alt Hacker NewsI'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"
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There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.
The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.
The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.
The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.