E-Waste Exportation and Cyber Crimes

Two main issues are exposed during the documentary: the health issues regarding the affected population and the cyber crimes that occur due to the misuse of personal information contained in hard disks.

The first is perhaps the most serious one, once most of the countries receiving this e-waste have no facilities to treat it properly (Li et al., 2012) and frequently child labor is used (British Columbia University, 2009). Because of this, thousands of people are exposed to toxic gases and heavy metals during their work activities without realizing the harmfulness of that activity (Grant et al., 2013). All too often, these countries are also responsible for the production of these compounds and end up with all the environmental damages, from the extraction of raw material to the waste disposal, while the consumers in developed countries pay a price that is not enough to cover all the environmental costs involved in the production.

This practice goes against two principles that guide the European policy regarding waste, the principle of producer responsibility, which states that the WEEE manufacturers are responsible for financing operations concerning their own waste (Barba-Gutierrez et al., 2008), and the proximity principle, whereby the waste should be treated as close as possible to its source (Williams, 2005). Two main reasons are pointed as the source of this problem: the illegal transfer (Vaughan, 2009) and the donation of “junk” computers with few possibilities of feasible use (Laurie, 2005). However, another issue arises when it comes to criticize this kind of practice, once some institutions that provide serious donations of computers to developing countries might be labeled as fraudulent (Wray, 2008), disturbing serious processes of cooperation and preventing the development of poor communities in these countries.

The second big issue related to e-waste exportation is the aforementioned cyber crimes. Attempts of bank fraud and extortion of an American Congressman coming from Ghana (Siciliano, 2009) expanded the awareness of the final destination of developed countries e-waste. Ever for western citizens that do not care about the life of millions in Asia and Africa, the issue becomes startling when their own money and privacy start to be harassed.

Even though it looks like the exportation of e-waste is just a burden for poor countries, all too often, it becomes a mean of living for whole families (Umair et al., 2013). This issue turns a feasible solution to the problem much more complex than merely forbidding e-waste all over the world as decision from Basel Convention that lack the ratification of 17 countries to come into force internationally in a voluntary way (Li et al.