Dozens of illegal shipments of old electronics — including televisions, DVD players and speakers — have been intercepted leaving Ireland over the past decade, with many destined for developing countries that are known dumping grounds for toxic e-waste.
A total of 47 shipments containing waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) have been stopped by authorities since 2013. Most of the illegal cargo was uncovered during inspections of second-hand vehicles headed to Africa, in which e-waste was added to containers as a “secondary component”.
Twenty-six shipments were later released after meeting compliance, but 21 were directed to be returned to their site of origin for recycling. They were prevented from leaving Ireland because the electronics were either damaged and not fit for reuse, did not have documentation certifying that they worked or were not packaged to prevent damage.
Experts said the scale of illegal e-waste shipments intercepted leaving Ireland was just the “tip of the iceberg”. They said the illicit trade was relatively low risk for criminals due to a combination of lax enforcement in the EU and weak regulations in recipient countries.
The findings come as Séamus Clancy, chief executive of Repak, a not-for-profit organisation leading Ireland’s recycling and packaging waste management, said last week that Ireland produced enough waste over the Christmas period to fill up to the first tier of Croke Park.
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The scourge of international e-waste smuggling is well documented, with mountains of discarded electronic goods piling up in developing countries. Electronic junk contains dangerous chemicals that can contaminate soil, water and air, causing serious health problems and environmental damage.
Europol has said that e-waste is emerging as a key commodity for organised crime groups operating in Europe, describing the trade as a “major criminal threat” rivalling drug trafficking in scale and profit. As the world’s fastest-growing domestic waste stream, the volume of global e-waste produced annually is forecast to reach 74 million tonnes by 2030.
The National TransFrontier Shipment Office (NTFSO) in Dublin city council, which is responsible for the enforcement and administration of waste shipment regulations, said tonnes of electronic waste had been intercepted at Dublin and Cork ports over the past ten years. Every container of hazardous waste that was turned around was destined for African countries including Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, Libya and Malawi.
The NTFSO has not prosecuted anyone over the illegal waste shipments but said it had imposed fees totalling €7,900 in respect of the exports that were prevented from leaving. The office said that due to the scale of exports intercepted it does not believe criminals are targeting shipments destined for Africa, saying those involved were mostly expats living in Ireland and citizens of the countries of destination. However it conceded that “a proportion will always ship undetected” because not all exports are inspected.
Nigeria, the destination of 13 shipments that were turned around over the past decade, is a hotspot for e-waste dumping. The UN has said that up to 100,000 people in the country are exposed to hazardous chemicals through their work processing discarded appliances.
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A study by researchers at the United Nations University and the Basel Convention Coordinating Centre for Africa found that more than a quarter of the 60,000 tonnes of electronic equipment imported into Nigeria in 2015 and 2016 was e-waste. Most of the second-hand electronics came from EU ports, including 6.2 per cent from Ireland.
Under the Basel Convention, it is illegal to ship hazardous waste secretly from the developed world to poorer countries. Working second-hand electronic goods can be exported and e-waste can be moved internationally for regulated processing and treatment.
Dr Kees Baldé, a researcher for the UN who monitors global e-waste movement, said that the people behind the smuggling operations were using more inventive techniques to avoid detection. This included mixing e-waste with second-hand electronics, loading e-waste in used cars or declaring cargo as personal goods.
“It’s a cat-and-mouse game and in most countries, including Ireland, what they seize is only the tip of the iceberg. It happens everywhere,” Baldé said, adding that prosecutions against illegal e-waste exporters in Europe were rare.
Baldé said there was strong compliance in WEEE recycling in Ireland, but that criminals working with a network of brokers could still exploit the system to smuggle e-waste out of the country. He said opportunistic exporters in the EU used online marketplaces and street collections to acquire cheap and free second-hand electronics. He said waste traders could also be involved in the illicit trade, owing to the lower cost of exporting electronics compared with recycling them.
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“The real value is in selling second-hand items but there is also a business case for dumping e-waste,” Baldé said. “If a certified recycling company has to get rid of laptops, it is cheaper to dump in Africa instead of sending them to a proper facility. And with the second-hand goods, after they are used in Africa, it still becomes e-waste.”
Dublin city council said there was “high compliance” by the waste industry with the shipment of WEEE and that most shipments are within Europe. It added that none of the shipments stopped leaving Ireland over the past ten years were being exported by companies in the waste or recycling industries.
A two-year investigation by the Basel Action Network (BAN), an American environmental campaign group, found electronic waste from government-approved takeback stations in European countries including Ireland was ending up overseas. The project used GPS devices hidden in broken electronic goods to trace e-waste from European recycling plants. One broken LCD screen that was deposited at a Limerick recycling centre was traced to a notorious electronic junk yard in Hong Kong, the 2019 report said.
Three out of the 24 electronic items tracked from Ireland were later found to have been exported overseas. BAN estimated that more than 350,000 tonnes of electronic waste is moving illegally from the EU to developing countries every year.
Gorazd Mesko, a criminology professor at Slovenia’s University of Maribor, said some countries with weak regulation had become “Europe’s dump yards” for dangerous waste. Mesko, who has researched transnational environmental crime, said the main motivation for exporting e-waste was profit, and that the problem was being driven by a consumer mentality to replace electronic goods rather than repair them.
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“The main problem is that these [recycling] processes, if done properly, are still much more expensive than dumping e-waste in Africa and Asia,” he said. Mesko added that a combination of preventative measures, more efficient law enforcement and harsher penalties were needed to crack down on e-waste smuggling out of the EU.
More than 50 million metric tonnes of e-waste is generated every year, according to the United Nations’ Global E-waste Monitor 2020, but only a fraction is collected and recycled. It said that $57 billion (€53 billion) worth of recoverable raw materials — such as iron, copper, gold, silver and platinum — were mostly dumped or burnt.
A record 64,856 tonnes of WEEE in Ireland was collected for treatment in 2020, according to the EPA, representing a collection rate of 60 per cent of all waste electronics. Most pre-treatment was carried out here and all e-waste was exported for the final treatment step. The EPA and the Department of the Environment referred questions about WEEE exports to the NTFSO.