Waste Colonialism and the Cost of Looking Away: How discarded goods cross borders, and why their final destination matters

A phone reaches the end of its life in one country. A secondhand shirt loses its appeal. A plastic container goes into a recycling bin. Each object seems to have left its owner’s story. In reality, another story has begun, often in a place far from the person who discarded it.

Waste colonialism is a name for the unequal movement of unwanted material and its costs. The phrase draws attention to a recurring pattern in which wealthier economies generate large volumes of waste, while workers and communities elsewhere handle material that may be difficult or dangerous to process. It does not mean that every shipment is illegal, or that every receiving country lacks a recycling industry. The question is who earns from a shipment, who can reject it, and who pays when it cannot be used safely.

The scale behind the bin

In a landmark study of plastics, researchers estimated that 8.3 billion tonnes had been produced by 2015. Roughly 6.3 billion tonnes had already become waste. Of that waste, about 9 percent had been recycled, 12 percent incinerated, and 79 percent accumulated in landfills or the natural environment [1]. Those are historical estimates with a 2015 endpoint, yet they show why a recycling symbol cannot account for everything people discard.

Electronics pose a related problem. The Global E-waste Monitor estimated that the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022. Only 22.3 percent was documented as formally collected and recycled. The report projects 82 million tonnes of annual e-waste by 2030 [2]. The undocumented share has several possible destinations, including storage, disposal, and informal recovery. We cannot describe it all as exported waste. We can say that weak records make unsafe handling harder to find and stop.

The same report estimated that 5.1 million tonnes of e-waste crossed borders in 2022. About 3.3 million tonnes moved from high-income countries to middle- and low-income countries through uncontrolled or undocumented routes [2]. That flow is one part of a global problem, and it puts particular pressure on the places where the shipments arrive.

What the rules try to control

The Basel Convention was adopted in 1989 after concern over hazardous waste shipments to countries with limited power and infrastructure to manage them. Its central tool is prior informed consent. For waste covered by the Convention, an exporting state must notify the receiving state and obtain consent before a shipment proceeds. Consent gives a country a formal choice, although paperwork alone cannot guarantee safe treatment after arrival [3].

The Ban Amendment, effective from 2019 for parties bound by it, restricts exports of covered hazardous waste from the countries listed in Annex VII to countries outside that group. Its obligations depend on the waste, its intended treatment and whether the exporting party is bound by the amendment [4]. Later changes expanded controls over electronic waste. Amendments adopted in 2022 made all e-waste subject to the Convention’s prior informed consent procedure from January 2025 for the relevant parties [5]. These are distinct steps, not one belated blanket ban on everything called waste. The rules matter because the label on a container can change how it is treated. Working electronics sent for genuine reuse have value. Broken equipment declared as reusable may transfer a costly sorting and disposal problem. Regulators must distinguish those cases, and they need the resources to inspect what crosses a port.

A place that became a symbol

For years, reporting on Agbogbloshie in Accra showed workers dismantling appliances and burning insulated wire to recover metal. The pollution and health risks were real. So was the economic activity around repair, resale and scrap recovery. Treating the site as a simple pile of foreign computers obscured the work people did there and the contribution of Ghana’s own discarded electronics [6].

The main scrapyard was demolished in 2021. Subsequent research describes informal recycling that persisted or moved elsewhere in Accra [8]. The work did not disappear with the site. Its history offers a harder lesson. Removing a visible scrapyard does little to settle where the work goes, who does it, and how workers can earn without inhaling toxic smoke.

The World Health Organization identifies lead, mercury, cadmium and other harmful substances associated with unsafe e-waste processing. Open burning can contaminate air and dust, while workers and nearby families may encounter pollutants through food, water, and soil [7]. The health risk follows the handling method. That is why safer tools, collection systems and enforcement matter alongside import controls.

Who gets to pass the cost on

A shipment can be useful to a buyer and still leave a community with costs that its price never covered. A trader may earn from repairable devices or recoverable metals. If unusable material must be burned, dumped or collected by a local authority, that expense sits outside the invoice. The same is true of protective equipment, pollution monitoring and medical care.

Stopping waste colonialism therefore calls for more than telling households to sort better. Manufacturers can make products easier to repair and dismantle. Exporters can test and document what they send. Receiving countries can set and enforce conditions for entry. Producer responsibility rules can help finance collection and safe treatment where products actually end their lives. Without those measures, an object leaves its first owner long before its costs end for anyone else.

Sources

[1] Geyer, Jambeck and Law, Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made, Science Advances, 2017  Read source

[2] UNITAR and ITU, The Global E-waste Monitor 2024  Read source

[3] Basel Convention, Convention text and overview  Read source

[4] Basel Convention, Ban Amendment questions and answers  Read source

[5] Basel Convention, E-waste Amendments  Read source

[6] Grant and Oteng-Ababio, Academic urban legend, Agbogbloshie, 2024  Read source

[7] World Health Organization, Electronic waste and children’s health  Read source

[8] Sarpong and colleagues, Decoding the logics behind the demolition, 2025  Read source