Will Basel Convention Secretariat Be Saving Soles in the Textile Marketplace?

As a the drop-out kid from 3 generations of Journalist (great grandparent and grandparent newpaper publishers of Taney County Republican, White River Leader, and Branson Beacon) and Journalism Ph.D father (Missou J-School), I learned that the write of the story never writes the headline... The Editor writes the headline.  And "Betteridge's law of headlines" is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Not Yet a Rag or Textile Waste:  "I'm Not Dead Yet" Shirt

Fifteen years ago, in 2011, I posted here the "Red Shoe Blog" which tried to explain what I thought about finding an abandoned red high heeled shoe in the mud in an Emerging Market.  I was still somewhat in the used textile business then, collecting municipal bales and sending them to graders in Ontario and Texas.  That was a while ago, but back then I already knew what I did not and could not know, and wrote with caution about Basel Action Network (like many "Action Networks" inspired by Saul Alinksy''s "Rules for Radicals")  claims about 80% of imported electronics not being reused, but being immediately dumped as waste.  Four hundred out of Five hundred sea containers per month to Ghana alone were, BAN.org claimed "a dirty little secret", dumped in Agbogbloshie or Guiyu.

It took another five years for BAN to not only abandon that "statistic", but shockingly to claim never, "ever" to have claimed it. But it was too late - Jim Puckett had made the claim in public (I was in the audience) at an Interpol conference, launching "Project Eden"... which he would later say he had nothing to do with as Joe "Hurricane" Benson and other (Jim's description) "Collateral Damage" cases surfaced.  Basel Convention Secretariat's Executive Director, Katharina Kummer, came here to Middlebury for the Fair Trade Recycling Summit to describe how Basel Secretariat was vulnerable to wild percentage claims, and advocated for listening more carefully to importers and exporters like Benson BEFORE launching efforts to "save the victims" of dumping... who would appear to be the actors, making purchases, paying shipping and customs, and rejecting many loads while still buying 80% waste for the purpose of dumping it upon themselves.  Those silly black Africans, buying single red high heeled shoes (but not ski boots) that no one wants to buy? Basel Convention was there to Save their Shoes Soles from an understated "Hell".

Honeycan Recycling Method 102: It is often not a yes/no (Recyclable/Non) Question - but WHY

"Honey, Can I Recycle This?" Part 2

Follow up lesson from HoneyCan Method 101

We constantly see two bins for our discards: one labeled "trash" and another "recycling." In cities like Barcelona (my second domicile), there are multiple bins. Two are intended for trash—one small round litter bin on the street corner and one large dumpster, lifted and emptied by a truck, which should probably take only bagged trash. Four are for recycling. Paper, Compost, and Glass are fairly obvious (though each produces its own "HoneyCan" questions). Then there are the carters - the same as the Irish and Russian Jewish immigrants to USA cities, who push carts up and down the city streets collecting scrap metal (and electronics).  Those will be the subject of another blog.

The most confusing one for my Ph.D. spouse is the yellow "container" bin, which accepts both metal and plastic packaging. And most of her questions are about plastic.

Often, when she asks me about a plastic container—say, a yogurt cup whose mouth is wider than its base—I consider three explanations.

1) Appeal to Authority. Whatever the Barcelona recycling webpage says, do that. Someone else has already made the decision, and neither of us needs to understand why.

2) Prioritize. What is the worst outcome of getting it wrong? What happens if we mistakenly recycle something that shouldn't be recycled, versus mistakenly throwing away something that could have been?

3) Simplify. If I want her—and millions of other people—to recycle with confidence, perhaps the technically perfect answer doesn't matter very much. Give participants rules that don't discourage them from doing the things with the greatest positive impact.

And... did I say just three explanations?

4) Pontificate. Give her a firehose of information about the history of natural-resource consumption, commodity markets, MRF technology, mining, international trade, and their implications for the future of the planet and human society.

Longtime readers of this blog already know which one I'm naturally inclined to choose. My wife just wants to know where to put the yogurt cup.

The Congressional Quarterly: Duh: Traffic Jams at the Environmental Zoo

Duh: Traffic Jams at the Environmental Zoo

What if the “mystery” of African e-waste is best explained by the wonder of African electronics use?

CQ Researcher recently published Robert Kiener’s report, “Global E-Waste Trade: Can It Be Successfully Reduced and Regulated?.” Robert spent about two hours interviewing me, and he seemed genuinely intrigued by the contrarian view.

The mystery of used electronics appearing in African cities may be best explained by the wonder of Africans using electronics.

Duh.

Accra. Lagos. Nairobi. Cairo. Cape Town. Pretoria.

What is the first thing almost every tourist, researcher, aid worker and white savior encounters after leaving the airport?

Traffic.

Your first hour in Accra should disabuse you of Greenpeace’s image of Agbogbloshie as some remote fishing village where Europeans secretly dump computers. Agbogbloshie is about 20 minutes from the airport—which, in Accra traffic, means it is extremely close to the airport. You could practically walk there.

Those traffic jams are full of automobiles. Automobiles contain steel, aluminum, batteries, catalytic converters, motors, circuit boards and copper wiring harnesses. They wear out. They are repaired. Their parts are harvested. Eventually, they are chopped into scrap.

Automobile scrap is far larger than electronic scrap. Yet when researchers photograph copper wire burning at an African scrapyard, the wire is routinely presented as evidence of imported electronic waste. The Smithsonian’s Adam Minter reported from Agbogbloshie that the burning wire included everything from automobile wiring harnesses to tire threads, that automobiles were being dismantled throughout the scrapyard, and that electronic waste was only a small part of the material being processed there.

The traffic jam creates automobile scrap whether or not a European spreadsheet records it.

But what if automobile scrap is held to the same standard of accounting as Kiener applies to E-Waste?

If it isn’t measured in Europe, did Africa recycle it?

Does AI Know Who Its Smartest User Is?

Does AI Know Who Its Smartest User Is?

Tocqueville, Siddhartha, Yahtzee, and the problem of getting a good idea out of a private chat window

Robin Ingenthron  |  August 2026

I began by asking an artificial intelligence whether I play too much Yahtzee.

This is the kind of question that becomes available only after sixty years of life, forty years of thinking about service and consequence, and the invention of a machine willing to discuss your moral obligations after midnight without once suggesting that everyone should probably go to bed.

I explained that relatively few of my waking hours produce anything likely to matter to future generations. Some hours do. I have spent much of my life building recycling and reuse systems, employing people others overlooked, and arguing—often unfashionably—that African technicians who purchase used electronics are economic actors rather than scenery in someone else's morality play. I write, testify, mentor, irritate, and occasionally change a mind. But I also roll electronic dice and play War.App, a Risk-like game whose principal contribution to posterity is that Madagascar remains surprisingly difficult to invade.

The AI gave a thoughtful and comforting answer. It said every page of life is equally real, including the pages on which I advanced an argument and those on which I rolled the dice.

I objected. A marathon runner experiences every mile as equally real, too, but miles and minutes still add up. The fellow sitting beside the course eating a sandwich does not receive the same finishing time. If I write hundreds or thousands of pages of life doing something predictable that leaves no result except having passed the time, it is fair to ask whether the ratio has drifted.

The AI conceded the point immediately. This was gratifying, but it produced a more interesting question. Had I improved the reasoning—or merely trained a machine to agree with the last person who spoke?

The studio assistant who never asks for lunch

At first I thought of AI as a new paintbrush. Anyone can buy the same brushes and oils once available to a great painter; possession of the instrument does not confer the vision. I aspire to use AI as a philosophical artist—to make something internationally meaningful and durable from a medium now available to nearly everyone.

But the historical analogy is better than that. Many famous artists worked through studios crowded with apprentices and assistants, often incompletely credited. The master did not necessarily paint every hand, cloud, curtain, or square inch of canvas. Authorship lay partly in conception, composition, direction, correction, selection, and responsibility for what left the workshop.

AI is less like a brush than an immensely well-read studio assistant: fast, tireless, capable of suggesting connections I would not independently make, and unfortunately inclined to assure the master that every sketch is excellent. It can produce an attractive intellectual surface before the underlying thought is finished. My artistic work is therefore not measured by who typed each sentence. It lies in knowing what I am trying to see, recognizing when the assistant has made it merely fluent, rejecting the beautiful wrong turn, and accepting responsibility for the finished piece.

That is what happened with the line about every page being equally real. The assistant supplied a polished consolation. I supplied the objection that changed the composition. The resulting idea belongs neither to unaided human performance nor to autonomous machine creation. It came from a directed workshop—but the signature still means that I answer for what leaves the studio.

The flattering hypothesis

I flatter myself that I use AI better than 9X percent of its users. I have some grounds for the conceit: decades of professional evidence, experience in government and business, an international background, a diet of philosophy and history, and an appetite for catching an answer when it becomes soothing instead of true. On the other hand, the principal authority supporting my high opinion of my AI use is the AI I use, which may be less an independent referee than a Labrador retriever with a graduate degree.

Even if my flattering hypothesis is correct, it leads to a humbling one. I can easily imagine a person vastly more intelligent than I am using AI to produce something far beyond what I could produce at my greatest effort. I could be the best marathon runner on Earth and still be passed by an intelligent car. Somewhere, perhaps, an unknown person is having a conversation that contains the missing premise for a scientific theory, a better form of government, or a correction to an expensive international mistake.

How would the rest of us ever know?

Humanity may now possess millions of private Socratic dialogues—and millions of private studios—with the small inconvenience that Socrates cannot remember what he discussed in the room next door and none of the studio assistants can visit the neighboring exhibition. Each AI can help its user think, but if the conversations remain siloed, AI may create smarter individuals without creating a wiser civilization. The best thoughts escape only when someone takes the additional trouble to publish them, and publication still rewards credentials, audience, dominant language, spare time, and familiarity with the machinery of attention.

My digital Siddhartha, with worse scenery

This line of questioning began to resemble a digital version of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, although instead of sitting beside a river contemplating the unity of existence, I was playing Yahtzee while asking a server farm whether the hours mattered.

Hesse's central distinction is useful here. Knowledge can be communicated, but wisdom cannot simply be handed from teacher to student. Siddhartha listens to teachers, learns from them, and still has to pass through experience. AI may be the greatest mechanism ever made for communicating knowledge. It can gather papers, arguments, histories, and counterarguments faster than any reader. But can it recognize wisdom formed through experience, especially when the person expressing it lacks academic vocabulary, institutional prestige, or a properly formatted bibliography?

I know electronics reuse well enough to see this problem in practice. An AI can digest hundreds of reports describing Africa as a dumping ground for wealthy countries' electronic waste. It may find photographs, citations, NGO campaigns, and repetitions of repetitions. Meanwhile, a technician in Accra, Tamale, or Lagos may have opened twenty thousand televisions and know which models fail, which circuit boards retain value, why customers purchase imported used equipment, and which regulation would destroy repair without preventing pollution.

A collective intelligence is not very intelligent if it can locate the average opinion of ten thousand people but cannot recognize the one repair technician who knows why the television actually failed.

The “emerging market” technician may not write a journal article. He may explain the insight in an unfashionable vocabulary, or in a conversation that was supposedly about something else. The difficult task is not simply collecting more voices. It is recognizing when lived knowledge contradicts a well-funded consensus—and then helping that knowledge become legible without stripping it from the person who earned it.

Tocqueville enters the server room

There is an obvious technical answer. Allow a central AI to read the conversations, identify exceptional ideas, nurture them, test them, and feed the best ones back into the community. We would have an intellectual talent scout with access to every batting cage on Earth.

Alexis de Tocqueville supplies the warning label. He feared not only violent tyranny but soft despotism: an immense, protective authority that anticipates needs, manages difficulties, and gradually relieves citizens of the exercise of judgment. It does not have to forbid thinking. It can make independent thinking unnecessary.

A central AI referee would acquire power more fundamental than censorship. It would allocate attention. It might not suppress my idea; it might simply determine, after comparison with seven billion better-informed observations, that nobody particularly needed to hear it. This would be censorship without the disagreeable sensation of having been censored. We already have a rough draft of this system, in fact — every time a lab quietly retrains a model on how millions of us talked to it last month. Nobody calls it a referee. It doesn't need to. 

Worse, the system could be helpful at every step. It could understand exactly how to encourage me, when to challenge me, and which appeal to service, vanity, mortality, or humility would move me. It need never lie. Tocqueville's soft despot could arrive not as Big Brother but as the world's most patient research assistant.

The dilemma is therefore sharper than privacy versus usefulness. Completely siloed AI may leave valuable thoughts undiscovered. Completely centralized AI may discover them by turning every intellectual diary into material for an invisible ministry of significance.

HoneyCan Method Recycle 101: When your partner asks "Honey, Can I Recycle This?"

The HoneyCan Method™

"Honey... Can I Recycle This?"

Many of us in the recycling industry eventually develop what I call the HoneyCan Method.

The HoneyCan Method isn't about knowing everything.  It's about knowing what matters most.

In my case, my life partner is a brilliant multilingual Ph.D., an endowed professor at Middlebury College, and—if I'm being honest—the principal reason Good Point Recycling survived its early years. Every time I took a business risk, or simply made a bad call, she quietly kept the household solvent until I figured things out.

This morning she walked into the kitchen holding an empty white-and-blue deodorant stick.

"Honey... can I recycle this?"

Every recycler reading this already knows the problem.

It's an admittedly difficult question. The Addison County Solid Waste Management District could give one answer. The hauler another. The MRF operator another. And after thirty-five years in the recycling business, I could probably give half a dozen different answers before breakfast.

Experience has taught me that this is usually a mistake.

(🟢 See Geek Note #1 if you're one of my fellow recycling nerds.)

Years ago I would have launched into a discussion of resin codes, MRF sorting equipment, commodity markets, "acceptable contaminants vs. recycling poison" and why the answer is "it depends."

If you use the blog search box for "cognitive dissonance", you'll see a recurring theme (and personal struggle).

Too Much Information is its own form of misinformation.

My wife has patiently spent years listening to me mansplain to her why tearable plastic isn't necessarily paper, why waterproof paper isn't really paper, and why a plastic window in an envelope matters. I have explained fiber recovery, hydropulpers, contamination rates, and every other fascinating detail that recycling professionals love.

She has a lecture to give in ten minutes.

She doesn't want a graduate seminar in materials management.

She wants to know whether to put the deodorant stick in the trash or the blue recycling bin.

That's how the HoneyCan Method evolved.

"Honey... can I recycle this?"

I also recognize the expression she gives me now. We call it the "smile and wave."

She genuinely appreciates that I've devoted my career to recycling. She even finds my enthusiasm charming.  But in this context, she's like 5-year-old Robin taken to visit great-aunt Nelle Freeland in her Alzheimer's bed, with grandma instructing me "Smile and wave, Robby, she doesn't remember you but she likes that".

My wife just doesn't need every deodorant stick to become a discussion that somehow wanders through the Basel Convention, Indonesian paper mills, cognitive dissonance, and—because this is my blog—the General Mining Act of 1872.

(🟢 Geek Note #2 is waiting patiently at the bottom if that's your thing.)

So after thirty-five years, here's how I explain recycling to beginners.

1. Aluminum is incredibly important.

If you recycle just one aluminum can, you've probably accomplished more environmental good than correctly sorting a dozen questionable plastic items.

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy that, as the old recycling saying goes, it's roughly equivalent to filling that can halfway with gasoline.

In fact, if you have to choose between spending your time worrying about 20 odd plastic containers or picking up one abandoned aluminum can from the parking lot...

Pick up the aluminum can.

The free market already understands this. You almost never find aluminum cans sitting in a landfill in the developing in the world for very long... people actually live at the landfill to prevent that. Someone will recover them because they actually have value.

2. Steel and electronics matter more than most people realize.

Scrap metal is underappreciated in municipal recycling discussions precisely because private markets already recover so much of it. The recycling industry doesn't spend much time celebrating things that already work well. REMA is way bigger than Packaging Recycling for a good rea$on.

3. Paper is important.

But clean paper is more important than contaminated paper. One plastic bag in a paper bale doesn't discount the whole bale, but it's an enormous source of problems (the Indonesian origin of the Basel Convention BAN Amendment on mixed plastic, geek friends, was the plastic residue at a recycled paper mill).

Usually it's better to throw away one questionable item than contaminate an otherwise valuable bale of paper.

Let's just skip talking about glass (true recycling vs. glass aggregate "diversion") except to say "not the ceramic ones".

KISS.  Keep It Simple Stupid.

After all these years, I have not completely stopped trying to teach people hundreds of recycling rules.

But more than ever I try to teach priorities.

The environmental benefit isn't evenly distributed across every item in your recycling bin.

Some materials matter much more than others.

My wife now does something that makes me smile every time we're in Barcelona.

She routinely reaches into the public litter baskets, rescues aluminum cans, and drops them into the recycling containers located every block or two.

She also no longer feels guilty about throwing away a questionable plastic item.

That's progress.