Dell announced it will join 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.
The facility will also create a new e-waste business to be supported by a regulatory model tailored for developing countries.
The new facility will create green jobs and implement a solution that deals with e-waste being generated both in Kenya and the greater East African Region, and providing environmentally sound management of e-waste collected.
The new regulatory model was developed by Kenyan officials and representatives from non-governmental organizations and 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 also could make computing less affordable for Kenyan citizens and public and private-sector organizations. Other African nations have monitored the development of the new regulatory model, with a view to replicating the approach.
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, the company said.
Last month, Dell also sponsored a project that helped micro finance and create jobs for for 27 women from Nairobi’s Mukuru informal settlement, known as the Mukuru slums. Women participating in the Dell-Mukuru collected 1.5 containers of e-waste, which was resold to the new recycling hub.