What a waste

German photographer Kai Loffelbein captured the e-waste phenomena in this book with 117 photos from Abogbloshie, Ghana, New Delhi, India and Guiyu, China. Tons of this electronic waste is send to these countries and though there are no captions it looks like some of this waste, in particular TV sets, are checked to see if they are usable for sale in local markets.

The photos of Abogbloshie (a suburb of Accra) don't actually show much recycling of the valuable parts of e-waste, rather the locals seem to be scavenging through the rubbish to see what they might find. The Indian and Chinese photos show a much more practical approach to sorting through the electronic components, Chinese ladies are sitting at tables with lots of different small containers to hold the various parts. Several photos show the waste arriving in big sacks with no earlier separation of the contents, other photos show piles of the same components having been sorted and frequently just left in a factory yard.

There are two essays in the book and both suggest that the world cannot carry on producing such huge amounts of electronic waste but I thought the Chinese photos showed that it is possible to organise recycling though in a very crude way at the moment. I wonder if robots might do all this in the future?

These documentary photos are certainly a powerful reminder of the e-waste problem but without any captions the images tend to lose some credibility and it's left to the reader to make sense of each picture. This also applies to the book's twenty-four page loose insert. It has no text but some wonderful close-up photos, taken by Loffelbein, of circuit boards showing hundreds of tiny parts found in any of today's electrical products (the book's cover has one of these photos). The production of these circuit boards is done by robots.