How China Kicked Our Asses in Africa

Photo and post inspired from London School of Economics Africa Blog, 
Africa and China: How it all began



What I'm doing with Fair Trade Recycling is perfect.  It's appropriate technology, it gives Africans affordable internet, and the repair jobs which pay too little to do in the USA create 10 times the per hour wages for Africa.  It's the "tinkerer blessing", the opposite of the Resource Curse.

Thanks for the Business, Uncle Sam
It seeds and creates and pays for an appropriate technology recycling system.  While only 15% of imports of used equipment are bad (Wal-Mart returns are 11%), paying for the proper disassembly and recycling of incidental breakage, elective upgraded parts, etc. creates a recycling infrastructure.

In Retroworks de Mexico, that creates a "computers for clunkers" trade in program where the ones they refurbish for resale can be exchanged for the domestic-generated e-waste.  That's the system already in Africa, people trade in the ten year old ones for more recently imported and upgraded, which is the link between the importers and Agbogbloshie.  BAN and Greenpeace and Interpol would have known this if they'd given Souleymane, Wahab, Hamdy, Somda or Miguel the courtesy of a discussion rather than just profile them as "waste tourists".

USA would be smart to be selling the repair and working display devices etc. to Africa.  We create more income and more jobs through reuse.  We cannot afford to have an idiotic 48 cent per pound California-destroy-all SB20 system.

USA has former Peace Corps volunteers like me, African immigrants like Wahab and Souleymane, and a history as a melting pot which our biggest competitors - China, Japan and South Korea - didn't have.



Jim Puckett and Allen Hershkowitz, the Ayatollah and the Accidental Racist, are screwing this up.  They are telling Americans "I have been there" to describe 6 billion people, and they are circulating photos of little kids with wires posed on their heads, picking up Chinese toddlers and placing their butts on piles of scrap.  We desperately need to make a remake of "This Is Spinal Tap" for the E-Waste Documentary Movement.   I'll fund part of it, if someone wants to do this and get funding on Kickstarter.

See the London School of Economics Africa Blog, about how Taiwanese are doing what they did to the Southeast Asia economy, in Africa, right now.

The 83% of the world, the six billion people, are talking and dealing and trading.

And the USA is passing a law making it illegal to sell your used car to someone who earns less than you.  You can only sell your used car to someone who makes as much or more than you (OECD).  Our E-Steward Export Rules "go all the way up to eleven".

As China consumers buy more smart phones and PCs and tablets than we do, as we are replaced as the "sole rich neighborhood" with repairable and gently used devices, do you think for one moment China isn't going to trade with the Africans???  Africa is already becoming the go-to market after India for refurbished goods.  Africa should be refurbishing by itself.  And it will be, and Chinese investors are putting up SKD factories in Africa NOW.  I'm visiting one moved from Indonesia to South America this month, will post photos... and the Chinese guy who put it there has two others in Africa.  I don't want to boycott him or arrest him, I want to partner with him, heck, I would like to WORK for him because Americans are being idiots.

STuPiD.  STOOOOPID.  STEWPUD.  Google "USA IS STOOPID", and our used electronics export policy should be on page 2.   Europe is Page 1.

below... "tell us what you really think"...



Jim is telling people of late that he cannot talk to me because I'm being negative. He is full of it.  We spoke regularly following my publication of the 2002 Article in Recycling Today, Setting a Higher Standard, and we published the 2004 CRT Recycling Test paper together, and had a lot of other correspondence.

In the end, he didn't trust Africans, didn't trust business, assumed the worst.  Exploitation.   There is no trade in Jim's world view which is mutual lovemaking, the whole world is tawdry @#$%ing.  Allen I cannot say has spoken with me heart to heart as Jim has, if he calls me an a**hole it's more understandable.  But he's still on the Neu Payroll and Kennedy at NRDC needs to clean house or I'll burn the whole NRDC down.  You can't be arresting my friends in Africa and Indonesia, you can't be calling them primitives, waste tourists,  polluters, etc.   You are screwing up, you are screwing the environment, you are screwing sustainability, and you are doing it very badly and the book is being written and it's going to be a lonely retirement as the laughingstock environmentalists who established a racial profiling system embraced by dictators and planned obsolescence interests.   FOOLS.  I'm your best friend, I'm telling the truth, your moral house is on fire, and you need to come out the fire escape and meet some geeks and fixers and tinkerers and stop the fatwah on reuse.  The Resource Curse is the problem, not the people fixing IT.

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