At Agbogbloshie, young people scavenge for scrap metal amid the smoke from plastics fires. The health risks are obvious but the money is too good to ignore
The orange flesh of a papaya is like an oval gash in the landscape at Agbogbloshie, Ghana's vast dumping site for electronic waste, where everything is smeared and stained with mucky hues of brown and sooty black. A woman kneels among the carcasses of discarded computer monitors, scooping the fruit's flesh for workers hungry from a morning's work scavenging to eat.
If the appliances at Agbogbloshie were not being dismantled plucked of their tiny nuggets of copper and aluminium some of them could almost be technology antiques. Old VHS players, cassette recorders, sewing machines, computers from the 1980s and every period since lie haphazardly on large mounds in the dump, which stretches as far as the eye can see.