Major disasters, such as the tsunami in the Indian Ocean ten years back, receive massive global attention. That a disaster gains more attention than ongoing issues is partly understandable. The news images often show people in shock and distress, while images of e-waste dumps usually show people who are 'used to' their situation. The latter will naturally have a less dramatic impact on the viewer, even though it should also be alarming that this is the daily life of many. In order to get attention to ongoing matters, we thus need to find a way to create awareness through knowledge. But what kind of 'knowledge'?
We can divide knowledge of an issue into three categories: extent, causes and consequences. Considering e-waste, we are getting a clearer picture of all three, but there are still gaps. In short, we have estimations of the extent while the causes can be traced back to rapid development in technology and poor (export/import) regulations on e-waste. However, some scholars claim that the third category, consequences, is most important for the public to react. This might explain the missing attention on e-waste. Toxic smoke from the current handling of e-waste in places such as Agbogbloshie surely has bad consequences for environment and health, but facts and numbers are unclear considering how many are affected and to which degree. If we draw the consequences further towards climate change, we move into another rather 'chaotic' discussion topic where the consequences (for instance of rising temperatures) are highly debated.
Most people would probably agree that e-waste deserves attention regardless of gaps in facts and numbers. Nevertheless, it will still be surrounded by all the other causes fighting for people’s attention. The question is how to stand out from the crowd as e-waste is a growing issue. To answer this I believe Ron Smit makes an important point in a former post on this site, namely that e-waste is both an issue and an opportunity. Perhaps the lack of knowledge about the issue is not the most important defect, but instead, the lack of knowledge about the opportunities. In that case the focus should be on more economic research on urban mining, or maybe even a few successful business examples could do the trick. By getting more (recycling) actors involved we might not be able to achieve desired awareness around the humanitarian and environmental challenges - but it might just be the attention we need to tackle the e-waste issue.