Recent evidence indicates that large amount of e-waste, which is the term for obsolete or broken electronic equipment, is being taken from the United Kingdom and dumped in countries all over Africa. Ghana and Nigeria are two countries in particular that have reported large amounts of e-waste being shipped illegally from the United Kingdom. The government of the UK says that the surging amounts of such waste make it extremely difficult to regulate, and that many businesses think that they are dealing with legitimate waste disposal companies.
Recently the European Union has outlined directives for each of its member countries to reduce their landfills by half by the year 2013. These news laws, along with increased fees for landfill dumping, have many companies in the United Kingdom unable or unaware of how to dispose of their electronic waste. This problem has given birth to a bevy of scams where fake recycling companies remove e-waste for a fee and then simply dump it somewhere else, often in the third world.
Developing nations like Nigeria and Ghana have long been dumping spots for harmful waste, which is usually mislabeled as something legal when it leaves the United Kingdom. It is thought that as much as fifty million tonnes of e-waste is created in the world each year and that much of it ends up being dumped illegally. It is estimated that over half of all e-waste created in the United Kingdom ends up in Africa.
Even the UK government has been implicated recently as it was found that thousands of obsolete computers belonging to the National Health Service of the United Kingdom, as well as many belonging to various universities were dumped in Ghana.
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