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Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana. The e-waste dump of Agbobloshie is one of the biggest in Africa. Here hundreds of young man coming from the northern rurals regions of Ghana work every day dismantling and recycling electronic scraps. These processes results in enormous damage to the health of workers and to the surrounding environment. Adjacent to the landfill Agbobloshie is also one of the largest food markets in the city.

“Consumer goods are meant to be used up and to disappear; the idea of temporariness and transitoriness is intrinsic to their very denomination as objects of consumption; consumer goods have memento mori written all over them, even if with an invisible ink.”

E-Waste is the new emerging pathology of the man-environment ecosystem, born during the current historic period characterized by capitalistic production. Electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) is the major flow of waste in the world, growing faster than any other type of waste. With an annual volume that goes between 40 and 50 million tons, according to the UNEP (United Nation Environment Program), the growing amount of e-waste could grow exponentially, as much as 500 times over the coming decade. Especially in countries like India, China and some African regions where the technology industry is growing fast. It is hazardous waste, containing dozens of substances dangerous to human health and the environment; it is hard to be sustainably disposed of and it needs a costly processing technique to make it recyclable. This is the reason why about 80% of the e-waste produced in developed countries (North America and Europe on the top of the list) is not disposed of in situ, but shipped, most of the time illegally, to developing countries on cargo ships, where it is illegally disposed of. In its history of subjection and exploitation of the planet’s resources, the human specie has always produced scraps and waste as a side effect to its production and consumption activities. With the so-called industrial economy first, then the chemical, the petroleum and furthermore the plastic one, the waste produced by man couldn’t be metabolized and recycled by the force of nature that regulates the vital dynamics of the planet.

Electrical and electronic waste (e-waste) is the major flow of waste in the world. With an annual volume that goes between 40 and 50 million tons.

The commercialization process and the capitalistic valorization created a true “waste economy”. This extends the logic behind profit and exploitation even to those scraps that it had produced, creating a never ending cycle that profits from its own death. Like organic waste, which becomes organic matter and regenerates life during decomposition, the capitalistic action uses the work of human being to decompose waste produced by other humans in order to generate profit. No longer do worms and enzymes carry out the natural cycle of life and death, producing biochemical energy and fertilizing the land. Now men and women are forced to take apart inorganic carcasses and generate money for their survival and for other men’s profit. The peculiar way of functional diversification and specialization of the human species, brought by the modern global organization and the capitalist system of production, subtracts from the natural resources and the knowledge from traditional production techniques, that were once sufficient to sustain the local populations. And it forces the population who is now deprived, to accept, as only solution, a survival condition given from operating a specific function inside the large world’s work division system. Old and new colonization’s processes produce old and new functional specialization’s forms based on ethnos and territory, giving life to generations of men and women condemned to carry out specific tasks. Men and women are “socially modified” to carry out a specific functional task to support the entire system.

300 million computers and 1 billion cell phones are put into production each year, growing 8% a year, indefinitely.

Lifespan of pc has dropped in developed countries from 6 years in 1997 to just 2 years today.

New Territories, Hong Kong. A collection and stocking site for electrical and electronic waste. Here are collected large amounts of e-waste arrived by container ship at the port of Hong Kong. Will be stocked here for a short time, waiting to be transported overland to the various recycling sites in China, which is a few kilometers away. The border with Shenzehn is just behind those hills.

This is what happened to the “waste economy”, which, since it was born with the industrial capitalism, has been subjected to changes implied by the transformation, that the industrial capitalism itself has been undergoing through time. In the same way, “ socially modified men” have been involved in transformations to adapt to the changed functional needs. It is hard not to remember the role of the junk dealer of the city during the industrial age, or to not recognize the figure of the metal digger, usually looking for copper, going trough waste containers in the contemporary post industrial cities. Those two figures are the product of a different setting of the capitalistic system on a historic and quality level. Hard to leave out in this category are those who selected urban solid waste, working in the open-air dumpsters of western cities during the industrial era.

Between 50-100 e-waste containers travel every day from the U.S. to Hong Kong.

Old Seelampur, New Delhi, India. Old transformers and inductors are boiling in a metal pot. What is emblematic is that this particular type of pieces is essentially used, in life, in the so-called “energy saving” applications. "In life" then, these components are used to increase energy efficiency while also reducing CO2 pollution; when they "die" instead cause serious problems to people’s health.Most of the time, this technique is carried out in a yard or in private houses, just like in this case.

Lahore, Pakistan. A guy stand in front of a huge pile of electronic components which will be later processed to extract precious metals.

Perhaps today, thanks to the diffusion of the information linked to communications technology, it is easier to recognize men, women and children of African villages that “ decompose” big commercial ships beached because left abandoned and adrift. Or maybe those who select urban solid waste in the open air dumpsters in Madagascar, a sublime place transformed into one of the 21st century post-industrial World’s dumpsters. The current phase of the “financial-biocognitive” capitalism defines the physiognomy of the present day version of the “waste economy”, accepting “e-waste” as matter and symbol of discontinuity and at the same time, peculiarity when compared to the past. Trough cognitive machines we have the production of new, in their genre, consumerist individualities; the substance of consumer objects, even in its symbolic meaning of social emancipation instrument that characterized them during Ford’s era of mass production and consumption, has now been drained of its ability to give pleasure. To avoid the cognitive machines to become recyclable instruments of independent production of multitudes, the objective of the capitalism of the millennia is to create bio-cognitive individualities destined to produce and to consume information, signs and symbols during their biologic existence, transferring to the immaterial content, true merchandise value.

In the informal recycling canal, scraps are salvaged to extract valuable materials, contained in the electronics goods, to resell it.

Karachi, Pakistan. A repairing workshop for electronics.

Old Seelampur, New Delhi, India. Old Seelampur is one the poorest suburb areas but the biggest e-waste market in Delhi. There are dozens of retail and wholesale stores. Most of them buy materials from abroad (USA, Europe, Dubai). They buy it for about $10 cents to $15 cents per kilo and they sell it for double the price to other stores. There, they separate the components of the electric and electronic devices in order to sell them again.

Hall Road, Lahore, Pakistan. One of the many workshop for dismantling and recycling of electronic waste in Hall Road, the largest electronic market in the Punjab region and one of the largest in Pakistan.

Lahore, Pakistan. An electronic and electrical waste collection area on the outskirts of Lahore. In this place small business’ owners, look for wastes that they can use for recycling and waste disposal purposes or that contain precious metals.

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana. The e-waste dump of Agbobloshie is one of the biggest in Africa and is surrounded by huge slum of about 30.000 people.

Odaw River, Accra, Ghana. The Odaw River and the Korle Lagoon are full of every kind of wastes coming from the Agbobloshie landfill and from the nearby slums where they use the river like a latrine. A couple of hundreds meters downhill the river and lagoon flow into the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. The government of Ghana is trying to restore the natural conditions of the lagoon thanks to the Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration project (KLERP).

Huaqing Recycling Solution Center, Qingyuan, China The hall at the entrance of the center, on the left the panel with The Huaqing recycling center is the largest of Guangdong Province and the second largest recycling center in China, only after Bejing's one.

Guiyu, China On the outside of a workshop where are dismantled and recycled electrical and electronic components. Guiyu in China is reported to have the highest number of cancer-causing toxins in the world. The rivers contains up to 2,400 times the WHO-acceptable threshold for lead.

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana. A guy is standing in the midst of smoke, fire and residual parts of electronic equipment as he burn it to extract some copper contained inside he will resell later to gain his daily food.

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The cycle for the valorization of capital, that during the industrial and modernization era was represented with the famous formula “M-C-M+”i. Today, the biocognitive-financial capitalism becomes “M-I-M+” where I is the information that is continuously produced and consumed by individualized men who are the product of segmentation and biocognitive segregation. To survive the drop of profits linked to the now computerized industrial production, the cognitive capitalism needs a “ digitalization of the Ego” induced to the continued fulfillment by its “ semiotic bulimia”, from which it can extract most part of its value, banishing materiality (that we already discussed as object of valorization) to become just a support, a vehicle, a means of the “sign”, where the sign is the real object of individual pleasure.

Yaocuowei, China A worker dismantles electronic equipment in his backyard, between the streets of Yaocuowei, a village adjacent to the town of Guiyu, which keeps track of the largest streams of electrical and electronic waste in the world. Here, the vast majority of the population of over one hundred thousand inhabitants is involved in this type of work. The damage to the surrounding environment are incalculable.

Qingyuan, China A worker who transports electrical and electronic components, ready to be dismantled and recycled from one warehouse to another.

Qingyuan, China A big family-run business that separates and sells materials derived from refrigeration systems and cables for high-voltage electricity. The materials processed here come from Europe and the United States, despite the legislation prevents the import. Here the workers are paid according to the weight of recycled materials product in the day, on average from 60 to 100 yuan (10 to 15$) for about 8/10 hours work per day.

Qingyuan, China Workers dismantle and separate different parts of electrical items which are then resold, insiede a family-run workshop. Because of the controls by the government in recent months, many workshops were closed. Those who decide to continue with this private activity, instead of finding a job in a big factory runned by the government, it does because it is more flexible in his work, while gaining slightly less.

Qingyuan, China A big family-run business that separates and sells materials derived from refrigeration systems and cables for high-voltage electricity. The materials processed here come from Europe and the United States, despite the legislation prevents the import. Here the workers are paid according to the weight of recycled materials product in the day, on average from 60 to 100 yuan (10 to 15$) for about 8/10 hours work per day. They normally work by night because electricity is cheaper.

Huaqing Recycling Solution Center, Qingyuan, China A room with informational materials about the life cycle of electrical and electronic products designed to sensitize the local population on the use and dispose of these wastes.

Huaqing Recycling Solution Center, Qingyuan, China The hangar in which old disused televisions and electrical appliance have been collected for years, waiting for the launch of the section for the recycling of these specific waste.

Huaqing Recycling Solution Center, Qingyuan, China One of about three thousand workers employed works during the separation of different materials from electric cables, separating here the copper wires from the plastic sheaths. The electrical materials processed here come exclusively from China because of laws that prevent the import. The Huaqing recycling center is the largest of Guangdong Province and the second largest recycling center in China, only after Bejing's one.

Qingyuan, China Through several steps, using mechanical methods and chemical processes, they extract various types of metals, also very valuable. This company has been active for more than ten years and in the last 3 the amount of work has decreased dramatically because of increased competition. The owners of the company do not allow us to photograph the processes they use because they are afraid of incurring penalties from the government. "If the government like you, you are ok. If they dont like you, you will get in trouble."

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This unconditioned commercialization’s logic is a machine that produces dichotomies: “Sign”/ “support”/, “information”/ “matter”, which reverberate on space-time divergent dimensions. Signs and information linger everywhere and forever in hypermediated networks and individual minds. Support and matter stay limited and localized as a result of a necessary and procured physical and technological obsolescence and of their specific territorial localization at the end of the employment cycle. And it is in this procured “spatiality” that we go back to the e-waste; a massacre of land and men, brought by the neoliberal management of digital consumerism’s waste. And it is always in this “spatiality” that the matter meets materiality, the misery and the blunt life conditions of men, women and children that survive de-composing it. If in the solitude of life online there is loss of contact with the materiality of technological objects, it is this spatiality that stuns when we find those objects again in the form of a toxic dumpster. And the gaze of young men and adolescents that are forced to live in it is even more stunning.

In Guiyu (China) 80% of the families is engaged in e-waste recycling. Nearly 60.000 workers involved.

Walton Road, Lahore, Pakistan. On the roof of a building, bins full of chemicals that will be used for the extraction of precious metals from electronic waste.

Lahore, Pakistan. A man stand in front of a pile of electronic components which will be later processed to extract metals.

Wagha Town, Lahore, Pakistan. Trucks full of metallic materials coming from the disposal of electric and electronic waste arrive to this foundry daily. Here the metal, along with some other metal scrap of different provenience, is melted at a temperature of 1800 degrees Celsius. In this way, they create new metallic materials and use it in the construction field.

Walton Road, Lahore, Pakistan. A boy on the roof of his house is preparing a chemical tank where, through a very complex procedure, he will extract gold from printed circuits that were parts of broken computers. His father had to pay a great amount of money so that his son could learn this technique from another person, but this investment is allowing them to increase the profits of their small business that is specialized in the recycling of electronic waste.

Karachi, Pakistan. A small repair shop specialized in electric and electronic devices inside a shopping mall .

Hall Road, Lahore, Pakistan. Hall Road is the largest electronic market in the Punjab region and one of the largest in Pakistan. Here you can find any kind of electronic device. Most of the materials you can find here have been illegally imported from China or western countries. You can buy devices that are new or used and working. There are parts coming from the disposal of devices from United States, Europe or China through illegal shipments, and parts that don’t work anymore and that are sold wholesale to extract metals like gold.

Hall Road, Lahore, Pakistan. About 20% of the electronic devices exported in Pakistan from China or western countries are fully functional, or just need some repairing to work again. It is important to keep in mind that the illegal import of electronic devices has increased the general population’s access to technologic objects, like laptops and televisions, and to new forms of culture, even for the poorest.

Lahore, Pakistan. In a bulk warehouse of used electronic components. Because of massive power outages, frequent all over pakistan, workers spend hours illuminated only by a light bulb powered by a small running generator.

Lahore, Pakistan. A man stand in front of a pile of electronic components which will be later processed to extract metals.

Karachi, Pakistan Customers and sellers in the streets of one the many electronics markets in the city. This one is situated right near the harbour, so the imported items from the rest of the world are resold or dismantled immediately upon their arrival.

Shahdara, Lahore, Pakistan. Outdated electronic equipments are resold in a small retail shop. Old cathode ray tube televisions, old radios and recorders imported mostly from China, constitute for a good portion of the population the access to new forms of communication before unapproachable, even though bringing with them high risks to human health and environment.

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The vastness and the quantity of e-waste sites in poor southern countries is explained by the million of tons of electronic scraps poured out there. It is a growing flow because during the integration process of networks and territories to PC and to television we have to add a billion new mobile devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops etc. This squander is incentivized by ICTii Corporations, which in their spasmodic research for infinite profit implemented a programmed obsolescence of their products that is increasingly widespread and imposing.

With the regime of the financialised governance, the laws that should prevent these kinds of human and ecologic disasters are planned in a way that leaves plenty of space to the interests of those who have economic power, public or private. It is quite a difference compared to the toughness applied to those laws made to keep migrant workers away from our postindustrial paradises. The governance’s executive prefers by far that they stay in their homes, and then transforms those homes, into toxic rubbish dumps.

Strengthening and enforcing insufficient international laws would thwart massive profits. Disposing of a PC by sending it to a dumpster in Africa costs $2, while it would cost $20 to sustainably recycle it. Those $18 are split between those apparently respectable operators from the north and their equivalent mobsters from the south. The connivance and complementarity between lawful capitals and capitals linked to the Mafia, in some countries of southern Europe, is reproduced on a world’s scale… In the peripheral regions of the world, the forms of capital accumulation and Mafia-like organizations represent an essential means of insertion in the international division of labor. According to economists that are not subserviced to the mainstream finance “in the end, cognitive capitals and capitals linked to the mafia find their true unity in the innate opacity of financial markets where any distinction disappears”iii. Providing additional evidence that the exploitation has the same matrix in building and in destroying…

Delhi process 10.000 to 20.000 tons of e-waste per year with nearly 25.000 workers, mostly children.

Ghana imports around 215.000 tonnes of secondhands consumer electronics from abroad (primarily Western Europe) and generates another 129.000 tons of e-waste every year.

Old Seelampur, New Delhi, India. The average pay of an electric waste disposal worker in the suburbs of Old Seelampur in New Delhi is about 2/3 thousand Indian rupee per month, which is about 35/55 dollars. It pays for nine to ten hours of work per day, with insufficient security conditions, in close and prolonged contact with toxic substances and without any kind of protection for human health or the environment.

Old Seelampur, New Delhi, India. E-waste scraps are piled on the street waiting ti be processed or resold.

Old Seelampur, New Delhi, India. Two young men during a break in a warehouse full of old cathode ray tube monitors. These types of devices contain polluting and toxic substances like lead, cadmium, hexavalent chromium and Brominated Flame Retardants (BFRs). A prolonged exposure to these compounds can cause serious problems for the environment and for human health.

Old Seelampur, New Delhi, India. A warehouse used to dismantle electronic devices. Where they separate the components and extract the parts to sell.

Chennai, India. Two workers of SIMS Recycling Solutions, the global leader in the recovery of electronic and electric wastes for reuse and recycling. It has facilities in the five continents. SIMS signs contracts with big companies that recycle obsolete devices on their premises. SIMS Recycling Solutions provides 1700 collection points of end of life electronics throughout India. However, managing to take away large amounts of waste from the illegal market is a hard task, especially in places like India, where people live selling wastes, the same wastes that in other countries would be disposed of for free. SIMS is trying to raise awareness in the population about the risks of environmental pollution and for the human health and is offering services to the local community.

Kancheepuram Districti, Tamil Nadu, India. GEMS (Global E-Waste Managment and Services) facilities close to Chennai. GEMS is one of the few companies authorized to treat electric and electronic waste in India. They separate the different parts of the wastes, plastic and metallic, and then they sell them to companies specialized in the recycling of those specific materials. According to the law in India, it is not possible to treat and recycle materials like PBCs (Printed Circuit Boards) because of the substances they contain. Consequentially, a company like GEMS is allowed to accumulate and store a minimum of 300 tons of material and then export it to other countries, (Hong Kong and Singapore) where they can legally treat them.

Kancheepuram Districti, Tamil Nadu, India. Plastic monitors wrecks accumulated in the “plastic segregation” sector of GEMS (Global E-Waste Managment and Services) facilities close to Chennai. GEMS is one of the few companies authorized to treat electric and electronic waste in India. They separate the different parts of the wastes, plastic and metallic, and then they sell them to companies specialized in the recycling of those specific materials.

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$E-waste territories, 300 tons of radioactive water poured into Fukushima’s ocean every day, lands in decay ravaged by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) to extract oil and gas from shale: there is no breaking in the dangers of today’s capitalistic model. Through the network, the dominant machine of economic rationale is accelerating the rhythm of destruction of the biosphere. When will it stop?$

In developing countries the eco-mafia is taking charge of rare and non-renewable resources. And is contributing to the ecological crisis with e-waste. In both cases we are talking about expropriation of the common, both regarding the devastation of land and the exploitation that confines with enslavement, and have seen the precarious life conditions of those who work in such an inferno. The disturbing paradox is having before you, the tangible results of the rough materialization of the roles’ division in the global economy. The finance’s oligarchy gets the shares for intellectual property, immaterial production or bio-hypermedia devices, the multitudes of the “damnés de la terre”, get the enslavement into technologic dumpsters that invade their ecosystem making it sterile and toxic.

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana. A pile of copper on the ground of the landfill. In the Agbobloshie landfill, copper is the most precious material. After extracting it from electric wires, it is sold for an amount that is barely enough to buy one or two meals for the day.

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana. A young man is transporting electric materials ready to be burnt.

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana. A young man is transporting electric materials ready to be burnt. The materials treated in the Agbobloshie landfill contain substances that are highly toxic for the environment and for human health. Cadmium, lead, phthalates, antimony, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), chlorobenzenes, Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), triphenyl phosphate (TPP), Brominated Flame Retardants (BFRs).

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana A guy resting in the e-waste dump in the capital city Accra. They work all day long, seven days per week.

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana. Young boys selecting electric and electronic wastes in front of the Agbobloshie landfill. The flow of trucks unloading waste coming from other parts of the city or from Tema Harbor, is unstoppable. Tema Harbor is the main commercial seaport in Ghana receiving all the shipments coming from United States and Europe.

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana. A young man during a pause from work in front of the Agbobloshie landfill. He is waiting to collect electric materials that are going to be burnt in order to extract metallic parts to sell.

Agbobloshie, Accra, Ghana Guys burning electronic scraps in the e-waste dump of Agbobloshie.

Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana. A guy is standing in the midst of smoke, fire and residual parts of electronic equipment as he burns it to extract some copper contained inside to resell later to earn his daily food.

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Lian River, Guiyu, China. A branch of the Lian River, a minor river that flows into the South China Sea. Here, every night, huge piles of electrical and electronic waste, together with other waste derived from the manufacture (another business very present in this region) are accumulated on the banks of the river and are set on fire. These wastes are the last link in the chain, the result of all the processes of cannibalization and recycling. From these materials is no longer possible to extract anything that has a value, then are burned in the open air thus creating serious pollution problems for air and the surrounding waterways.

Valentino Bellini, +39 3286886891 bitrotproject@gmail.com www.valentinobellini.com