Race and Waste: The Politics of Electronic Waste Recycling & Scrap Metal Recovery in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana

Agbogbloshie scrapyard in Accra, Ghana is featured in images and documentary films as a charred landscape of disassembled computers, worn-out appliances, mangled plastic, derelict vehicles (in various stages of disassembly), and smouldering bundles of cables skillfully manoeuvred by gangly youths. These incendiary images spurred global concern for the adverse environmental effects of informal e-waste recycling and scrap metal recovery at the Agbogbloshie scrapyard. My research shifts the analytical focus away from the materiality of e-waste - whether hazard, risk or conversely, resource or commodity - and centers the place and people who are racially marked and already co-produced as waste and, therefore, disposable. The livelihoods of these workers unfold within a global capitalist system that perpetuates racial inequality, socio-historical and cultural factors in Ghana that continue to marginalize northerners, and more recently, a transnational governance landscape that promotes the economic benefits of e-waste recycling while obscuring its racializing logic. My analysis is multi-scalar, connecting informal recycling activities in Agbogbloshie, the disproportionate representation of northern migrants in forms of precarious work, and their relegation to under-utilized and poorly serviced spaces in Accra, to global politics that have long racialized space and spatialized race. Informal e-waste recycling in Agbogbloshie emerges as part of the cumulative and continuing legacy of the economic exploitation and the political diminution of Africa and its people for the furtherance of capital accumulation by foreign interests and local elites. Fundamentally, my research demonstrates that hazardous forms of waste management respond to existing spatial imaginaries, i.e., the racialization of space and the spatialization of race and the colour coded international division of labour that ensures that racialized workers remain overrepresented in precarious, low-paying and hazardous work. As a contribution to scholarship, this dissertation offers an alternative reading of the global e-waste landscape. It asserts that the racial, uneven and hierarchical differentiation of Africa and its people, and their contingent disposability within various iterations of capitalism, are the conditions of possibility for the emergence of informal e-waste recycling and scrap metal recovery in Agbogbloshie - with implications for sustainable material flow cycles, extraction, and resource efficiency at the global scale.