers to melt away the plastic,
leaving behind scraps of copper and iron they can collect to sell. The
younger boys use magnets from old speakers to gather up the smaller
pieces left behind at the burn site.
Anane
says he used to play soccer here as a kid, when it was pristine
wetland. Since then, he's become one of the country's leading
environmental journalists.
“I'm
trying to get some ownership labels,” Anane tells reporters. “I'm
collecting them because you need them as evidence. You need to tell the
world where these things are coming from. You have to prove it. Now,
just look,” he says, pointing to an old computer with the label:
“School District of Philadelphia.”
When
containers of old computers first began arriving in West Africa a few
years ago, Ghanaians welcomed what they thought were donations to help
bridge the digital divide. But soon exporters learned to exploit the
loopholes by labeling junk computers "donations," leaving men like
Godson to sort it out.
Godson, one of the e-waste dealers who have set up shop close to the port, shows the contents of the container he has bought.
“Some
are from Germany and the U.K., and also from America,” he says, when
asked where the equipment has come from. He sorts through them looking
for working electronics that can be sold. He says that maybe 50 percent
of the shipment is junk and the rest he will be able to salvage in
some way.
After it’s sorted, a lot of the contents of the container will still be dumped at the burn site outside of town.
Hard
drives that can be salvaged are displayed at open-air markets. Off
camera, Ghanaians admit that organized criminals sometimes comb through
these drives for personal information to use in scams.
As part
of the investigation, one of the students buys a number of hard drives
to see what is on them, secretly filming the transaction to avoid the
seller's suspicions.
The drives are purchased for the equivalent of US$35.
The
students take the hard drives to Regent University in the Ghanaian
capital and ask computer scientist Enoch Kwesi Messiah to help read what
is on them.
Within
minutes, he is scrolling through intimate details of people's lives,
files left behind by the hard drives' original owners.
There
is private financial data, too: credit card numbers, account
information, records of online transactions the original owners may not
have realized were even there.
“ I can
get your bank numbers and I retrieve all your money from your
accounts,” Messiah says. “If ever somebody gets your hard drive, he can
get every information about you from the drive, no matter where it is
hidden.”
That's
particularly a problem in a place like Ghana, which is listed by the
U.S. State Department as one of the top sources of cyber crime in the
world. And it's not just individuals who are exposed. One of the drives
the team has purchased contains a $22 million government contract.
It
turns out the drive came from Northrop Grumman, one of America's largest
military contractors. And it contains details about sensitive,
multi-million dollar U.S. government contracts. They also find
contracts with the defense intelligence agency, NASA, even Homeland
Security.
When
the drives’ data are shown to James Durie, who works on data security
for the FBI, he's particularly concerned about the potential breach at
the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
“The
government contracting process is supposed to be confidential. If I
know how you're hiring the people for security related job, TSA air
marshals, then I can prepare a person to fit that model and get my guy
in,” Durie says. “Once I have my guy in, you have no security.”
Northrop
Grumman refused to speak to FRONTLINE/World on camera. But they did
issue a statement saying the potential security threat was
disconcerting, and they pledged to investigate.
Right
now there are no tough U.S. laws regulating the disposal of e-waste,
leaving companies and consumers to sort out the claims of recyclers on
their own.
Following
the recycling process as a consumer would, students drop off some
e-waste at a facility on America’s West Coast. They are wearing a hidden
camera and are assured that what they are bringing in will be disposed
of safely and locally.
One
worker at the facility tells them: “What they literally do is dump it
into a blast furnace and it burns it all up; and all they get out of it
is a bunch of ash and some of the precious metal. Everything else gets
consumed, burnt. And that's an actual fact.”
The
team notes the container numbers leaving the facility and, using public
records, traces where they're sent. A few weeks later, their reporting
takes them to the port of Hong Kong.
Just a
few miles from Hong Kong’s port, hidden behind eight-foot-high
corrugated walls, are mountains of computer monitors, printer cartridges
from Georgia, relics of old video arcades…
In China, e-waste has become big business.
The
southern Chinese city of Guiyu has been completely built around the
e-waste trade. Miles and miles of nothing but old electronics.
Jim
Puckett is an environmental activist credited with discovering this
harmful e-waste route to China. He has accompanied the team to Guiyu, a
place he first visited eight years ago, and calls it the dirty little
secret of the hi-tech industry.
Video
Puckett shot in 2001 was the first anyone had documented showing
Western computers being dumped in Guiyu. He found tens of thousands of
people working here in the toxic trade. On this return visit, Puckett
says things have gotten worse.
“I was
there first in 2001 and it was shocking enough then. It had gone from
very bad to really horrific. And what is happening there is rather
apocalyptic.”
One of
the most disturbing things Puckett points out is happening behind
closed doors. Women literally cooking circuit boards to salvage the
computer chips, which have trace amounts of gold.
“All
these old mother boards and other types of circuit boards are being
cooked day in and day out, mostly by women, sitting there, breathing the
lead tin solders. It’s just quite devastating,” Puckett says.
To find
out who is making money off this hazardous work, the team travels to
downtown Hong Kong, home to hundreds of companies that import e-waste
into China. No one here will speak to the reporters on camera, so they
film surreptitiously.
Puckett and one of our reporters arrange to meet an e-waste broker willing to explain the e-waste trade from the inside.
The man
explains how hundreds of thousands of tons of American e-waste makes
its way into China, despite laws intended to stop it.
“If we
were to send you our material, would our recyclers get in trouble with
the Chinese government if they find their material coming into
mainland?” Puckett asks the broker.
“I can
only say that if they get caught it has nothing to do with you. Because
I buy from you, and then I sell to him. He is buying from me; he's not
buying from you,” the man explains.
He says
that since Hong Kong ships millions of containers to the U.S. and most
return empty, it's cheap to load them with e-waste, and too expensive
to dispose of the waste safely -- no matter what recyclers claim.
When the reporters ask what sort of due environmental due diligence there is, the man responds:
“I can
only say one thing, if you want to do it environmentally, you have to
pay. They have to invest in machinery, labor, everything. It isn’t worth
it to pay so much money.”
On the
last trip of the assignment, the team heads to India. No longer just a
dumping ground, India is now generating its own e-waste at an alarming
rate, thanks to a growing middle class with a taste for high tech.
“Last
year, we sold more than seven million PCs in India,” says Indian
businessman Rohan Gupta. “We generated 330,000 tons of electronic waste
within India. So all these are going to comeback to the waste stream
sooner or later. It’s a growing industry.”
Gupta is giving a tour of his state-of-the-art facility outside Bangalore.
He is
betting on a new Indian law that could force its high tech industry to
recycle responsibly and maybe one day put the digital dumps out of
business.
At
another recycling plant in Bangalore, they are literally trying to spin
the waste into gold, refining the scrap in a safe environment and
fashioning it into watches and jewelry they market as eco friendly.
Plants
like this could become part of a global network of certified e-waste
recyclers that Puckett's group is trying to get off the ground. But even
Puckett realizes it's an uphill struggle.
“Even
if you have a state-of-the-art facility in a country like India, the
free market there will send it to the lowest common denominator, to the
worst facilities where people are sitting on the streets just picking
through it by hand,” he says. “It’s a myth to think that you can just
solve the problem immediately with technology alone.”
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