We think of globalization usually in terms of production--cars made in Japan or Korea, everything made in China. But there is a disposal side of globalization as well. The short useable life of electronics technology means that there are a lot of computers and other things that we are getting rid of all the time. (You can see this at the Wake County landfills.) We think of Silicon Valley USA as the exemplary place where electronics technology is developed; perhaps we should think of Agbogbloshie, Ghana as the worst-case example of how electronics are disposed of. Photographer Pieter Hugo has a series of photographs of this computer graveyard. He says that inhabitants of this area call this place Sodom and Gomorrah. Well meaning people from Europe and America donate old computers to Africa, thinking they will be used. But many of them end up in this graveyard, where people, working in unsafe conditions, strip them for their precious metals. Hugo provides some commentary on the situation, noting that the world generates 50 million tons of digital waste every year, only a quarter of which is properly disposed of.
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