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From: Hamburg, Germany
Image credit: Kevin McElvaney, Adam Latif, 21, 2013
Photographer description: Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana is a place where illegal electronic waste trading routes find their end. For more than 10 years, boys and girls between the age of 7 and 25, smash stones against old monitors, use old magnets to collect metal and (most times) burn cables to get the copper from it. Agbogbloshie is one of the largest e-waste dumpsites in the world and more than 400 containers end up here every month. These containers are full of unusable electronics and are falsely labeled as “development aid” or “second hand products”. Almost every worker has heavy headaches, lung problems, eye and back damage and suffer from insomnia. Most of them die from cancer before they are 30 years old. The 40,000 inhabitants themselves nicknamed this place “Sodom and Gomorrah”. For me, Agbogbloshie is a social-economic, ethical and environmental disaster.
