PRESS RELEASE: Recycling Sisterhood Bene Gesserit of Sustainability Thwarting Harkonen Waste Management

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 1, 2025

Waste Arrakis: Elite Recycling Sisterhood Revealed as Bene Gesserit to Thwart Harkonen Waste Empire

BOSTON, MA – In a stunning development uncovered today (April 1st, obviously), a covert order of elite recycling professionals has been outed as none other than the secretive Bene Gesserit of sustainability—a powerful collective silently shaping the environmental future of the galaxy... one compost bin at a time.

The Prophecy: Children and great-grandchildren yet to be born will care whether we kept the water pure and made finite world resources last, and they will appreciate the sustainability we try to care about today.

Operating for decades under the guise of state officials, nonprofit leaders, and municipal department heads, this fearless group has been secretly resisting the expansion of the galactic menace known as Harkonen Hauling Waste Management, along with its sinister subsidiaries: Harkonen Mining (motto: "Strip it faster!") and Harkonen New Produce Obsolescence Corporation (creators of the 6-day toaster).

When the Harkonen Waste Wars latest battle brought on gaslighting of recycling participants, markets, businesses, and workers - with bold "RECYCLING IS A LIE" Blimps floating over Earth Day Festivities, it awakened a quiet set of sorceresses who have been supporting the environment for decades, as described in the Great Book of Recycling.

Meet the Sisterhood of the Circular Economy:

• Brooke Nash (MA DEP) – High Reverend Mother of End Markets and Master of the “Waste Not” Litany.
• Megan Schulz-Fontes (NERC) – Keeper of the Northeast Waste Path and Mistress of Materials Flow.
• Laura Olivier (Earthworm Recycling) – Whisperer of Compost, Summoner of Worm Armies.
• Reagan Bissonette (NRRA) – Wielder of the Spice of Source Separation; Prophetess of Post-Consumer Peace.
• Gretchen Carey (MassRecycle) – Queen of Education Outreach, feared for her deadly accurate eco-haikus.
• Terri L. Goldberg – Supreme Auditor of Hazardous Substances and Knower of All That is Buried.
• Kathi Mirza (MA DEP) – Code-breaker of Collection Data; her spreadsheets strike terror into the hearts of cartels.
• Waneta Trabert (Newton MA DPW) – Commander of Municipal Resistance, known as “The Waste Whisperer of Walnut Street.”
• Abbey Massaro (MassRecycle) - Vision Mother of the Context.

The Prophecy: Future generations around the world will benefit from one person's impact - each of our impacts. What we are doing today will matter.

The Conflict:

As Harkonen forces spread cheap plastic packaging, fake recycling apps, and new operating systems that turn working laser printers into boat anchors, the Bene Gesserit Recycling Order has activated their plan: The Great Diversion. It includes zero-waste Jedi training, organics mind-melding, and an AI-powered Extended Producer Responsibility sandworm.

“We must conserve for the next generation, the prophesized children of the future,” said Nash during a recent council. “We will not permit the waste stream to flow unchecked.”

Sources say the Sisterhood has infiltrated multiple board meetings under the cover of “public comment periods” and is rumored to have hypnotized several corporate executives with repeated chants of “Reduce, Reuse, Refuse.”

The Prophecy: Mothers will see the importance of the world their children's children will inherit.

"Extract! Carbonize! Brickware! Dispose!" - Harkonen Waste Motto

What’s Next?

A climactic battle is rumored for Earth Day, in which the Sisterhood will ride in on solar-powered e-bikes to challenge the Harkonen clan at their last known landfill stronghold, armed with reusable tote bags, carrot peels, and a binder of intergalactic waste bans.

When asked for comment, Harkonen CEO Vladimir Dumpstrakh simply muttered, “Curse those witches of waste... they sorted everything.”

The Prophecy: A kinder, gentler, more sustainable Sandworm can be nurtured and bred, to make our Spice more sustainable...

Anne McGovern, Christine Beling, and Susan Cascino, Laura Dubester, Lynn Rubenstein - and many others whose claims that the Sisterhood existed were scorned as Recycling Lies - are passing out the Prophesy Popcorn.

@AlexanderClapp Officially Blocks My Twitter X Posts

After hearing about his book interview on an NPR podcast, I tried to suggest he take a look at dozens of taped interviews I made with importers in Ghana and scrap workers at Agbogbloshie between 2010 and present day.  When trying to introduce him to Olu Orga, who gave Adam Minter and I our first tour of Agbogbloshie in 2014, and to share my interviews with Olu in 2017, I found Alex has blocked me, so cannot see any of my posts or replies.

I haven't said anything impolite, though I tried to ask about his book's misapplied quote from me here in this blog.  But here's a screenshot.  

Followed by a link to just one of Olu's interviews I wanted to share with him.

If you want to leave readers a review of his book on Amazon, here is a link.  Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash

Here again is Olu Orga's description of his years working at Agbogbloshie, where he specialized in repairing thirdhand goods discarded by wealthier homes and businesses in Accra, Ghana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qQM3WLdYR8&list=PLZQiwXcn3NV9ohL-tYCTdGdXH9b1ohBX_

Recycling Is Not a "LIE": Part 3. Alexander Clapp says I'm an Expert?

 

Waste Wars: A Journey Through the World of Globalized Trash

Forthcoming from Little, Brown & Company

Try out this logic.  

"Health Care Is a LIE, because everyone receiving health care will eventually die".

So I just found out that Alexander Clapp, author of the NYTimes Opinion editorial saying that Recycling Is a Lie, quotes me personally as an expert. Page 135. 

Yet, he does not respond to my direct messages, offers to dialogue, or follows (Linkedin, BlueSky, XTwitter)... So I'm following his posts and will buy a used copy of his book when it is available, but this "Health Care Is a Lie" logic is patently false.  

The 2006 NIH Report by Charles Schmidt, where the misleading quote is pulled from, was based on a trip I made to Asia 20 years ago with Total Reclaim of Seattle president Craig Lorch, and native (2nd generation) Mandarin speaker Lin King of WR3A.org and University of California (recycling program manager).  I had not been to Africa since 1987, and was trying to explain to Mr. Schmidt that the HUGE CONTRACT MANUFACTURERS IN ASIA - SUBCONTRACTORS FOR DELL, HP, ETC. were certainly not importing 80% waste. When he asked about Africa importers, I knew that they were not running 50+ huge factories with up to 1500 employees, 3 shifts a day, seven days per week.  And during that interview, I was also trying to remain friends with Mr. Jim Puckett who was making the (false) claim that 80% of used electronics trade violated the Basel Convention.

AFTER this interview with NIH Schmidt, the following occured.

1. I went to visit our buyers in Africa - with my whole family - and learned that they were Tech Sector professionals who knew WAY more about the electronics they were purchasing than USA recyclers did.

2. I sent multiple emails to the 2006 study author between 2006 (when I complained about the coverage even then) leading right up to 2013, when I invited him to attend the Middlebury Fair Trade Recycling Summit. See email to the author at bottom, with the list of speakers and experts meeting to discuss the "e-waste hoax" BAN had by that time created.  

3. 2013 was the year Jim Puckett of BAN disavowed his own claims in the 2006 Charles Schmidt NIH study - actually claiming he had never ever made the 80% illegal export claims.

In a sample email to Schmidt copied above, I was imploring him to update the 2006 study I'm quoted from, and he submitted my offer to his editor at NIH, who in 2011 turned it down.  Instead, Adam Minter that year visited multiple importers (and domestic Chinese e-waste buyers) for his book, Junkyard Planet.  Which like his second book, Secondhand, interviewed me and our WR3A members directly and on multiple occasions visited them.  

Recycling Is NOT a "LIE" Part 2. Alexander Clapp Fails Math On Plastic Recycling

Plastic recycling is not a lie. It's not perfect, but if you have to choose how your fresh spinach leaves are sold to people who live in Vermont, steel cans, copper, glass and paper may be easier to recycle at the end of package life... but lifecycle analysis of mining and refining and transportation also count for the environment. We need to keep working to fix the parts of plastic recycling that are not working, but attacking the plastic recyclers who ARE WORKING is shameful. Lying about PETE bottle bill plastic recycling will not fix the recycling prospects for a microgram of toothbrush at its end of life.

In part 1 of "Recycling is not a Lie" we shared just how aggravating it is to have African Geeks in the Tech Sector profiled as landfill scavengers. Yes they are both black, and yes they both make less money that the white guy running mobile phones through a shredder while wearing a white lab coat.  In the same kind of way, successful plastic recycling companies are being cast as failures because the word "plastic recycling" doesn't cover the toothbrush.  In both cases, the arrogant claim that "Recycling Is A Lie" profiles honest, incredible people as shameful.

PETE (#1) and HDPE (#2) Plastics are incredibly successful. They are not subsidized, they are not "a lie", and they are not thrown away at the recycling facilities. People who are telling us that may have a legitimate gripe about the film plastic your spinach leaves were transported in, but they don't have an answer other than "don't eat your spinach".  They might imagine that spinach farmers in Mexico will successfully ship it 3000 miles without most of it spoiling, or being packaged in material far heavier to transport and more harmful in lifecycle analysis (see Oregon DEP study on paper bags vs. single use plastic). But doing so, they imagine they are more truthful than Malaysian Plastic Recycling Factories.

I'll focus on Malaysia, because Malaysia and Indonesia are getting a lot of recycling hate, and I've got experience with successful plastic recyclers - inventors and investors - in both nations. Both nations have been "Asian Tigers", economies who have muslim-majority DEMOCRACIES. There is plenty to criticize (extinction of orangutans for palm oil plantations for starters), but attacking their plastic recyclers is just ignorant.

I have learned the hard way that it is dangerous to single out a single recycler unless they are already (a la Joe "Hurricane" Benson in the UK, or Semarang Indonesia's PT Imtech) falsely accused.  Saying "what is wrong with this factory" has drawn sick attacks, like Jim Puckett's letter shutting down my friends at Net Peripheral in Penang Malaysia after Adam Minter visited them and wrote about them in Recycling International. But let's just look at the largest Malaysia recycler on this list.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis, reporter at The Guardian and author of Wasteland, at least accepted my invitations to meet and speak about the potential for "collateral damage" in Emerging Markets. He visited Evans Quaye's shop in Accra (the smallest electronics refurbished I could risk introducing him to), and as a result wrote a nuanced chapter about his capacity to judge Africa's Tech Sector.  And to his credit, he admitted to me he had not visited a single plastic recycler in Malaysia or Indonesia while writing about their businesses (blamed covid travel restrictions). Oli is honest.  But Alexander Clapp has not responded to any of my twitter or Linkedin invitations.  Alexander Clapp is the one who told the NYTimes that people like me are LYING about recycling.

Here is a plastic recycling plant my Fair Trade Recycling Team visited in Semarang Indonesia about 15 years ago, when the factory was being "outed" by Basel Action Network as a "primitive" operation. We verified their ISO Certifications and photographed their ABS and HiPS plastic recycling lines. Colin Davis, my former VP and Middlebury College Grad (now CEO at Shacksbury Cider) visited in 2009 (I think).

This factory used plastic from used computer monitor housings - removing their paper and foil labels - to peletize them, adding black die, and made brand new computer monitor plastic housings out of 100% recycled plastic.  Was the factory perfect? No, but it made brand new computer monitors as a contract manufacturer to OEMs before converting to a recycling and reuse operation... so making computer monitors out of old computer monitors seems like progress to me. The plastic was just one part of the operation - they reused 4 year old CRTs to make affordable new TVs and monitors as well... while USA companies were grinding those CRTs up to make abandoned piles of toxic dust, and accusing this factory (through BAN.org) of lying.  That was more than 15 years ago... my guess is that Alexander Clapp was in Junior High School at the time. Now he's "recycling" Puckett's stories about these genius entrepreneurs... sigh. Maybe someone in his friends and family circle will read this and suggest he is only "holding up a mirror" to factless journalism.

So back to the present day.  I've posted the image and link to the list of the largest plastic recyclers operating in Malaysia as of 2023.  Clapp and Puckett have accused the largest factory (in that they have accused ALL of them) of operating illegally.

The factory claims to recycle 60,000 tons per year of HDPE (milk jug), LDPE (film), and PP Plastic grades into pellets that can be extruded to make new products.  Putting a photo of domestically generated Indonesia river mixed-plastic litter hardly disqualifies their claims to employe hundreds of staff, or their ISO 14001 certification, or their import permits.  If Alexander Clapp wants to accuse this factory of lying, he has had more than 10 years to visit and show us how they manage to pay for the plastic (PETE and HDPE scrap sell for much more per ton than paper), pay for shipping, employ hundreds, document residuals management, and somehow are "lying" and somehow responsible for plastic litter in an Indonesian river thousands of kilometers away.

Burden of proof much?

Recycling Is NOT a "LIE". Alexander Clapp Fails Math Racially Profiles Geeks of Color

New York Times Opinion Editor Tim Schneider introduced us all to another "tell all" author, Alexander Clapp, with the headline "The Story You've Been Told about Recycling is a Lie".  It's been forwarded to me by a half dozen colleagues, readers, and scholars, who know that these "Recycling is a Lie" claims have been the whole reason this blog exists. 

It's strange.  "Health Care is a Lie".  "Barber Shops are a Lie". We never see those finger waving headlines.  But somehow a writer gets a flight - and yes, Alexander Clapp's focus in the Op Ed is on Agbogbloshie, in central Ghana - stays in a hotel and spends a few days with poor African primary school dropouts who burn wire (mostly from automobile harnesses, not electronics) which been in use in the city since the Akosomba Hydroelectric Dam was built in the mid 1960s.  And how he's an expert, telling everyone that people like me are lying about recycling.

I will start by disproving Mr. Clapp's completely false claims about Agbogbloshie, and then if I have time, take on his judgement of plastic recycling in Southeast Asia - which I've also visited decades ago.

Funny how Agbogbloshie is in the highest electricity consuming city - per capita - in subsaharan Africa... 100% electricity access. But Alexander Clapp finds TVs in the city dump, and jumps to a bizarre conclusion. 

Tim Schneider, let's start by taking about ELECTRICITY in Ghana (NASA, 2018), the number of televisions per household, and see if you can distinguish between the geniuses in Africa's Tech Sector and the primary school dropouts in Agbobloshie, and how the mystery is how good African Techs are and why that explains there is so very little E-Waste in Accra City dumps compared to a city of 5M in the US or Europe.  I sent Mr. Clapp a link to a 2011 Op Ed I had published in Vice, and sent him a Linkedin and X.com invitation to meet.

To the NY Times Editors (Tim Schneider et. al.)

While international Recycling is certainly not perfect, the patently false claims made by Alexander Clapp author of a new book Waste Wars: in "Recycling Is a Lie" have been called out by dozens of University research studies and noted authors such as Adam Minter (Bloomberg columnist and author of Junkyard Planet and Secondhand). 

I will start with my many filmed interviews of the so-called burner boys of the Agbognloshie described in the piece, at the scrap yard in Accra Ghana, whom I've introduced not just to Minter, but to many other reporters with integrity.

No one has ever seen a sea container unloaded there.  The idea that African city junkyards are fed directly by USA exports is absurd to anyone who has spent any significant number of years there (as I have).

The E-Waste there is collected from the streets of the city of 5 million by men with push carts. They collect it from the millions of businesses and households in Ghana who have had electricity since the 1960s. 

If you search for World Bank data on televisions per household since 1999 in greater Accra, the glaring question is why there are so few e-waste tons at the city dump.

The answer is that they repair and reuse electronics far longer than wealthy westerners do. Yes, Africans do conservation better than we do. A lot better. Poor people tend not to throw working stuff away.

Data exists.  Electricity consumption. Televisions per household. Lack of sales of new electronics. If the electronics they buy and test are really burned as junk, what is using the electricity and creating the blackouts and brownouts from record demand? If there were over 300 TV stations in Africa when I first arrived in 1984, who was watching them? Where did the critical mass of users (UN term) come from who made those investments possible? There were no BestBuys or Walmarts. But there were thousands of talented Geeks of Color, who deserve credit for creating African Mass Communications. Summing them all up as wire burners is a liberal own-goal.

It's distressing that authors fail to interview ANY, not one of, the talented importers in Africa's tech sector, and to see the NYT profile them as wire burners is painful. Those wire burners (who I also know pretty well), by the way are mostly burning automobile harness wire from the scrap automobiles. Racial profiling is not something do-gooders are immune to.

If you don't do any secondary research and expect a city of 5 million people to have a dump full of coconut shells and banana peels, it hardly qualifies you to call Africa's talented tech sector liars about what they are capable of selecting testing and reusing.  The Op Ed calling us liars doesn't have any data at all. The words "much of" did not use to pass editorial muster.

I don't have time to explain how plastic buyers fly here and inspect the plastic they buy and pay for not just the plastic but the shipping and the customs fees. But start with plastic consumption in rapidly emerging markets and you see that the plastic waste photojournalists see there was domestically generated. 

Who is the liar?

My son (now 28) spent a 7 week internship with Karim, a TV refurbisher in Ghana while at Middlebury College.  There is just no way Alexander Clapp can pass himself off as an expert if he believes wire burners are buying used electronics from Americans.

How can you explain the electricity, the TV stations, the traffic, the mobile phone towers in Africa if you are so much better at recycling and repairing than they are?

See the youtube video by Alex Wondergam, "In The Life:  Scrap Metal Men" to see how the scrap at Agbogbloshie is collected, busines-by-business, house-by-houses, street by street.  And you will start to get a feel for the mystery here - why is the Accra dump so SMALL?????  Because of men like Karim.  And I wanted to make sure people in my son's generation got to experience circuit-board-level repairs that Americans once did 50 years ago.

Same history in Asia, by the way. I wonder if Alexander Clapp or Tim Schneider has ever heard of Simon Lin, Terry Gou, or Lee Kun-hee?  All three started out like Karim.  As did Steve Jobs and Michael Dell.  See? If you can stop racially profiling the Tech Sector as "primitive recyclers" you might learn what I did.