In the past few years Agbogbloshie, Ghana has become a common dumping ground; hundreds of tons of e-waste ends up here every month. Out of the 20 to 50 million tons of discarded electronics, 70% will end up in poor nations, in the EU alone 6.6 million tons of e-waste are unaccounted for every year.
Increasingly, this kind of waste is finding its way to places such as:
– West Africa – Ghana
– Nigeria – Ivory Coast
Traders bypass the laws regarding waste by labelling the equipment as second-hand goods or charity donations. In reality as much as 80% of the computers sent to Ghana are broken or obsolete, the most common “last destination” is Agbogbloshie, where children pull apart the electronics to salvage copper, hard drives and other components that they can sell.
In the West the disposal of electronics is costly whereas in places where there aren’t any regulations regarding waste, there are toxic metals such as; lead, cadmium, mercury and beryllium are continuously being released causing untold damage to those who live there as well as the environment. More than 1 billion people worldwide do not have access to clean drinking water, as a result of this 5,000 people die every day. Around 1,000 children die in India due to diseases caused by the polluted water.
Around 88% of the children in Guiyu, China suffer from various respiratory diseases as the area they live in is a huge e-waste site.
The average American generates 29 pounds of garbage a week, that is 9 billion pounds per week as a nation. Approximately 46% of lakes in America are extremely polluted this is why people are told to take caution when swimming and/or fishing. The Mississippi River dumps 1.5 metric ton of nitrogen pollution in the Gulf of Mexico every year.
Composting and recycling alone have prevented 85 million tons of waste to be dumped in 2010.
The garbage dumped in the ocean annually is roughly 14 billion – plastic being the major component. More than 3 million children under the of 5 die every year due to environmental factors such as pollution.
China is the world’s largest producer of carbon dioxide, the USA being the second. Almost 80% of urban waste in India is dumped in the river Ganges. Acidification of the ocean is one of the worst types of pollution – oceans are becoming more acidic due to the greenhouse emissions from fossil fuels. Scientific research has proven that carbon dioxide emissions are lowering the pH level of the ocean which leads to the acidification of the water.
More than 100 pesticides in any medium; water, air and soil, can cause birth defects and gene mutations:
– There are more than 73 various types of pesticides in the groundwater.
Major oil spills are one the most common types of pollution as well as one of the most destructive due to how frequently they occur and the rate they spread in the water.
In the “Great Smog Disaster” in London (1952) approximately 4,000 people died in just a few days due to high concentrations of pollution. This happened due to the heavy use of coal during this time, which formed a thick layer of “smog” over the city. A period of cold weather combined with an anticyclone and windless conditions collected airborne pollutants, mainly from the use of coal.
It lasted four days, 5th of December until the 9th. However in that short amount of time, it is said there was approximately 4,000 died as a direct result of the smog and over 100,000 were made severely ill due to the effect of the smog to the human respiratory tract. A more recent search has revealed that the number of fatalities might have been greater, one paper stating that 6,000 more people died in the following months as a result from the event.
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