Why ship damaged African phones to Europe?

Eric Arthur spends most of his weekends driving around Ghana collecting damaged phones.

From his home in Cape Coast, he can travel 160km over the weekend, visiting phone repair shops, junkyards, or wherever he can get a good number of damaged phones.

Sometimes he can collect 400 phones in one weekend. In addition, Arthur runs a team of six who are doing the same thing elsewhere in the country. Arthur and his team aim to collect 30,000 phones a year.

Arthur and his team pay a small amount per phone: 2.5-2.7 Ghanaian cedis, or the equivalent of 44 US cents.

Although these phones can't be repaired, sometimes the team has to work hard to convince owners to sell them.

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"The price of a new Android phone is about $150," says Arthur, "and I offer them less than $1. Even though they can no longer use these phones, they say to me, 'We paid so much for these phones, why should we sell them to you so cheap?'" ".

Arthur works for the Dutch company Closing the Loop, which ships phones collected by Arthur and his team to Europe, where they are disassembled and recycled. Then a specialized company melts the phones and extracts about 90 percent of the metal used in them, while the plastic components are burned.

But why ship those phones thousands of miles from West Africa to Europe?

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The answer is simple, says Joost Lee Kluyver, who co-founded Closing the Loop with Reinhart-Smit. The African continent does not yet have the highly sophisticated smelting plants needed to extract the small quantities of the expensive metals used to make mobile phones.

None of the things necessary to build a (smelting) plant are economically sustainable. There is no legislation, no infrastructure, no consumer awareness. There is no money to fund proper collection and recycling."

About 230 million mobile phones are sold in Africa each year. When those phones stop working, some of them go to the informal recycling industry, but most of them end up in the trash.

According to the Global E-Waste Monitor, Africa generated 2.9 million tons of e-waste in 2019, of which only 1 percent was collected and recycled.

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"African countries are experts in extending the life cycles of products, in repairing them, and to some extent in recycling as well. So the mentality is there, but the necessary tools are not available, especially for this type of waste," says de Kluyver.

To fund collection of phones in Africa, Closing the Loop signs deals with companies and organizations that pay them around €5 (US$5.60, £4.20) for each mobile phone they buy or rent from the technology provider.

For every new phone, Closing the Loop recycles a similar amount of e-waste in countries that lack recycling capabilities.

The five euros cover the collection, shipping and recycling of the phones, with some of the profit going to the Closing the Loop company.

The growing list of clients includes the Dutch government and financial services company KMPG. For customers, this is a relatively small investment, but with significant environmental benefits.

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De Kluyver criticizes some of the recent efforts to set up recycling projects in Africa, as he believes that in the absence of a sustainable financial model and implemented legislation, these projects will falter.

Simone Anderson, Director of Planning and Sales at the Waste Electrical and Electronic Center (WEEE), which recycles these products in Kenya, is well aware of these challenges.

Kenya does not have a national government-run recycling system, but there are waste collection services in some areas. The idea for the center came from Computers for Kenya Schools, a non-profit organization that provides the country's schools with refurbished computers.

Her work with schools showed her that there was a need to dispose of e-waste, which is why the recycling company was established in 2012.

The WEEE Center expects to collect 250 tons of e-waste this year through deals concluded with major companies such as Total Energies and Absa.

However, this figure represents only a small part of Kenya's e-waste, which is estimated at 50,000 tons annually. Anderson has ambitious plans that include setting up electronic collection points across the country, where people will be able to leave their unwanted electronic devices at these points.

Anderson says that Kenyans are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental problems caused by e-waste, and would like to do something to overcome them.

"The majority of people are very aware of the general problems caused by waste, and many of them want to solve them, and they will be able to do so when there is an infrastructure to support them. We want to be part of the solution to the problem of e-waste."

The Kenyan government is taking some steps to help. For example, he has begun working for "extension of producer liability" legislation that would hold producers or importers of electronic goods responsible for recycling.

"We are pushing for (the enactment of legislation), because we see what this country needs, and we want Kenya to become an example for other African countries to follow," Anderson says, adding that the enactment of this legislation will help a lot, "maybe not Immediately, but it will completely change situations, and it will have a tremendous impact on objectives and structures."

The ten technicians who work in the WEEE center's workshop carefully and carefully disassemble electronic devices. Some metals such as iron and copper can be extracted locally, but precious metals such as gold, palladium and platinum embedded within electronic circuit boards can only be extracted by specialized smelting companies in Europe and Asia.

Anderson hopes one day to be able to build a smelter in Kenya: “As we expand, we'll definitely want to bring this technology to Africa. Why not bring it to East Africa? Why not bring it to Kenya and Nairobi? It's part of our vision future".

De Kluyver also hopes that Closing the Loop can fund recycling and smelting facilities in Africa, but until that happens, the next best option is to ship cellphones to Europe.

Back in Cape Coast, Ghana, Eric Arthur says he has seen improvements in the way e-waste is handled in recent years, but says there is still more work to do.

"With more awareness, I think people will realize the need to get rid of e-waste," says Arthur.