Excerpt: Sanya Carley and David Konisky on the Power of American Energy to Destroy

A new book from Weitzman’s Sanya Carley and Indiana University’s David Konisky is a portrait of American energy in the twenty-first century focused on the increasing—and inevitable—human costs. Power Lines: The Human Costs of American Energy in Transition (The University of Chicago Press) includes case studies from locations across the world that are connected to the power industry’s supply chain. The excerpt here, describing an e-waste site in Ghana that was demolished in 2021, shows how a single community of people bears a disproportionate share of the burdens associated with an energy technology. Carley is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning and the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. Carley and Konisky will discuss the book at a public event on Tuesday, October 14, at 4:00pm.

Located just south of Ghana’s capital, Accra, the wetlands of Agbogbloshie were not always the world’s dumping ground for e-waste. In the early 1990s, Accra’s yam market moved out of the central business district to Agbogbloshie’s current location. The new yam market was quickly followed by the informal creation of a scrapyard around the market, providing spare parts to trucks that carried the yams to market.(1) Around 2000, the scrapyard started to become a popular site to dump imported e-waste, quickly overtaking Agbogbloshie’s primary purpose as a market. E-waste tripled between 2003 and 2008, and currently there are between 13,000 and 17,000 tons of e-waste dumped there every year.(2)

These conditions led Agbogbloshie to be named one of the ten most polluted sites in the world. It inspired the 2018 film Welcome to Sodom, a movie whose title is based on Agbogbloshie’s inhabitants’ references to the area as “Sodom,” a place where “the constant flames of burning plastic over the blackened ground of scorched computer parts accumulate into an apocalyptic sight that evokes visions of biblical infernos.”(3) This movie has been acclaimed by critics for its dramatic cinematography of a dystopian world that reveals the “poisonous side of globalization.”(4)

Around forty thousand people live in or around Agbogbloshie, many of whom are migrants from surrounding nations. There are between 4,500 and 6,000 individuals who work directly at the site and another 1,500 people indirectly involved in work at Agbogbloshie, such as in transporting scrap.(5) The workers rummage around the scrap heap, with the goal of stripping away precious metals like gold, cadmium, and lithium that they can then resell. The stripped metals are then sent to China, the United States, India, and Germany to be repurposed into “new” electronic goods.(6)

In order to get to the precious metals, workers must burn plastic off of the wires and burn other metals, which releases toxic fumes, specifically polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, although burning toxic waste is technically illegal in Ghana.(7) Just over 50 percent of workers spend their work time dismantling old electronics, about 24 percent sort the electronics into usable and unusable parts, 22 percent trade the parts, and just over 3 percent burn the parts, the last being the most dangerous of all.(8) Yet all workers are exposed to these harmful conditions and toxic deposits. A health survey of the workers at Agbogbloshie found that they had particularly high levels of cadmium and lead in their blood.(9) High cadmium in the blood can lead to cancer, organ failure, and cardiovascular failure, while high amounts of lead can lead to kidney and brain damage. These landfills are not only bad for human health due to the smoke and fine particulate matter that lingers in the air, but also due to the toxic chemicals that are saturated in the soil.

A story published in Wired UK about a young burner named Shaibu reveals the health implications of working in the waste fields of Agbogbloshie. Shaibu, who has worked as a burner for years, frequently coughs up blood. When his coughing fits get unmanageable, he buys a drink from a local medicine man that claims to “wash his heart.” On his best days, Shaibu makes under $2.50, much of which he sends to his parents to support his two siblings. Shaibu’s friend Ibrahim moved to Agbogbloshie from Northern Ghana after he dropped out of school and heard from his friend that he could earn a living working at the scrapyard. Ibrahim has similar coughing fits, and also experiences debilitating headaches and chest pains. Even when he can afford painkillers, they do nothing to help. Both Shaibu and Ibrahim acknowledge the serious health problems they have, but they also believe that they have no alternatives.(10)

Agbogbloshie also has a significant impact on the surrounding environment. Chicken eggs from around the site have been found to have extremely high levels of brominated dioxins; eating just one egg would surpass the European Food Safety Authority’s daily tolerable intake by 2,200 percent.(11) Although the health effects of brominated dioxins are not well understood, studies have identified links to high risks of liver damage.(12) Even though there is still a yam market nearby in Agbogbloshie, the ground around the area has become polluted with chemicals preventing any vegetable growth in the area.(13) Additionally, the fumes from the site permeate throughout Accra, exposing millions of people who live there to toxic air.

1) Grace A. Akese and Peter C. Little, “Electronic Waste and the Environmental Justice Challenge in Agbogbloshie,” Environmental Justice 11, no. 2 (April 2018): 77–83, https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2017.0039.
2) Karoline Owusu- Sekyere et al., “Assessing Data in the Informal E-Waste Sector: The Agbogbloshie Scrapyard,” Waste Management 139 (February 2022): 158– 67, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2021.12.026.
3) Florian Weigensamer and Christian Krönes, dirs., Welcome to Sodom (Torch Films, 2018).
4) Weigensamer and Krönes, dirs., Welcome to Sodom.
5) Lebbie et al., “E-Waste in Africa.”
6) Oteng-Ababio et al., “Building Policy Coherence.”
7) Neil Shaw, “For Ghana E-Waste Recyclers, a Safer Option amid Toxic Fumes,” AP News, January 5, 2019, https://apnews.com/article/f9a0d071d1d646edb2b53fd22fd8548c.
8) Srigboh et al., “Multiple Elemental Exposures.”
9) Srigboh et al., “Multiple Elemental Exposures.”
10) Jacklin Kwan, “Your Old Electronics Are Poisoning People at This Toxic Dump in Ghana,” Wired UK, November 26, 2020, https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ghana–ewaste-dump-electronics.
11) Lebbie et al., “E-Waste in Africa.”
12) World Health Organization, “Dioxins and Their Effects on Human Health,” WHO. int, October 4, 2016, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20180427100129/ http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dioxins-and-their-effects-on-human-health.
13) Tash Morgan, “Agbogbloshie: Welcome to the World’s Digital Dumping Ground (Part 1) | Human Impact,” Earth Touch News Network, March 26, 2014, https://www.earthtouchnews.com/conservation/human-impact/agbogbloshie-w….