STOP E-WASTE MENACE NOW (JULY 21, 2009)

THE highly dangerous and toxic environment at Agbogbloshie in Accra which has been created by dealers in electronic waste (e-waste) has received exposure in the British media.
A report in today's issue of our paper said investigations conducted by The Times of London into the Agbogbloshie dumping site made an emphatic statement that "the dangerous trade in obsolete electronic products is being encouraged by companies in Britain".
Last year, an environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO), Greenpeace, brought to public attention the danger posed by the booming trade in used computers in Agbogbloshie, a suburb of Accra.
It reported that much of the e-waste was dumped in Ghana where, without proper regulation of health controls, pieces can be extracted and recycled by unemployed youth.
The e-waste menace has become quite frightening because it appears that the country's regulatory body, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), lacks the capacity to deal with the challenge.
The EPA says it has been working on a strategy for the control and management of e-waste in the country for more than a year now but no concrete step has been taken to fix the problem.
It is worrying that more than one year after Greenpeace raised the red flag about the potential harm e-waste posed to the health of the people, the EPA has no concrete mechanism in place to deal with e-waste disposal at Agbogbloshie and other parts of the country.
A commentator on the liberalised economic environment once sarcastically remarked that the free market economy had given room to the phenomenon of reducing majority of the people into inferior citizens as they were "clothed in other people's rags".
The report in The TIMES of London traced many of the discarded personal computers to British companies. However, the DAILY GRAPHIC thinks that in dealing with this big environmental challenge that exposes majority of our youth to health hazards, we should avoid the blame game.
We concede that personal computers are not manufactured in Ghana and so the e-waste must originate from the advanced economies. Nonetheless, we are also convinced that the greater percentage of the e-waste is imported by Ghanaian business concerns.
Although no evidence is available yet, there exists unimpeachable information that some Ghanaian importers put containers at refuse dumps in Europe and America to receive used items which eventually find their way onto our market.
All over the world the disposal of waste materials poses a big challenge, even in the most advanced societies. Those developed economies are, therefore, looking for places to dump their waste, hence there have been occasions when some of those countries have dumped hazardous substances in developing countries.
The DAILY GRAPHIC urges our health authorities to be concerned about the time bomb at Agbogbloshie and to team up with the EPA to find an antidote to the e-waste menace.
We also appeal to the government to enact legislation to outlaw the importation of second-hand goods, particularly those that pose a risk to our health. The menace is a potentially dangerous threat to the health of the unemployed youth and the situation calls for action now.