Bloomberg New Economy
The Surprisingly Lucrative Business of Recycled E-Waste
In Nigeria and elsewhere, entrepreneurs are making money by dismantling electronics—and sending valuable metals back to the developed world.
E-waste at a scrapyard in Lagos.
Photographer: Irene Galan/UNEP
In Lagos, Nigeria, Tijjani Abubakar runs a surprising, and lucrative, business: He sells trash from one of the world’s poorest countries to some of its wealthiest.
Abubakar’s warren of workspaces, in a dingy concrete building near a sprawling electronics market, is a charnel house of dead cellphones. Workers armed with screwdrivers and hammers remove mobiles from plastic sacks and crack them open like walnuts. Their practiced fingers pull out the printed green circuit boards inside, then toss them into heaps at their feet.