From miles away great plumes of black acrid smoke mark the site of Sodom and Gomorrah, a sprawling slum on the outskirts of the Ghanaian capital, Accra.

As one edges closer to the world’s fastest-growing e-waste dumping site at Agbogbloshie, it is the smell that hits hardest. A blend of burning rubber and chemicals clogs the nostrils, stings the eyes and hangs at the back of the throat.

The dangerous trade in obsolete electronic products is being encouraged in part by Britain. The Times saw computers that had once been used in the offices of the Ministry of Defence, and workers claimed to have seen labels on the back of discarded PCs from several British companies.

An MoD spokeswoman said that obsolete computers had been sent to its Disposal Services Authority, which passed them on to Sims, one of its IT contractors. The computer identified in Ghana by its tag number T849 had been “sold to a British company for re-use”. The spokeswoman said that the MoD was trying to find out the name of the company, but added: “Where it goes once it’s in their hands is nothing to do with us.”

The waste stream from these products is termed “e-waste”. It is a vast and growing market, put by some estimates at 50 million tonnes a year. Much of it is dumped in Ghana and Nigeria, where without proper regulation or health controls pieces can be extracted and recycled by unemployed youths.

In a report last week the United Nations said that organised crime cartels, already active in drug smuggling in the region, were moving into the lucrative e-waste trade. The UN promised a co-ordinated approach in an attempt to keep it in check.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said: “Organised crime is attacking West Africa because of the intrinsic weaknesses of these countries — the result of poverty, the result of underdevelopment, the result of corruption.”

That underdevelopment is visible at the Agbogbloshie scrapyard. Scores of young boys, some as young as 5, join men in scouring over mounds of computers, televisions, monitor screens, fridges and microwaves.

Edwin Anagwe, who has worked at the site for three years, says that he has suffered from skin infections and often gets headaches, but he has no intention of giving up the work. “We are survivors, we have nothing else. We need this work. It is not pretty but there are some 5,000 people who work here.” Isaac Kojo, 5, says that he comes to the site every day. His clothes are blackened from the fumes of dozens of chemical fires. On his forehead he bears the scratches from a fight over a strand of copper wiring.

All the items contain small but valuable amounts of aluminium, copper, cadmium or other minerals. Many of the devices also contain material that, if handled incorrectly, becomes toxic, including lead at one hundred times above normal background levels. A popular method used by the children is to melt or burn the plastic coating around a computer or television’s internal wiring — a process that releases dangerous chemicals such as phthalates, which are known to damage sexual reproductive faculties, and cadmium and antimony, which have been found to contain chlorinated dioxins that can cause cancers.

“It is a highly dangerous and toxic environment,” said Kim Schoppink, toxics campaigner with Greenpeace. “What they don’t want is just discarded and left to seep into the earth and affect the water table and even enter the food chain.” Two nearby rivers, which even six years ago used to boast fish, were now dead.

Containers filled with old equipment from major brands such as Dell, Canon, Philips and Sony arrive at the port in Accra from Germany, Switzerland, Britain and Japan under the false label of “second-hand goods”.

Mike Anane, a local journalist, said that criminals were able to dodge Customs by falsifying documents to say that the goods being shipped were working.

“It is illegal to export e-waste under international agreements, but it is not illegal to export old electronics for re-use. This allows unscrupulous traders to exploit the loophole,” he said.

“Working computers, phones and the like can be useful in developing countries, but this is not what is happening. Instead they are creating pollution due to the high levels of toxic chemicals they contain.”

Even in the European Union, which has some of the most stringent controls, an estimated 75 per cent of e-waste is unaccounted for. Most of this, an estimated 8.5 million tonnes a year, is believed to be finding its way to unofficial dumps in West Africa.

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