A recent study by the University of Michigan has highlighted the serious health and environmental risks faced by informal electronic waste (e-waste) workers in Ghana. The research, led by Brandon Marc Finn, assistant research scientist at the School for Environment and Sustainability, focused on Agbogbloshie in Accra—one of the world’s largest informal e-waste sites.
According to United Nations data, approximately 62 million tons of e-waste are discarded globally each year. While recycling this waste can recover valuable materials like copper, aluminum, and lithium-ion batteries for use in global supply chains, less than a quarter is processed under regulated conditions. The majority is handled informally without protection or oversight. About 15% of global e-waste ends up in Ghana.
The team conducted 55 field interviews with residents of Agbogbloshie to understand what Finn calls the “informal paradox.” He explained that people engage in unregulated recycling work because it provides a livelihood but exposes them to significant long-term toxicity and causes extensive pollution.
“We have these long-term unequivocally dangerous social and environmental outcomes, but the paradox is that people are using this as perhaps the only way to earn money, or the only way to actually pursue upward socioeconomic mobility,” Finn said. “If circular economies rely on exploitation and exposure to toxicity, as our research shows, they cannot be assumed to be sustainable. We need minerals for the energy transition, but the integrity of their supply chains is just as important as the outcome of clean energy itself.”
Finn worked alongside Dimitris Gounaridis, a geospatial data scientist at SEAS, who collected two decades’ worth of data on population growth and air quality around Agbogbloshie. Gounaridis analyzed changes in population density alongside levels of PM2.5—a fine particulate matter produced largely from burning plastics during e-waste processing.
“We found a positive relationship between urbanization and particulate matter, which means that over the last decades, air pollution increased and so did the population,” Gounaridis said. “This relationship was most pronounced in Agbogbloshie, where people moved for work and were exposed to severe air pollution from open e-waste burning.”
The researchers noted that many workers are migrants from northern Ghana seeking economic opportunity due to poverty or conflict at home. Much of the imported e-waste arrives labeled as donations or usable electronics but is often unusable.
Finn emphasized that past attempts at regulating informal economies have either displaced workers through eviction or imposed barriers too high for entry into formal markets; some efforts have failed altogether by not intervening.
He suggests adopting hybrid approaches such as providing safer wire-stripping tools instead of burning plastics or creating central processing units with basic oversight measures. These could reduce health risks while allowing continued access to livelihoods.
“Interventions into the informal paradox, in Ghana and more broadly, are desperately needed,” Finn said. “However, the nature of these interventions is uncertain, and there are very real risks that policies that fail to understand these contexts and challenges worsen the outcomes for some of the world’s most vulnerable people.”
The findings appear in Urban Sustainability and received support from both U-M’s Graham Sustainability Institute and African Studies Center.
