Sensors deployed across Greater Accra have recorded particulate matter 2.5 concentrations above the WHO guideline of 15 micrograms per cubic metre on almost every single day in Agbogbloshie through 2024 and 2025 — and the daily average at the 20-acre scrap site exceeds both the WHO annual average and Ghana's own EPA standard of 35 micrograms per cubic metre over 24 hours.

Those readings come from the BREATHE Accra project, implemented in November 2022 under the Ghana Urban Air Quality Project, established in May 2019 and funded by the Clean Air Fund. Low-cost monitoring sensors operate across 13 districts in Greater Accra; Agbogbloshie has one. Data Manager Patrick Attey-Yeboah says the numbers have not moved in years.

"Among all the districts and areas we've been monitoring so far, we've realised Agbogbloshie has been the most notorious — the numbers have not changed over the last few years; 2024, 2025, the trend has been the same," Attey-Yeboah said. "We've had almost every single day above the WHO 15 micrograms per cubic metre; we've had the annual average also above the WHO average and even the Ghana EPA standard."

His attribution is specific: informal e-waste recycling is a major contributor to pollution in Agbogbloshie and neighbouring Old Fadama, alongside idling delivery trucks, pre-dawn waste burning by market traders and solid-fuel domestic and commercial cooking.

The copper economics that drive the burning

The material stream at Agbogbloshie, sited on the banks of the Korle Lagoon less than a kilometre from Accra's central business district, converges on one commodity: copper. Scrap dealers — many of them migrants from northern Ghana — collect cables and goods from across the country, smash and sort them, then hand the stripped cable to groups known locally as the Burner Boys, who torch the insulation in the open to release the metal.

The price spread explains the practice. "If all these cables are copper, you can make GH¢300 or GH¢400, but you won't get even GH¢10 from other metals," one dealer, Ibrahim, told 3News, which conducted the monitoring as part of a documentary, 'Toxic Smoke, Fragile Lives', premiering on TV3 Ghana on 4 October 2026.

Burning releases lead and mercury into the air, with exposure concentrated on workers and residents in Agbogbloshie, Old Fadama and Abbosey Okai — an exposed population of more than 80,000 people.

The occupational toll is documented in the workers' own accounts. Mohammed Sofo, a burner, said doctors advise masks and warn the smoke affects the heart, causing chest pains and coughs. Rahim, who described himself as chief burner boy and has done the work for over 20 years, said heat exposure weakens the body. Both a fatality and a serious injury from exploding airbag units — triggered by sodium azide — were recounted by workers within recent months.

Regulatory response and the collection centre

The Environmental Protection Authority is the lead body on air quality. Larry Kotoe, Director of Sustainability and Circular Economy at the EPA, says an operating collection centre at Agbogbloshie now receives cables from the informal sector at requested prices and has accumulated thousands of tonnes of material — reducing, but not eliminating, open burning.

"It is not 100% because you will still find some recalcitrant individuals still burning," Kotoe said. "If you're a company that is receiving some of these items and you want to buy from those sources, that means you are patronising the burning of these cables. The law will deal with you; so we're putting in some of those measures."

On inbound flows, Kotoe said organised dumping of the kind seen roughly 20 years ago has largely ended because the Basel Convention's notification process blocks waste shipments without a designated recycling facility. Current arrivals are characterised as personal effects.

Formalised cable processing existed previously on the site: dealer Issah Kwaku said cables were once sold to a company with formal copper extraction capacity, with material exported to China, the United Arab Emirates, India, Russia and other markets.

Public health burden

Florence Kuukyi, Director of Public Health at the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, links rising cardiovascular and upper respiratory disease directly to air quality, citing burial permits as a proxy. "About 80% of the burial permits that are brought, when you look at the cause of death, it's either upper respiratory disease or cardiovascular diseases," she said. She identified the elderly, children under five and pregnant women as highest-risk groups, and said enforcement is now producing arrests, fines and convictions for waste burning, supported by education sessions with transport operators, the e-waste association and market women.

Globally, the WHO estimates 62 million tonnes of e-waste are discarded annually, with less than a quarter recycled formally. A 2024 UNITAR study put the share not formally collected or recycled at 77.7%. WHO attributes around seven million deaths a year to outdoor and household air pollution, nearly one million of them in Africa.

The next test is whether the EPA's collection-centre volumes and Accra's enforcement actions show up in the sensor data. Attey-Yeboah's assessment is blunt: active policies are needed to address the crisis — and on the current monitoring record, nothing in Agbogbloshie's PM2.5 trend has yet turned.