KATE THOMPSON FERREIRA: Consumers should flex their muscles to force a cutdown in e-waste mountains
Despite much resistance to climate-change science, technology has to face up to the role it has played in the phenomenon, which is backed by most leading voices
A few years ago we all gasped and clutched our pearls in collective horror at images and stories emerging from Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana, a space that was then declared the world’s largest e-waste dump.
In compelling stills and video, people picked over mountains of scrapped computers, radios, television exoskeletons and unidentifiable twisted metal and cabling. They breathed in thick black smoke from fires licking up mounds of plastic and rubber fittings. Children moved among the heaps, grabbing fistfuls of electronic circuits with a view to eking out a living by selling the copper, aluminium and other reclaimable metals it offers...
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