Dell leaders have joined members of the E-Waste Solutions Alliance for Africa in Nairobi to mark the opening of East Africa Compliant Recycling – the region’s first large-scale e-waste recycling facility – and the creation of a new e-waste business to be supported by a regulatory model tailored for developing countries.
The new regulatory model was developed by Kenyan officials and representatives from non-governmental organisations as well as the IT and e-recycling industries. The hub was designed by industry, in collaboration with policymakers.
Developing regulations from Kenya’s National Environment Management Authority will help generate capacity for the new e-waste hub by requiring electronics companies to meet certain thresholds for e-waste collection and treatment.
Underscoring the regulatory framework is the recognition that, particularly in developing countries, e-waste has monetary value. That value, combined with the lack of a sustainable e-waste recycling infrastructure in East Africa, likely would have abated the effectiveness of common regulatory approaches to funding and managing e-waste collection and recycling, such as import fees.
Those means could also make computing less affordable for Kenyan citizens and public and private-sector organisations.
Other African nations have monitored the development of new regulatory model, with a view to replicating the approach.
At the heart of the business model are shipping container-housed collection points located throughout Kenya. Each collection point functions as its own independent small businesses, purchasing e-waste from newly-trained individual collectors. To date, four collection points have been established – two funded by Dell – with at least 40 more planned.
Once a shipping container is filled to capacity, its contents are resold to the main hub where the e-waste will be sustainably processed into material fractions and sold back to the technology industry. Each stage of the model is designed to be profitable for participants, from individual collector to collection point to hub.
In addition to protecting the environment, the model is aimed at creating thousands of green jobs at the facility and across supporting logistics and collection networks, in part by converting existing informal-sector e-waste “pickers” into trained and legitimately-compensated e-waste collectors. Dell and others have invested in training programs to educate workers on the safe collection and recycling of e-waste.
A separate Dell-sponsored project launched last month already has micro financed and created jobs for 27 women from Nairobi’s Mukuru informal settlement.
Following the satisfactory completion of a training course, women use funds made available through mobile technology to purchase and resell waste. In its first two weeks, women participating in the Dell-Mukuru collected 1.5 containers of e-waste, which was resold to the new recycling hub.
