ToxiCity: life at Agbobloshie, the world's largest e-waste dump in Ghana

this is Agri blushy a suburb of Accra the capital of Ghana but local residents have given it a nickname Sodom and Gomorrah it's the home of the biggest electronic waste dump and is a livelihood for many first it feeds them then it kills them this is one of the most polluted areas with toxins and toxic metals on the African continent this way miss Dawson Emanuel Ax candy Rika has spent his entire childhood at the dump site he's never been to school so he can't go elsewhere for him this job is the only way to sustain himself family move yet 14 years said you will prune them back by damming back no talk massive oak Oak much more demo and I'm in band bible ed you know Khatami said we are doing a Erica Kroger back you're gonna puke Ghanaian laws forbid Emanuel to work at all until he comes of age but no one pays any attention you see this much more children who's awake yelling so we are doing our parents so again father dies over than their mothers die and so the day our mothers are there but didn't take care of them you know as a small boy and so then they cut you can't work here after Trevor go back to school and so glad they don't go to art or when the crew school you will come here show them le in the money will come here pick the ion way and sell koppány a baby o.o movie with my yet nami decks mia meet me yes ker you say mesa at the enemy tanaka to commit my a to return wanna turn this money which is equal to three to five dollars will allow a manual to have at least one meal a day electronic waste comes to Ghana from the USA Australia Western Europe and Asia to the tune of hundreds of tons per year there's enough work here at the dump site for everyone waste collectors as well as those whose job it is to provide anything the collectors might need Sam Issa Abubakar iya rubaba sells food and has only been here at the site for two weeks she's from the north of Ghana where there's no work at all the nomicon and Friends tuned I am achieves a hobby it's laughs oh my community to tabasco and come back show me like Incan aunty Cogan the drinks only hope will compute in goes along coconut tiara uncle I detect when I trade will put on the business shop so come amount to title number that can achieve so dentist of beasts Chimecho super villain young person yep a man who can cooperate together for another book war me I went to drop by sorry Sam ISA is 18 but she hasn't finished high school yet she still has two more years to go no King Abdullah is my combat as of my trash fourth inning and cranny nice new mika-chan school like the command each other SSL vanish on nascent Trini internal nests can yularen limba Becca lemma Bekele a farmer for the neon initial and instead this study scrubs that was 1991 two hours of debate now we have our fourth out of 5,000 hours come it's a good business because we don't notice our scrap yard like our local companies dr. Hager boos now look at this we shall play them the iron will give them more No so our work is number one Gunnar our b13 1s we look out for lead and cadmium which could easily affect the people who spend time here the kids who play around the adults themselves and what a w-2 recommended level for lead in the soul as fonder parts per million and yeah getting a bit of a thousand two thousand dependent on where we sampled we switch the week route was the route where we started we did some work in 2010 where blacksmith and the Ghana Health Service we took eighty people here to check their bloody urine to see the level of contamination and it was quite high very high quite high in terms of if you don't get any medication you don't eat well you don't move away from this around and over a period of time you fall sick if you fall sick and you stood on their medication definitely you will die you burn any plastic we have toxin and then you have combinations out of a list of poisons which are ranking under the highest poisons in the world the combinations are much more dangerous and a much faster working in your organism shortening your life much faster as if you are drinking every day rat poison Victor Shaffer a manager of a waste utilization company came to Ghana from Germany working with waste here promised a high income higher than in Western Europe I'm actually have joined the bass business to produce compost because waste in ghana contains more organic material as waste in europe i'm living here for 40 years and i can say that the situation Asajj has not improved and that is really dramatic we have enough loss it's not a question that we don't have enough laws we have environmental laws we have all the laws but nobody's enforcing the law so everybody is doing what he wants and that is a problem and that causes problem for all of these people here look I'll do you just look at everything yes we need where we are living even what we were to walk to wherever you eat yeah it's very bad for us absolutely look at human be living here yes every day come closer everyone come closer you must live in here yes yes you don't think about our thurber no but I do have another bad ear yourself you have to think about because you are also getting sick and if you are getting sick you cannot care for the children anymore so the action is really serious and therefore we brought them here to have also from the outsides of international crowd to help us because it's not good the people which are going the site are cashing in in this waste so they are making everyday a lot of money of course without taxes a Manuel's family has always lived in poverty when his mother was alive it wasn't that hard for the boy she would always find a way to feed her son but to do this she had to work almost around the clock oh no mom I gave you a definition no bonuses no antimacassar being nobody until a second none none none my ammu Jessa I'm gonna call daughter consume in casa na mandoline by fear llama dinner call back Bobby oh oh oh yes sir with me Kassabian today has been a good day for Manuel he's earned enough to buy food and can now have a rest in his temporary home these two and three storage shacks are right next to the dump site people eat sleep and keep cattle here no one pays attention to the smell coming from the dump site or the fact that they are surrounded by poison mr. Linton talons on Ben's of Milan unbeknown meets bomba nerves and finger and I'm been doing belly oh no they are kinda cool awesome boom Carmel food conquer Chandra to come Kucha hydrogen mutation and vindaloo Soneji I'm gonna fumble Jocasta Hobbs any the an chickens Kamala la fée been chosen bells on the balloon dinghy so Nagar Malcolm a hanky leg amalgam fungal Hickman you can also argue if you are Finnick that more people die on the road in Europe I see people dying from this raced in figures maybe but when you count how many people are sick and dying later and how many of these kids have a very short life and they are not registered while they are dying nobody says oh they were working a lacto blushing therefore they made only twenty twenty to twenty five years and then they are dead this is P amount Children's Hospital we on a daily basis you see children anywhere from 200 cases attention we do see cases coming from the ablution area so these are these are some of the general awards that we have here formally we know there will be times won't be getting so many patients but now it seems like we're getting cases throughout the year because we saw we're seeing an increasing number of chest infections so it's possible you could be actually travel to some of these pollution pollutants coming from beasts and backsides there are no official numbers as to how many people died of deadly poisoning in Abba blushy no one registers the number of diseases caused by this ecological disaster there are no statistics of it at all in Ghana aqua blushy has two sides on one side is the biggest fruit market in West Africa the biggest fruit magazine rather well the other side is a biggest contaminated site in the whole world not a little West Africa so and this is just a street in between so that means we are also accepting that when this kids are burning all these rubbers and plastics and all that this smoke goes opposite Society to the fruit market onions and all that so effectively the people who buy from here and you realize the way a cattle be read other side will kill it or cook people eat so it's not only about the people here by spreads to other parts of our crop Nicoletta in Yakima Haruka Ouma newtonia Shiva come on you punk band Newtonian what about my faith because opening for new business some of them are not the business men - I don't know black man 75050 tulum cover my free Sabino tomotommy knows all too well so be Aquaman we can play mother take care of Cody Emma go to the world okay nabela Tom bass convenience Daniella Rochelle for you nobody on Tim Boetsch from Bimini a lot of shopping W so Shane connect instance writing a lot observe vengeance English Cola Kanchan with double smack it with the camera - corn and a new purchase diffidence la boca lukewarm a super color the knife time when I challenge the Zuccotti busker contracted to devour it's like this look at the bashful traffic to run foolishness officially no electronic waste comes to garner only secondhand devices which are sold in shops a barehanded minute may be aware parents will be there D dependent animal now who are on a new neck shake ray or game or game for text test between Z and I'm on weight or more your experience near mom we're getting weird minute full data to this and a little meal ticket up a draining Emma for amplifies with your plants with map 24 lights off with mins before see computer monitors yeah always take a handful oh by K repair Johanna Dina in a pass no enter no no say una pesadilla de Saron ver cuando no no SAE lesser known a Dubois no no Mo's ha ha ha when you say ya initial business yeah oh yeah I know so now yeah so yeah yeah yeah DDD 28 a chef Feenie di Medici sat at manna home and then yet been wanna marry yo ho everybody oh yeah oh yeah we're creepy I don't let is your home the victor Schaffer believes the trade of second-hand electronics in Ghana is really no more than a cover for a waste traffic and it's highly profitable turning over around 250 million dollars per year this is somehow a mafia the ones which are collecting this used computers over there so what you do is you have a 40-foot container in the back of the 40-foot container you pack all the computers we just crap money to us whatever you want and in the front that you pack savants with just in function this is the main trick that suppliers of e-waste use utilizing broken down devices in developed countries is too costly so they are sent to Ghana to the dump site everybody knows about the value of this containers when you have a 40-footer you can have calculate with a little bit what you can sell and the scrap it is inside there it's a forty thousand euros affair to maximize his profit he selects these poor boiz which are coming from the north and from all other sides to Accra to find a little bit trip money direct you can never go to the expert and they look my friend you may have the guilty one you have killed five kids in Africa yeah this you cannot proof and of course he will not take up the blame he will say I have sold used materials to somebody who came to my yacht and bought it I don't know what he's doing with it no see Saturday embed map and oh no cosa [ __ ] embed map oh no God was upon our own bed my journey now in your pursue it said no investment in jail you come broader girl Anasuya honest one member no option in some Watchmen of him no catch a nice a new bar on contingency on country Emma said you mean Gino Nagar comes over me okay - mommy gifu Nanami friend sound and some of them are here so everybody works here and some people try here and some people try here so you see how the racket is everybody's me is Hardwick so that's the business the dump site at Agra blushy is divided into sectors each of which has its own supervisor but the last word always belongs to up to light Abdul Rajamani I'm gonna take over everybody yeah if anybody have a program they can bring it yeah should our jiggies if you do have right I will tell you you are much higher all right so Lesley ladies that's always somebody color somebody's money or somebody offend somebody they will come here I'll talk to them so everything will be cool assuming ivory yesterday our hot politician they beat some our boy evil boy cotton ear here the RS the voice even yesterday IV when they stopped the program for them so that this will calm down so the fighting stopped and some time when they are there at police station or other places I'm they're always going there we said f count of one an economy toy boy named in full tsunami Poirot Episode II miss economy who mommy cartel boys normal chance in the same environment club you know on the turbo name is Michi Imam now I'm a big mess on an open the appropriate chain I will miss it nobody book Bob Walker Johnny you may be a new impaired one little buddy Carmen Luna Maria PR recipient through legend cut through a family lian-chu kobozev i'ma come come when your baby mama so young well exalted Miniver dan chicken gravy to feed themselves to survive in our crap they have to get somehow in this system the ones which are dealing with evinced they know all that at the calculate or not and if she gives them let's say five or eight gamma cities a day so that they can more or less survive the boys have no choice they cannot say I want more money and if you want more money okay kick you out you

Channel: RT Documentary

Views: 5,079,467

Rating: 4.7836275 out of 5

Keywords: Russia Today, RT Documentary, RT Doc, RT docs, documetary film, documentary, filmmaking, producers, journalism, Toxicity, Ghana, Africa, e-waste, dump, waste smuggling, garbage, rubbish, waste, recycling, electronic waste, risk, health risk, Agbobloshie, child labour, Sodom and Gomorrah, e waste

Id: mleQVO1Vd1I

Length: 25min 54sec (1554 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/M0use_Rat]

I’m assuming this is the real life (horrible) inspiration for the colony on the e-waste planet on futurama?

[u/SigmundColumn]

The Insider - A Week In A Toxic Dump

Documentary in which Reggie Yates heads to Ghana to live on one of the largest electronic waste dumps in the world - Accra's Agbogbloshie. Working with a group of 'burner boys', the people grafting at what is considered to be the bottom of the ladder, Reggie discovers first-hand what life is like for the people who eke out a living on the site. Dumping electronic waste is illegal, and the chemicals in the soil in Agbogbloshie mean it has been described as 'the most toxic place on earth'.

[u/kidwithausername]

I want to gild this post for awareness but I'm broke rn. What the hell has this world come to... How do we even help these people and stop this electronics pollution (as well as other pollution) as consumers, enough to make a change..