Study: The Informal Paradox: Electronic waste and the toxic circular economy in Ghana (DOI: 10.1038/s42949-025-00299-5)
A University of Michigan study found that people in Ghana and across the Global South who recycle electronic waste face a difficult paradox: earning livelihoods to ensure survival comes at the cost of severe long-term exposure to toxicity and dramatic environmental pollution.
Every year, the world throws out 62 million tons of electronic waste, or e-waste, according to the United Nations. E-waste recycling recovers important minerals for global supply, such as copper, aluminum and lithium-ion batteries. But less than a quarter of this e-waste is captured and recycled formally, or under regulated conditions. The majority of e-waste is recycled informally, without protection, regulation or registration with the state. About 15% of the world's e-waste is sent to Ghana.
A team led by Brandon Marc Finn, assistant research scientist at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, examined Agbogbloshie, a settlement that has sprung up near one of the world's biggest informal e-waste sites, located in Accra, Ghana. In a series of 55 field interviews in the settlement, Finn documented what he calls the "informal paradox." In this paradox, the unregulated recycling work done by e-waste workers compromises their health as well as the environment of the city.
Together with SEAS scientist Dimitris Gounaridis and University of Melbourne professor Patrick Cobbinah, Finn found that as more people moved to Agbogbloshie, air pollution in the form of particulate matter surrounding the settlement intensified, further endangering human and environmental health. The team's results are published in the journal Urban Sustainability and supported by grants from the Graham Sustainability Institute and the African Studies Center at U-M.
In Agbogbloshie, people recycle e-waste by burning plastic away from wires and electronics or use acid to leach valuable minerals from the e-waste. Particulate matter from these open pits settles over the region, while other pollutants from the refuse seep into the soil and nearby lagoon. The workers sell these extracted metals to local buyers, who in turn sell the minerals back into the global supply chain. These minerals are essential for our everyday energy needs, including for global decarbonization efforts.
People conduct informal e-waste work for rational reasons, Finn says. Many are migrants from the north of the country, which faces extreme poverty and conflict. E-waste reaches Ghana from across the Global North and parts of Africa, where old and often unusable electronics are mislabeled as charitable donations or usable electronic items.
"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 with Gounaridis, a geospatial data scientist at SEAS, to understand the scale of the challenge. Gounaridis examined the relationship between the growing population in and around Agbogbloshie and air pollution as represented by fine, inhalable particles in the air with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less, called PM 2.5. PM 2.5 in the region largely comes from the open burning of plastics.
Gounaridis gathered 20 years' worth of geospatial data about population changes, PM2.5 concentration levels and the footprints of 200,000 buildings surrounding Agbogbloshie.
"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," he 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.
This dynamic is closely intertwined, the researchers found: Urban population growth is driven by economic necessity, yet the presence and activity of e-waste workers further exacerbate the pollution they endure.
"The paper raises the broader question of how to regulate informal economies and settlements across the Global South," Finn said. "Previous efforts either alienate people from their housing and livelihood through brutal evictions or create inaccessible higher barriers to market entry, or they completely ignore the problems and fail to intervene at all."
Finn suggests a hybridized "middle ground" strategy in order to mitigate harms, provide financial and technical support, and reduce environmental pollution while still allowing people to seek shelter and create livelihoods for themselves, which are often only available through informal means. Such strategies could include providing people with wire-stripping tools so they can access copper from e-waste without burning it.
Finn also suggests having a central processing unit where people can recycle e-waste with some level of control. A governing center could also help increase transparency about who buys recycled materials and how they are reincorporated into the global supply, thereby strengthening safety measures around e-waste recycling.
"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."
