The Toxic Cost of the Philippines’ Growing E-Waste Crisis
A similar version of this article was published in Spanish by Planeta Futuro, EL PAÍS.
MANILA – On a stormy day in May, trucks carrying large containers from Manila port dashed along Tondo’s main street. The rain made the already congested street even busier, with traffic leaving little space for an army of informal workers dismantling electronic items on the pavement.
Crouched beside shops and homes, these workers — young and old — carefully tear apart air conditioners (ACs), televisions, and other electronics with hammers, often barehanded.
Felipe Parco, 64, one of the many informal workers in Manila, was pushed into this work after he lost his home to a fire in 2017. Day after day, he knocks on neighborhood doors to collect discarded electronic items, filling his small room to the brim. He works in a toxic environment, with no protective gear and little recognition from the government. Yet, workers like him help keep tonnes of discarded electronics from ending up in Manila’s landfills.
In a country of almost 120 million inhabitants, there are only 28 formal facilities where e-waste can be disposed of safely, as per a report cited by BAN Toxics, a local NGO advocating for environmental justice and workers’ rights. With an annual generation of 540,000 metric tonnes of e-waste — the equivalent of 180,000 Asian elephants — the work of these informal dismantlers becomes ever more important.
Like many informal workers, Parco didn’t finish school, making it difficult to find an alternative livelihood. “I continue with this kind of livelihood because if you don’t work, you will have nothing to eat,” he says. Parco removes sought-after metals such as aluminium, copper and lead from discarded electronics and sells them to the next player in the recycling chain — locally known as junk shops.
“I don’t want to be excessively rich. I can’t take that with me when I die anyway. If life becomes easier, that’s enough for me. Just a little money for everyday food and household expenses.”
‘You Are Spreading Poison’
Climate change has increased the number of days when Manila experiences extreme heat (above 35 degrees Celsius) by over 250% since 1994. As the heat rises and the country's middle class grows, so does the use of ACs. Annual AC sales have risen from 700,000 units sold in 2016 to 4 million in 2025, making them one of the most commonly dismantled electronic items in Tondo. The market is expected to double over the next 10 years, further increasing the e-waste problem.
“The informal e-waste industry has steadily grown over the past years,” says Jashaf Samir Lorenzo, deputy executive director at BAN Toxics. “It’s growing mainly because formal recycling options are scarce and financial struggles push people into informal waste collection.”
The informal sector also makes it easy for households to cash in on their recyclables. Though the sector handles up to 80% of the e-waste processed in the country, laws on hazardous waste and planned institutional mechanisms for solid waste management make informal dismantling unauthorized.
Sammy Espinosa, who has been dismantling e-waste for over 20 years, lives in a tiny room with six other members of his family, including his daughter and grandchildren. The 55-year-old uses the remaining small space to store the electronic objects he collects from people's houses.
“The government’s answer to us is: ‘Your work is prohibited, you are spreading poison, dirt [and] trash.’ That’s how the government sees it, but they don’t look at the contribution of the scrap pickers,” says Espinosa, who is also a member of the Association of Scrap Traders in Capulong, the main street where dismantlers work in Tondo. “There are already so many [people] without jobs; are they going to add us to that?”
Though there’s a government department addressing the informal sector, formalizing will require a shared facility, proper training, proper equipment, and the like, according to Lara Ortega-Ibañez, country director at Pure Earth, a global organization advocating for public health in developing countries. She has attended many meetings as part of the government’s formalization efforts. “Informal dismantlers can work according to their [convenience]. With the traders having their own clients, there’s some competition also at play. So it has to be worked out by all the stakeholders concerned,” she says.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources, the Philippine government agency responsible for the country’s environment and natural resources, did not respond to an e-mail sent by The Xylom with questions on informal dismantling and the health issues among workers before the publication of this story.
The Health Impact
Roldan Taganas, 53, became an e-waste worker more than two decades ago after his construction employer repeatedly failed to pay him. “Sometimes 500 Philippine pesos [$8], sometimes nothing at all,” he recalls.
But this work comes with serious risks. Workers break apart electronic items with hammers to extract valuable metals, often with no protective equipment, releasing a toxic cocktail of pollutants such as lead, mercury, or cadmium onto them and the surrounding environment.
Lynn Panganiban, a clinical toxicologist at Pure Earth, says lead can stay in the body for up to 20 years. “It will take quite a while depending on the metal that we’re talking about,” she says. “When you talk about arsenic, it stays [for] a very short while, just for days or weeks, but the effect of arsenic is cancer in the long run.” Other enduring health issues associated with e-waste include neurological damage, kidney issues, and obesity, among others.
Taganas has developed a chronic cough from inhaling toxic chemicals. Workers also face physical hazards, including sharp objects and flammable materials. “I’ve had many wounds on my hands. Once, when we were collecting a large volume of appliances in Cavite [an industrial province near Manila], a fire extinguisher suddenly exploded. It led to a fracture in my leg, and I had to rest for about a year till it healed,” says Taganas.
The risks are not confined to informal workers. Pregnant women and children are particularly vulnerable to the irreversible effects of toxic exposure.
“When the male e-waste workers bring their children to their workplaces, that's one way of exposure,” explains Ortega-Ibañez. “The other one would be that their clothes are not washed separately, or the tools are not kept properly or even cleaned regularly.”
A local health centre in the neighbourhood providing assistance to e-waste workers did not respond to The Xylom’s email queries on the kind of health problems among dismantlers. The Xylom was unable to obtain any government data or study on health impacts.
For about a year, Panganiban has been testing blood samples of these workers and their families to understand the effects of e-waste dismantling on the wider community, especially women and children. “Heavy metals pass through the placenta and can affect the developing foetus. So when the child is born, he has already been exposed to these heavy metals. In our study, we observed a relationship between the blood lead level of the adult male worker and that of his child,” explains Panganiban.
Lax Rules Come in Handy
Electronic waste exports are added to domestic waste. The Philippines is one of the destinations in Southeast Asia for e-waste shipments from North America, which exports around 430,000 metric tons of electronic garbage. Of this total, 325,000 correspond to uncontrolled shipments of used equipment or e-waste exported primarily to Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central America, and South America.
Additionally, since 1989, the Philippines has been a signatory to the Basel Convention, an international treaty that regulates the transboundary movement of hazardous waste. According to the convention, international e-waste shipments must be properly declared by the sending country, and the authorities of the destination country must grant formal consent, in addition to having adequate facilities to dispose of the electronic devices safely.
Most e-waste exports to the Philippines don't meet any of these conditions.
Despite the negative effects on public health and strict international agreements, the country continues to receive shipments of e-waste from the Global North, especially from the United States. In July, Philippine port authorities prevented several containers supposedly transporting U.S. electronic waste from being unloaded at the port of Subic. In late August, another suspicious cargo coming from the U.S. was intercepted. This adds to warnings issued this summer by the organization BAN Toxics regarding the potential arrival in the country of about 184 suspicious containers between August and September 30.
As the dismantlers on the main street carry on with their work, unmindful of the passing trucks and unaware of the toxins they handle, Espinosa says, “Our job is to dismantle and send it to the junk shop. We don’t think about what is inside the electronic waste or how it affects our health.”
(Cassandra Dela Torre contributed to this report)
