Engineer turned social entrepreneur Sabri Cheriha hunches over a washing machine at a small depot in a suburb of Tunisia’s capital, the unassuming home of a startup he launched to tackle the country’s mounting electronic waste problem.
Sabri said about eight million household appliances and nine million cellphones are currently in use across Tunisia. Still, once these devices break down or are replaced, “there’s no service to dispose of them properly.”
WeFix, the startup that won him a second-place regional social entrepreneur award last year, stands out by offering an “all-in-one service,” providing collection, repairs and recycling to reduce e-waste.
The aim is to have “an environmental and social impact, but also an economic gain,” Sabri said, adding that refurbished products can be up to 60 percent cheaper in a country where the average monthly salary is around 1,000 dinars ($310).
The startup “avoided” 20 tonnes of waste in 2023 and 80 tonnes last year, according to its founder, who anticipates handling another 120 tonnes this year.
“When we talk about ‘avoided waste’, we’re also considering the resources needed to manufacture a single washing machine — 50 or 60 kilos of finished product require over a tonne of raw materials,” he explained.
“So our environmental impact is twofold.”
While Tunisia has vowed to tackle waste in general, e-waste presents a particular challenge, and there is a lack of institutional avenues for dealing with it.
Tunisia produces an estimated 140,000 tonnes of e-waste per year, said Walid Merdassi, a waste management expert.
The majority of that — an estimated 80,000 tonnes per year — is generated by households, which have no official recycling system to turn to, he added.
Walid said the government should require manufacturers and retailers to take back used machines, and encourage the 13 local companies specialised in recycling to extract and export valuable raw materials like gold, copper and platinum from the devices they process.
In the meantime, WeFix is making strides at its own pace, reducing Tunisian e-waste by promoting the sale of refurbished appliances instead of buying new, Sabri said.
He eventually hopes to expand WeFix to Morocco, despite the challenges of scaling up nationally, Sabri said.
“Finding skilled workers in the electronics sector is becoming increasingly difficult,” as many emigrate to Europe where demand for refurbished appliances is high, he said.
Tunisia has previously faced threatening concerns with expired landfill sites, damaging the health of communities and the environment. The waste crisis in the Sfax governorate witnessed around 30,000 tons of waste piled up in the streets as a result of the closure of the Aguereb landfill, mirroring a crisis in official landfill sites across the country.Â
Official statistics showed that Tunisia annually produces more than 2.6 million tons of household waste, which is dumped in 11 official landfills, managed by three private companies. There are no official figures available on the number of unofficial dumps in various regions of the country near residential areas in the depths of the Tunisian suburbs and in the countryside.
The annual volume of toxic waste in Tunisia has previously exceeded 6.5 million tons and is disposed of in various ways in the face of the state’s inability to treat it. The Court of Audit statistics estimated that 142,000 tons of hazardous waste are being dumped in unofficial sites annually, without regard for the environmental damage or the cost of its removal, which is estimated at 670 million Tunisian dinars annually.
