E-waste management in Sub-Saharan Africa: A systematic literature review

Abstract

The developing world has become the primary destination for used electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) exported by the developed world, making e-waste management critical. This paper aims to determine the state of e-waste management in Sub-Saharan Africa by critically reviewing the corpus on electronic waste (e-waste) management in the region. Even though many studies were conducted on e-waste management, very few are conducted on developing countries who are significant recipients of used EEE. We applied a systematic literature review (SLR) process on research articles retrieved from Web of Science, EBSCO Host and Sabinet databases. Using the keywords that included e-waste management or recycling or policy in Sub-Saharan Africa or Africa, we searched for articles from these databases. We analysed 25 papers selected from 151,558 papers initially retrieved to answer the research questions. The findings revealed that about 80% of research on e-waste management in the Sub-Saharan Africa region was undertaken in three countries: Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa. The review of the selected articles revealed that lack of policy and limited recycling infrastructure were the main barriers to effective e-waste management. The SLR revealed that most

Musculoskeletal Disorder Symptoms among Workers at an Informal Electronic-Waste Recycling Site in Agbogbloshie, Ghana

“…Developing and implementing a targeted approach to reduce the risk of chronic and disabling injuries in this population will need a systematic evaluation of the associations between specific e-waste work exposures and WRMSDs. This need is urgent considering the global volume of e-waste generated each year and the large scale of informal recycling conducted in many developing countries [ 5 , 10 ].…”

“…Most e-waste is generated from domestic consumption [ 5 , 6 ]. In addition, large volumes of e-waste from Europe and North America are shipped each year to countries in Asia [ 7 , 8 ], South America [ 6 , 9 ], and Africa [ 10 , 11 , 12 ]. E-waste shipped to developing countries include legal exports intended for low-cost recycling, illegal dumping that evade national and international laws, and items sent under the guise of donations [ 5 , 13 , 14 ].…”

“…A small fraction of all shipped e-waste items are in working condition and get put to second-hand use. However, the majority (over 80%) consists of non-working goods that end up in dumpsites to be either dismantled for parts which are refurbished and resold, or recycled into scrap material [ 10 ]. E-waste recycling in developing countries is dominated by the informal sector comprising low skilled workers who manually collect, dismantle, and burn/melt e-waste as a source of income [ 5 ].…”

“…E-waste is hazardous since many components contain hazardous chemicals and heavy metals (e.g., lead, cadmium) harmful to the environment and to human health if not handled and/or disposed of safely [ 15 , 16 ]. The environmental and occupational health risks associated with e-waste recycling activities present unique challenges in developing countries due to the lack of appropriate e-waste recycling infrastructure, policy, and governance [ 2 , 10 , 17 , 18 ].…”

Towards a Circular Economy for African Islands: an Analysis of Existing Baselines and Strategies

“…Various studies have focused on South Africa which has explored the implementation of circular economy in various sectors such as waste management, renewable energy and manufacture [18,26]. The subject of recycling and managing e-waste has been addressed in Nigeria and Ghana [27]. Mutezo and Mulopo [22] have explored the potential of circular economy principles applied to the renewable energy sector in Algeria, Nigeria, Morocco, South Africa and Egypt.…”