In the. In the in the. In the mood in the in the. Right outfit that will be what i think i know monday to you before i make a switch. If youre going to a Global Community then why when they got me sitting down and working these are the doors weve been transported or exploited clip for country like africa. For me im. He does a deliberate act and by the west with out of so that acknowledges that how does much of africa because they think that as a visionary you know that it is somewhat expensive and these cheap crafts to bring it down here to africa as so i go through really angry there are if you wish i dont know how that goes with this somebody must be for its money it means theyve got already to be in but i doubt it was somebody else that is going to be fair. I mean you can guys by just me are looking at it. About seventy percent of the people who are impacted by this in these activities are women and children. And a majority of the book i mean really have nothing to do with it with but. We must begin to think more carefully. So that one day ill get news from one or rise up and say it is the west that opcode developing countries is it the dresses that is must now you have to consider. This is a book brushing a scrap yard in the Canadian Capital accra. Alongside chan noble its ranked as one of the most toxic places on the planet. Its when men women and children live and work with electronic waste trying to extract valuable materials from items people enrich a part of the world discount. Its a toxic and harmful precess both to local people and to the environment. As the range of production and disposal of Electronic Items increases more of these unregulated sites are appearing all over the world in the face of all growing crisis. As huge impact of second electronics and the last idea that was carried out in the case it adds seventy percent of inboards of electronic and electric up as a second hand so already that is huge and even within this i mean the base and twenty percent almost twenty percent is coming in as complete john and these ones go to the dump sites or this copy that were going to ship where. They can through our mentality has id also means to retrieve Precious Metals i did two days is lack of employment for our youth and so because their operations and i thought was that they can actually make some money out of it a lot of young people go into these how that doesnt mean that just to get income for themselves and so. Theyre monster both ways out of the problem that you have it on the quizzed in general not only in that crowd but in ghana as a whole. Is that going to go lead i started my job with burning and dismantling. I was seventeen or eighteen. Vienna charnock waste comes from the towns. Yes we get it from companies from homes and computer shops was this business of wonder bread and when they bring the waste mural they select the items that are good and sell them so when the ones that are good are given to us the scrap. When the waste the rides we dismantle it its not that we remove the copper and the wires the alimony and. The rest we buy. We have group of scrub the left that have come together to form an association we are called the great across crab the less across the ocean in our scrap yard we didnt scrap methos which is a cop out of me on and brought us top to bottom or by a very cause big machinery from factories computer Parts Electronics like the. Original said televisions and all of the aspects of metallic objects we transcended all that yes. If someone had said to me ten years ago what youll have a laptop which does internet phone you can watch films on it youll have a five which does all of that stuff as well be can make phone calls and then im going to quote enough to need something that fits in between nice to meet the template that does most of all of those things i wouldnt believe but we go increasing i t and thats happening in the developing world as well. Take the mobile phone. And twenty eleven Global Production was it five hundred Million Units two years later that number had doubled to one billion nowadays there are more operational cell phones on the planet than there are people. But eventually all fill phones break. In twenty fourteen the world produced forty two million tons of eat waste. Thats the equivalent of four hundred of the Worlds Largest aircraft carrier. One hundred fifteen empire state building. All seven times the weight of the Great Pyramid of giza. There are two problems with the disposal first one is that were generating too much of it because we throw things away and also the other problem is when we get to the end of life these things have inherent houses in them if they normally recycled the standards we would expect then theres absolutely nothing wrong with the protection of human health and the environment if however they end up in a country or a place where theres not less controls then we can have real issues with what people can be exposed to when theyre not looking after in a sound manner its a really nasty business the things are designed for example not to burn they have flame retardants in the levels of chemical additives in there which are functional they do a job both in the manufacturing process and when youre using it when you start taking it apart when you start to burn it for example trying to get to melt the copper rod or the gold. When you try and treat it with acids to try and leach out some of the material you may want to gain thats really bad news because you have no control over whats being released it could be released as a smoke it could be related to something in the ass english then goes into the ground. No. The main problem is the smoke is just. One every time when you breathe air then you dont feel well. What is it means you cant sleep which is good you get fever again and again. When you breathe in the smoke it gets into your chest just when you cough what comes up is black when i have an interest in seeing how the Environmental Movement has changed in human health all interact. And this ecology former testing for new compounds the team of life film wanted to an independent study to test if there is chemical determination related to electronic waste dumping and processing and equivalency as part of the study i worked with something the chairman of the gun Atomic Energy commission samson is a former schoolteacher and currently a researcher at the commission which is a Governmental Research station. I was teaching in a second new school when one time we had a letter from a Dutch Company and i thought we do want to mention any that they wanted to donate computers and us issues to my school to support i. T. Education and we were so happy because we needed to be easy literotica complains i dont type do pay for the food costs to forty five going down is flown madonnas right down to my hometown of pro bono where i was teaching well what they stand on three days before this machine we knew tito by fifty percent told him when we came and we were surprised because i would accompany p r ds money sending junk of give me two eyes i dont know how they had of us i dunno what it was when i spoke to i doubt he just wanted to for a second excuse and unfortunately he also how they see a massage story in one case none of the computers was working. I just went on to the net and he said. Dumping. Used those computers to africa and now phones so many people missing on you east and other to push me into the sea research. Things like areas with three vending areas. But what im wondering is that pockets of people my and my new only. Family get three guys my for anything that the end of the. Economy and everything for. This. Part is the way the smuggling routes are going ok guys here dismounted all. These guys were good i didnt mind this month they have to hire us. Yeah they are years and youve already got this guy. Theyre compression. Of the album. They. Might. You know. I got it right here i think they opened their. Role. Because i mean. Why are you doing what they should be doing the last message from your colleagues or turns it into if it would be a p. G. Its all. Right you know theres fire here. But. I think more surprising when you open up a mobile phone and you look at the Circuit Board through even a low powered microscope is how tiny some of these components are and because we demand more and more power and we demand smaller and smaller devices the components themselves are getting to a really miniscule scale capacitors and resistors not less than one third of a millimeter across talking about getting close to the width of a human hair for some dimensions from these components. So this is a pretty old phone this is relatively easy to take apart just a certain level and then it gets tricky so ive taken those screws up and i will. Ok then weve got the electronics you can see how they started to corrode a little bit in this really old phone. Then the. Circuit board. In you find in mobile phones theres a lot of shielding because theres a lot of. Obviously transmission of radiation as the thing transmits this little motor. Is the thing that makes the phone vibrate and this little weight at the top is actually made of tungsten alloy because its so heavy. Here we go. So thats the smaller of the Circuit Board and under here we can get it off. Is the gold. So whenever there are buttons theres usually gold thats why smartphones are a little bit cheaper to make in some respects to some extent because they dont use. All this is gold as the contacts are they simply dont have a keyboard and buttons. From this design. Not much thought given to you how you get the recyclable materials out of here how you get the valuable materials that maybe even how you get the toxic materials are just to integrate with the design just common sense tells you that this is all. Rather difficult probably not worth doing. If youre recycling you just want to throw this straight in a big recycling furnace maybe and just get the Precious Metals back current recycling technology is limited we can only retrieve some of the elements that we put into the waste stream in the first place in less than half the elements the rest of them are never fully recovered so we are basically consuming and throwing away some of these very precious materials they have a range of materials which are regarded in the us as toxic materials lead is one which most people would hear of but theyre also cadmium arsenic which people are aware of as a poison mercury and there are others as well which can be detrimental to health so as long as we control the amount thats released to the environment and we do it in a well controlled and environmentally friendly way then we can deal with these these these these elements which are. You know harmful to human health but if you do it in uncontrolled well way and if you release it to the environment it gets into the soil and. Then that can cause a problem. With me and. So. We are able. Yes really yes. So in terms of the main. We focused on heavy metals and the five ones that we selected were land. Arsenic cadmium chromium and mercury which one way or the other have been reported to cause problems to humans. Oh my god theres got to be gory things hour. With plenty of soap. Or go out if you go about one of the most if it was something awful lot of. Hard to avoid us too much trash as possible so. That we. As soon as we collect the soil samples we took them to the commission too and dry them so that almost first goes away with and saved each soul sample into finer powder to get rid of little pieces of plastic or or grass or whatever and then wade each sample to know how much we are using the next step. The next step was to add acids to the soil to perform a reaction those cold acid digestion in. This reaction allows the have to match has to come out into solution and then we can take the solutions to use and the final stage of the process which is analysis and date collection so we take those solutions feed them into a detector which in our case was an atomic absorption spectroscope and then detect the concentration of heavy metals program. This is how we determine that levels of the five heavy metals which shows. What was shocking. Support was the hypothesis of the of our testing was that we will find contamination. But i did not expect to find contamination in. In that small sample size and also in the disused areas in the the. There is that im not directly involved with the next one ways to make a very clear causal relationship between each having to reach kind of. Towards a Health Problem it takes a long time and thats the focus of this kind of thing and i thought i would turn from i wish i dont and my house with anything i put on top of wishing i had more lies remove everything they could and walk straight to the bathroom so i dont touch anything in the house i was just about grown thats myself washed down and i made sure i put up with that including soak my clothing for about three days before putting them in the washing washing so i dont was going to miss anybody in my house because im worried about me do you support wishing on this site. The problems associated with talks like materials onto new there are International Treaties that govern their transport use and disposal as even waste contains talk sick materials its classified as hazardous the main treaty covering Hazardous Substances is called the Basel Convention im jim parker im the founder and director of the Basel Action NetworkBasel Action Network its crazy from the United Nations convention about trying to help developing countries protect themselves from Hazardous Waste dumping by rich developed countries it was unique in that its an environmental treaty which was driven and basically authored by developing countries and extremely important it gets ratified particularly by the countries that it needs to apply to the most the highest ways producing countries in the United States per capita produces the most ways to be any country in the world. Over one hundred seventy parties all of the European Union australia canada japan except there are all parties to it but the United States refuses to ratify it and theres only two countries in the world that signed it involves the switzerland when it was first adopted that never ratified it thats one thing. And the United States. Its a big mistake to brazilian that gonnet is the extent of the problem john it is easily accessible you get off an airplane with your camera you go there and twenty minutes you can look at it thats why its going to feature so much for dont think for a minute its the only place its happening on earth we know for a fact that its far larger amounts to bring in that was similarly in china India Pakistan other countries in africa etc so it is a widespread problem its an economic driven problem so it isnt going to be confined just to go on. We may not have managed to test for everything but the five elements we did they are known to have negative Health Outcomes particularly lead in my carry. The rubes by which those have rationals can reach him and im more people so it can be harmful. To inhale when just you have skin contact and its very harmful to any one Bank Children because the head muscles can affect the development of the embryos. As soon as we got our results i showed them to dr tony fletcher. Who is going to pick me only just waking between Public Health england and on the school of hygiene and tropical medicine in. The way my particular focus over the last few years has been on chemical exposures to clean contaminated land and Drinking Water and i heard specifically about i go blue she from from ocular when she showed me these alarming results of some contamination its very very worrying because they are vulnerable individuals and they are not informed about the potential hazards i mean they dont smell theyre not going to you dont perceive these metals as being something that you taste or anything that those are the levels of exposure here its enough to lead to chronic risk to health without. Without you perceiving its happening to you youve got two different sorts of risks involved here mainly the. Neurological damage risk to your your brain to your nervous system particularly strongly from the lead and mercury which among the contaminants and then theres the risk of cancer that you get from austin and from chromium from cadmium. The final limits that were tested are all new and to cause human Health Problems were they include cancer spiritual complaint developmental defects and urine toxicity the concentration of these elements in our book blushing was sometimes over one hundred times higher than in the soil outside. Were. When we dont feel good. Looking at their condition. Economic ali we can be a condition of health because most of the things that we do here negatively. We first off or it come to us without getting the negative effect before it would as opposed to other people therefore we are not happy about what is we are enough out there. Our situation is like you have a daughter that is dying you dont have wanted to take your daughter to the hospital so you just because you say you dont know what to do that is the situation in which we find ourselves. Because the us has not ratified the Basle Convention its companies can export you waste without breaking federal law. In the European Union which has ratified the convention and implemented several other agreements only watching electronics can be exported to developing nations despite that the export of eat waste continues. When my boys bring down from the maybe youll carry it to the parts my general money to do it up with the day. After. And to bring them to their shops or the death of flowed them to the warehouse before we bring it. To the shops sometime