In the past year, Zimbabwean garage manager Amos Gwada has told over fifty desperate clients that the only way to deal with their old Japanese electric vehicles was to sell them for scrap.
“We have no knowledgeable EV mechanic around. I suggest we dismantle your car and only recover usable parts,” he told a client who comes in with a faulty Nissan Note hybrid sedan at his mechanical yard that hosts hundreds of technicians and associate car workers.
For decades, Japan has been shipping its used gasoline cars to southern Africa, selling them for as low as $2,000 per unit, displacing the American and European-made vehicles by creating a competitive market. But as gas prices rise and EVs become more popular, Japanese car manufacturers are now also shipping used EVs to the continent, especially as Japanese buyers turn down local brands in favor of foreign brands such as Tesla and Hyundai.
These used Japanese EVs have been attractive to African consumers due to the higher price points of American and European EVs. But the continent was not prepared for this influx of old, rusty electric vehicles that are already starting to end up in the region’s toxic, overfilled landfills, all because of a lack of specialized mechanics and recycling infrastructure networks in Zimbabwe and its neighboring countries, resulting in a failure to service the cars, keep them on the road longer and away from clogged landfills.
“I’m tired of not knowing what to do with old, rusty Japanese EVs shipped here,” Gwada says.
Africa is the world’s largest importer of used cars, importing about 33% of used light-duty vehicles globally, according to a 2024 report by the United Nations. That same report shows that Japan was the largest exporter of used light-duty vehicles, exporting 34.5% of the total used vehicles sold globally. In 2023, Japan exported more than 100,000 used cars to Africa, a process critics term as a “dumping” scheme that ended up creating a pollution and public health trap in Africa.
“This is deepening the pollution hazard, and making a mockery of local green-transition efforts.”
More than 46,000 of these used autos were reportedly imported to Zimbabwe in 2022. Luka Banda, auto dealer and former policy manager with the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority, says that around 5,000 of these cars were EVs, mostly hybrids.
“This is deepening the pollution hazard, and making a mockery of local green-transition efforts,” says Shamiso Mupara, a public health environmentalist and recycling expert.
“Our township landfills are filled with batteries and other sophisticated elements from discarded EV cars, spewing toxic chemicals, because we don’t know how to recycle their parts, nor have the machinery or skill to do so,” Gwada says.
Due to a lack of political will and absence of specialist engineering skills, Zimbabwe’s landfills are on a trajectory to become deadlier, especially with the caustic, toxic materials from EVs added into the mix. The Pomona landfill in Harare has already been subject to mismanagement and the resulting fires have caused fatalities, especially during a major incident in 2013 that released noxious fumes for several days.
Many urban landfills across southern Africa face the fate of the Pomona landfill as they are already overfilled and bursting, experts warn, and creating new landfill sites can be a difficult and slow process. Discarded solar equipment from China, old clothes, industrial hazards, and household waste have overwhelmed landfills in a region where recycling infrastructure is vastly underdeveloped compared to regions such as Japan, the United States, and the European Union.
In Harare, where Gwada works as a mechanic, overfilled landfills and waste management have gained a status of “disaster” in 2013, followed by chaotic efforts to remove 20,000 tons of excess waste from existing landfills in 2024.
“The increasing avalanche of used Japanese EVs, apart from high-emission Japanese gasoline autos, is causing all sorts of problems emanating from landfills. It’s the poor who will pay a deadly price,” says Kuda Moyana, a former councilor in Mbare, the biggest slum township in Harare.
Plastics from old EV car parts often contain toxic additives such as phthalates, polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) and bisphenol A, as well as flame retardants such as antimony trioxide, he says. Chemicals like PFAS are termed as “forever” chemicals because of how long they pervade the environment. These forever chemicals are seeping into underground water aquifers, suburban sewage drains and soil, which makes them dangerous to humans and animals in both urban and rural areas.
An EV car waste crisis will eventually emerge across the region, says Tawanda Chitiyo, founder of Tawanda Energy, a Zimbabwean startup that is exploring ways to locally manufacture cheaper photovoltaic equipment for solar panels.
“It is a matter of time. The lack of planning is causing chaos to accompany the emergence of Japanese EVs in southern Africa,” he says.
This is also a headache in neighboring South Africa, where the grim reality of the EV situation became clear last year when a business council leader said he wanted to expel thousands of used cars — mostly of Japanese brands such as Toyota, Nissan, Honda, or Suzuki — which he says have been illegally shipped onto its territory by exporters.
The continent’s wealthiest country, South Africa’s chaotic and overfilled landfills have been designated a “full-blown crisis,” with auditors warning that 86% of the nation’s landfills “did not even meet the minimum requirements for responsible waste management.”
“I don’t know how Japanese exporters don’t even feel shame doubling down on shipping old EVs and gasoline cars to severely poor countries that can’t recycle the mess,” Tapuwa Nhachi, an activist and former environmental researcher with the Centre for Natural Resources Governance.
Japan’s aggressive exportation of used autos to poorer African nations may seem positive, given that African residents can’t afford expensive EVs. Japan has also recently pledged $150 million in concession finance to South Africa to help decarbonize its energy grid, which includes numerous finance deals by the state-owned Japan Bank for International Cooperation in 2023. Yet beneath the “goodwill” of clean energy and mobility lies a hypocritical approach towards climate action, Nhachi says.
The used EV cars being shipped to Africa end up in landfills because they no longer meet the basic environmental safety and rehabilitation standards in Japan or in the West, says Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions. “It’s a stink, it’s a shame,” he says.
The Japanese embassy in Zimbabwe and trade committees in Zimbabwe and South Africa did not respond to requests for comment.
On paper, South Africa strictly bans old cars from Asia, says Dennis Juru, leader of the South Africa International Cross Border Traders Association. When such cars arrive in South Africa’s ports, they are not supposed to be driven or sold within the territory.
However, Juru says that bad actors have used innovative methods to bring cars to South Africa illegally. They smuggle such cars to neighboring countries, register them there, and then smuggle them back into South Africa to resell on the black market.
These illegally-smuggled cars threaten the livelihoods of those South Africans who manufacture about 700,000 new vehicles locally, says Sikanyiso Ndlovu, an automobile statistics manager at a state agency in South Africa. Large brands such as Kia, BMW, Chevrolet, and Toyota have plants that employ over 120,000 employees, he says.
“Used Japanese EVs – which are part of the illegal scheme of old car imports do gobble 8 Billion rand (equivalent to USD 433 million) in losses to the country’s domestic revenue purse,” Ndlovu says.
