The big chill: How Africa is moving to battle 'zombie' appliances

www.reuters.com...< br />
So Europe is selling old appliances, mostly refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners, to Africa, whose residents relish cooling devices and want to improve their quality of life.
so what's the problem?

unfortunately, lots of them are nonworking junk.

A 2018 United Nations-backed analysis of 60,000 metric tons of used electrical equipment imported into Nigeria, most of it from Europe, found that at least a quarter of it was not functioning, much of it refrigerators and air conditioners.

or almost junk

“They come in branded as new, but when they’re off-loaded it’s mostly near-end-of-life e-waste,” said Leslie Adogame, executive director of SRADev, a Nigerian nonprofit environmental health research group.

the old appliances suck electricity

Because many of the used cooling devices use two to three times more electricity than new models, they stress already overburdened electricity grids, government officials said.

and there are environmental issues with coolants etc

Many of them also use outdated chemical refrigerants that are potent contributors to climate change. And because many don’t work for long, they add to the already prodigious electronic waste dumps across Africa.

sad that there are always some lowlifes willing to take advantage of the poor and desperate.
hopefully the countries involved will better screen the exports, especially the nonfunctioning stuff.

can you imagine taking a container of used ACs and plugging them in one at a time to test? no thanks.

I certainly don't blame the Africans for wanting to improve their quality of life. I can't imagine not having air conditioning in the Eastern USA.

anyone with any magic solutions to monitor these exported appliances?

a reply to: ElGoobero

There is no way to stop this, same as those giant ship graveyards.

All the trash needs to be taken somewhere, these places are the unfortunate ones.

a reply to: ElGoobero

This story reminds me of when I used to go to flea markets. One such market was a week end affair that utilized a three screen drive in theater. I used to find lots of good stuff there but it went down hill. Over time the theaters went out of business and the owners just rented out slots of space during the day.

My last time visiting that ''market'' what I found was a very low grade of stuff being bought and sold. To me, junk mostly. Stuff I would have taken to the city land fill. But here there was a thriving market of hundreds of stalls where poor people were selling used junk to the destitute.

a reply to: ElGoobero

I thought that Obama said they couldn't have Ac's and friges. How dare they go against his hindness.

and actual zombies, from time to time.

a reply to: ElGoobero


"
can you imagine taking a container of used ACs and plugging them in one at a time to test? no thanks
"

Can you imagine running a program to collect containers full of second hand AC units and not test them before shipping them?
If I had to guess, someone made a lot of money moving this garbage out of one place and into another.
Why?
Because it's a "program", tax funded.
The salaries of the idiots who made this could have paid for factory new equipment, but that doesn't make the real crooks more rich...

a reply to: TerryMcGuire

national city drive in and swapmeet