Recycling our waste electrical items is a dirty job, and those who do it are among the poorest and least educated in the world.


The crude break-up of electrical items can cause heavy metals such as lead and mercury to leak into the soil and the water table - where they are taken up by plants, ingested by animals, and, eventually, accumulate in humans. Even when electronic equipment is certified as safe for reuse and exported legally, the thousands of manual workers who dismantle it are still unlikely to have had any training in how to handle it safely.

This challenge has been taken up by Professor Oladele Osibanjo, director of the Basel Convention Coordinating Centre for Training and Technology Transfer for the African Region. In looking for suitable flexible and accessible learning materials, Osibanjo, based in Lagos, Nigeria, is using eLearning materials created by Learning Light in combination with face-to-face workshops led by Dr Margaret Bates from Northampton University's Centre for Sustainable Wastes Management.

Learning Light focuses on promoting the use of eLearning and learning technologies, initially developed these learning materials for use among prisoners in the UK - allowing them to learn a skill and gain a nationally recognised qualification and thus reduce the chance of recidivism.

Covering various aspects of waste recycling operations, the Learning Light eLearning programmes deal with disassembling electrical equipment - from sewing machines to LCD televisions - in the most environmentally friendly way and concentrate on the requirements of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE Directive).

Those who complete these eLearning programmes have the knowledge and skills to disassemble electrical equipment - such as old personal computers - and it break down into its constituent parts. These parts can then be recycled and, depending on the costs of copper, plastic and so on, can produce an income for the "disassembler".

In the UK, the Learning Light course leads to an NVQ. In Nigeria, the course is being developed to lead to a formal Nigerian qualification for people who might never even have finished school.