 Think about, you know, your smartphone or a laptop. Today, you know everything about it. Every chip in it, you know where it was produced. And then, you don't know anything anymore. E-waste happens because objects are no longer useful to us, so we throw them away. We exacerbate that problem by the fact the way we've engineered them and designed them makes it very difficult to take them apart, extract the useful materials, and reuse them. Out here, there are about 4,000 people plus working here. I long here about 15 years now. We found that most of them had elevated levels of heavy metals in their blood. I think not only Africa is dealing with this E-waste issue because electronic and electrical devices are part of our daily life. We simply can't provide these kinds of products for the seven, eight, nine billion people that will be on the planet in the future if we're throwing most of them away after they've been used for two or three years. Certainly, you cannot generalize them. When you think about E-waste, it's different if you think about an old CRT monitor, if you think about the modern and contemporary smartphone. But certainly, there's a lot of value. You can also get back from E-waste and, you know, that should be an incentive to recycle. I'm a professor at MIT where I run a place called Sensible City Lab and also a design office called Colorado Society. We started looking at this with a project we called Trash, right? It was a few years ago and we worked with a city of Seattle and put many electronic tags on to waste, to follow waste. You know, we followed banana peels, we followed all CRT monitors, computers, cartridges and so on. A lot of E-waste would end up at the borders of the United States and then we couldn't follow it anymore. The first day I got here, I was shocked. You see the kind of work people are doing. They cut themselves. They expose themselves to so many things. My name is Bennett Nanna Ekufu. I'm a project manager for Green Advocacy Ghana. So the boys here normally go around with trucks. They go to each home. If they come to my home, they will definitely buy a fridge for me. Then they'll bring you all the way here. They cut it into pieces. They get aluminum from the casing. They get copper from the motor found inside the fridge. So what they do is cut it with a hammer and a chisel. Then the cables found in them, they would burn to extract copper. Then what happens to the styrofoam? It is used as some kind of fuel. So if they need to process other kinds of metals, they will add a styrofoam and set it ablaze. With the soil, we all know it's highly contaminated and the levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic in the soil keep on rising. We did a health survey of people here. We found that most of them had elevator levels of heavy metals in their blood. Heavy metals is linked to cancer and other diseases. You know, this whole place is like a commercial district. You have people selling water, drinks, others working, others going around picking stuff from the floor. So it's a whole community on its own. Out here, there are about 4,000 people plus working here and most of them spend their whole day here. So a lot of them will be exposed. You know, most people see Abu Bloshi as a waste dump but it's a service they are rendering to ordinary guardians. Yes, it's bad but it's a service we need. If Abu Bloshi didn't exist, what would happen to our old vehicles, our old refrigerators, TV sets and all that? We've always had the mission and idea of trying to connect people to technology through design. Hi, I'm Tim Brown and I'm the CEO of the design company IDEO. Back in the early days when we started, we did things like the first mouse for the original Macintosh computer and the first laptop and the first automatic distributor. The complexity of the systems that support these products and services. We understand that so much better now, which is why we got interested in things like the circular economy and the need to think about products not only through their cycles of use but what happens to them afterwards. I am Vince Netibilta and I'm the Minister of Environment of the Republic of Rwanda. We were dealing with 10,000 tons of e-waste every year and we decided to put in place an e-waste dismantling and recycling plant which has the capacity to deal with these 10,000 tons every year. Today we wonder how recycling plant first of all refurbishing some computers so far it has refurbished 400 computers which have been distributed to schools but we are sending plastic parts, the plastic components to plastic recycling companies. We are sending the metal parts to steel industries but we are planning on a second phase to recover the precious metals which are part of these electronic devices. With the help of pure earth, a US based NGO, we decided to find a way of eliminating burning as a means of copper extraction so we set up this pilot site here with wire strippers and you see these holes where you push the cables through so these are the sizes of cables we can recycle and it does that within seconds when it's done so plastic goes one side the metal comes out the other side. When you bring your cable here it's clean, copper or aluminium which weighs more so the boys will tend to have a lot more money. It's caused by design and the solutions are a design problem. If we really are serious about the circular economy we want to close the loop. Create new notions of supply we don't need to use very many devices having certain components that have many lives and when we need to dispose them off we just make sure we dispose them off where there are facilities. We're still in love a little bit with the idea of beautiful products that we want to own but maybe that's not the right model for the future. It could be that we shouldn't be buying these products at all but we should be taking them as services so that the manufacturers have a real reason to take them back. We're going to have to be quite creative over the next few years in order to solve these problems.