The Toxic E-Waste Trade Killing Pakistan’s Poorest

The E-Waste Curse: The deadly effect of dumping E-waste in Pakistan

Pakistan has become an illegal dumping ground for some of the 50 million tons of e-waste created each year. Karachi’s poor earn a living from the toxic detritus, but the vicious cycle of consumption could prove fatal.

In Pakistan, the massive arrival of electronic waste has created an informal substance economy that feeds 150,000 people. The country’s poor salvage what they can from the cast-offs of the electronic revolution: copper, steel, brass. Nassir is one who has cashed in on the opportunities found in old cables and hard-drives. “It’s a good business. I have more and more work”, he says. Yet workers pay the price for a few grams of copper; 4 million people die every year because of electronic waste and recycling workers have the lowest life expectancy in Pakistan. In his recycling shop, Akhbar earns 2€ on a good day. It feeds his family of six, but his health has suffered. “This job is dangerous. It’s very toxic”. And the toxic legacy is far-reaching – “It’s a catastrophe…especially for the children”, warns Saba, an activist for the WWF. “They will continue to live here and be poisoned, it’s dangerous for them and it’s dangerous for the next generations”. In our relentlessly consumerist world, can the global poor be saved from the toxic trade in e-waste?

For similar stories, see:
Pakistanis Are Pinning Their Economic Hopes on Upcoming Elections

Ordinary Pakistanis Live Under the Thumb of the Taliban

Is Pakistan Protecting The Taliban?
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17 thoughts on “The Toxic E-Waste Trade Killing Pakistan’s Poorest”

  1. Corporations in the U.S. have contracts with Computer wholesalers who switch out their old technologies with the newer. Those wholesalers also have it in the contract to remove and dispose the old computers,.now i know where all my e-waste recycling work is going,.to Pakistan. i bet those wholesalers don't even erase the hard drives before shipping them out. no wonder there is so much identity theft, our private information could be on the hard drives being sent over seas.

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  2. What the fuck. 25 kilos in two hours. The manager is working him to death. That's 26 pounds of components in an hour. That's retarded. There needs to be quicker means of separating the metals. The tycoon needs to find a damn hammer mill and something to protect the environment and employees so they can be around for a bit longer. Oh wait it's Pakistan, Allah will protect them from harm, NOT!

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  3. I would like to have a production company that makes hammer mills donate one to Pakistan so they can actually process this shit.

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  4. I do think that the electronics need to be processed without burning them in air. Dangerous shit indeed. I myself am a scrapper and I tend to put the circuit boards into a paint can with a few holes in the lid and use a wood fire to pyrolyze the plastic. This makes a clean burning gas that I can use to keep the fire stable. Otherwise you could crush the boards in a hammer mill to say 100 mesh and put it in a improvised sluce box retrieving the metals cleanly and efficiently. You can make one with a section of plastic flexible pipe and a hose. The metal can then be dried, go through a magnetic separator, then be fired down in a furnace to melt it down into a solid chunk of metal. The method of separation is up to you.

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  5. Another stupid doc guilt tripping the rest of the world. These people are doing these voluntarily cause apparently the only these people are good at is importing waste products and exporting narcotics. Nobody's forcing these people to import garbage and make a living off of it. These e-waste could be dumped in a desert somewhere and won't even affect the rest of the world.

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