E-Waste Recycling Reverses Typical Flow of Goods

In Lagos, Nigeria, Tijjani Abubakar runs a surprising, and lucrative, business: He sells trash from one of the world’s poorest countries to some of its wealthiest.

Abubakar’s warren of workspaces, in a dingy concrete building near a sprawling electronics market, is a charnel house of dead cellphones. Workers armed with screwdrivers and hammers remove mobiles from plastic sacks and crack them open like walnuts. Their practiced fingers pull out the printed green circuit boards inside, then toss them into heaps at their feet.

Abubakar’s warehouse in Lagos.

Photographer: Vince Beiser

The circuit boards hold minute amounts of copper, nickel, gold and other valuable metals. Retrieving those ...