A Nigerian man has been arrested by UK authorities for exporting e-waste out of the country following investigations by The Independent newspaper and Sky News all of the UK, The Independent has reported.
The 49-year-old man the reports say was detained last week on suspicion of the illegal export of e-waste. He was arrested during operations by the UK Environment Agency and the Metropolitan police as part of what the publication described as a wider crackdown on a trade which leaves thousands of tonnes of broken and contaminated electrical goods dumped in the developing world each year.
The man identified as Joseph Benson who is the sole director of BJ Electronics (UK) Ltd according to Companies House records, and has its main warehouse in Walthamstow, east London, has however denied breaking any law. He also told reporters that he was never arrested.
The investigation earlier in the year traced a broken TV set which was bought by BJ Electronics to be recycled in the UK, but was sold and exported to Nigeria.
According to UK media about 12 people have so far been arrested in connection with the illegal export of e-waste to developing countries.
Indeed, Nigeria and Ghana have been identified as a dumping ground for unusable electronics items, like TVs, mobile phones, fridges, irons and computers. These countries unfortunately have no laws or specific policies on handling the possible dangers that the poisonous chemicals contained in obsolete electronics equipment pose to both the environment and human health.
Most of the unusable electronics items that land in Ghana are sold out as scrap to dealers who dismantles these under unsafe and unhygienic conditions. The workers, who mostly operate at the Agbogbloshie crap yard, wore no protective clothing and hardly have enough information about the possible dangers they are exposing themselves and the environment to.
Meanwhile, in recent times, with help from the Secretariat of the Basel Convention of Switzerland and the EU some work has began in Ghana and other West African countries to formulate policies to deal specifically with the e-waste menace in the sub-region.
E-waste however, contains precious metals like gold, silver and copper, but because of the capital intensive nature of the technology for extracting precious metals from these, precious metal extraction from e-waste is only possible in the developed countries.
A Ghanaian company however, City Waste Management Company Ltd. has started the process of recycling e-waste in Ghana. But the company would only recycle by separating the parts and exporting to Europe for the extraction of precious metals.
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