The Score Card Approach Method of Evaluation of Public Awareness About E-Waste Hazards in Lagos State


 This study was carried out to evaluate the level of awareness of Lagos State residents about e-waste health hazards. Data were collected through the distribution of 424 well-structured and Likert scaled questionnaire with respondents selected based on the proportionate sampling. Unlike the common categorisation of awareness level as either Low or High based on the independent variables like age, sex, educational qualifications; and dependent variables like regulations, mode of disposal of e-wastes, information sources etc, this study adopted the scorecard approach to determine the awareness level in its totality and specific term as either Very Low - 1 or Low - 2 or Moderate - 3 or High - 4 or Very High - 5 in order of categorisation. On the final analysis, the result revealed a score of '2' which implies that the level of awareness is Low. Significance tests were also carried out to examine if any significant differences exist among the respondents based on their gender, age and educational level with respect to the hazardous elements contain in e-waste. The study revealed that statistically, no significant difference exists between the awareness levels of male and female regarding e-waste hazards; no statistically significant difference exists between the awareness levels of respondents about e-waste hazards based on their educational qualifications but there was a statistically significant difference between respondents' ages regarding e-waste hazards.


Introduction:
There are a number of challenges militating against e-waste management in Lagos State, Nigeria.
They include lack of culture regarding the sorting and separation of e-waste from other wastes; inadequate measures to checkmate cross-boundary transportation of e-waste; deficient national regulation or weak enforcement of the regulations even where they exist; inadequate technical capacity for environmentally sound management; no interface between informal sector and regulatory authority; and poor corporate social responsibility by the industry (Fagbohun, 2011;Tansel, 2017, About 53,600 mt e-wastes comprising 860,000 computers, 530,000 printers, 900,000 monitors and 480,000 television sets are dumped, annually, at Lagos State landfills; hence the initiative of Lagos State Government to put in place the Lagos State E-waste Management Policy (LASEPA, 2011). Key provisions in the draft policy include, promoting capacity building through public awareness efforts, education, training, promoting research; and observations through monitoring, detection, attribution and even model prediction to guarantee the management of e waste in an environmentally sound manner The assertion is also in tandem with the study of Senophiyah and Meenambal (2015) which reported that the lack of awareness on how e-waste should be disposed and inadequate policies to handle general issues relating to e-waste contributed to the problem in India. Likewise, in the USA, about 67% of the populace is unaware of restrictions on the disposal of e-waste in the USA (Ogunseitan et al., 2009).
However, in Lagos, Nigeria; e-wastes recycling have been a source of economic benefit to many unskilled workers who play prominent roles in activities surrounding e-waste collection and recycling. But, the crude or substandard or backyard methods of recycling being used by the unskilled workers are not only environmentally un-friendly, they can also cause severe damage to people's health (Balde et al. (2015). All these contravene the provisions of the "National Environmental (Electrical/Electronic Sector) Regulations, 2011"; the enforcement or implementation of which is yet below sea level ( Okoye and Chijioke Odoh, 2014). Hence, there is an urgent need to ascertain the peoples' level of awareness about e-waste hazards; whether the awareness is based on gender, age and educational qualification of the people. The level of awareness of the people could also be an indicator of their concerns for their immediate environment.

Methodology:
The study adopted the approach of Shabe et al., (2017) to evaluate the public level of awareness about e-waste. A total of 424 questionnaire were distributed with respondents selected based on the proportionate sampling method. The questionnaire was constructed in Likert scale and ranking for the items in the manner of "Strongly agree = 4", "Agree = 3", "Disagree = 2", and "Strongly disagree = 1". To make it easy for respondents to answer the close ended structured questions appropriately, they were instructed to tick one of the provided multiple-choice options.. The sample covers people with different background including age, educational level, gender, level of income and location of residency. The questionnaires were distributed to respondents through random sampling, based on the Proportionate Allocation Scheme (Chawla and Sondhi, 2011;Levey and Lemeshow, 2008). The proportional sampling was adopted to reduce the bias in over representation. Thus, there is proportionality in the size of sample in each stratum or group and the population percentage of the group. The groups are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive by criteria of geographical locations (Akinade and Owolabi, 2014)  Moderate: 3 iv.
Very high: 5 The Frequency Tables for Awareness Rating as derived from the questionnaire are detailed in Table 1 (am).

Level of Awareness:
The result as shown in Table 2 indicates that the awareness level of residents about hazards in e-waste was LOW.

Research hypothesis on residents' level of awareness about e-waste hazards:
Significance tests were carried out to examine if any significant difference exist among the respondents gender, age and educational level and awareness level about the hazardous nature of e-waste.

Testing the Hypothesis, Ho:
There is no a statistically significant difference regarding awareness level of respondents' gender about the hazards in e-waste. Table 3, there was no a statistically significant difference regarding awareness level of respondents' gender about the hazards in e-waste (χ2 (1, N= 424) = 2.751, p = 0.097), with a mean rank of 208.34 for male respondents and 232.16 for female respondents.

Testing the Hypothesis, Ho:
There is no a statistically significant difference regarding awareness level of respondents' educational qualifications about the hazards in e-waste. Table 4, there was no a statistically significant difference regarding awareness level of respondents' educational qualifications about the hazards in e-waste (χ2 (

Testing the Hypothesis, Ho:
There is no a statistically significant difference regarding awareness level of respondents' age about the hazards in e-waste.  years, 45 -64 years and above 65 years). Also observable is the difference between the awareness levels of respondents in the age bracket, 25-44 years and those above 65 years which significant.

Result: As shown in
From the "Mean Difference (I-J)" column in Table 7, it can be observed that the awareness level significantly reduces with respondents' age. It can be concluded; therefore, that significant fraction of middle class population is still unaware of the health hazard of e-waste unlike those in adulthood (15-24 years) who have access to information through the internet and various social media. Increasing the efforts to further promote the level of awareness about e-waste health hazards among this age group will be of great benefit in the future to an effective e-waste management.

Summary of significance tests on respondents' awareness level about hazards in e-
waste: Table 7 shows the summary of results of hypotheses on respondents' awareness level about hazards in e-waste.

Conclusion
The awareness level of residents about the hazards of e-waste in general term and in order of categorization from Cat 1 -5 was found to be Cat 2 and therefore implies a low level of awareness. It means that the residents have just a little knowledge of the existence of e-waste hazards. The hypothesis test indicated that there was no statistically significant difference between the level of awareness of male and female regarding the hazardous elements in e-waste; and statistically, no significant difference between awareness levels of respondents about e-waste health hazards based on educational qualifications. However, there was a statistically significant difference between respondents' ages regarding e-waste and its hazardous elements. This difference could be attributed to the dichotomy of interest between the old generations and young generations to technologies.
Large scale education and awareness campaign programme to increase the awareness level among the people of Lagos State specifically towards e-waste sorting, economic opportunities in formal recycling and treatment programs, requirements in laws and regulations etc. Education and awareness-raising will, therefore, continue to be crucial to an effective and efficient e-waste management in Lagos State.