These shots of CRT Display Imports, taken between 2002-2007, were for reuse. They were sustainable. No mining or refining, the carbon and toxics and pollution made them the best way ever that three billion people could get online between 1995 and 2010.
It wasn't perfect of course. More controversial "gray market" wasn't photo'd. One Contract manufacturing plant, assembling brand new CRT monitors, also had a used SKD operation on another floor. They insisted it was a different floor and that a used CRT could never be swapped out with a new one. But of course that's how the whole sector started, bleeding used ones into new lines in the 1990s until there were actually more used ones than new ones in the early 2000s. By then, 100% used refurbishing factories were the norm.
CRT manufacturing for the West was in decline. Fortunately, there was a new "good enough market" where professionally assembled used goods became the most profitable in the sector.
Most of the buyers for these cheap, durable, affordable display devices has been in places like India, Egypt, and Indonesia. The 3B3K, three billion people earning $3 thousand per year, who were getting telecom and ICT and satellite TV at 10 times the rate of growth of the rest of the world. CRTs were on fire - in a figurative sense, not a literal one.
While the environmental NGOs were playing games with "percentages" understood by laypeople, some of us were actually travelling around the world documenting the purchase orders and uses of the export market. The percentages make a lot more sense when you actually know what you are talking about, rather than making things up as you go along.
How do display devices move, geographically, around the world?
In the big geographic picture, here are 5 import-export scenarios:
Import 1. Reuse of secondary CRTs (Tema Port, Ghana)
Import 2. Raw materials for new CRT factories (Videocon, India)
Import 3. Clandestine reuse of 'passable' used CRTs into new CRT assembly lines (China 1990s)
Import 4. Whole 100% semi-knock-down (SKD) reuse factories, often converted from closed #3
Import 5. Import for recycling of junk CRT displays (Calexico, Mexico).
Import 6. Mixed lots of used electronics to be assessed in country or scrapped on receipt
Below is the evolution of the smallest cause - #6 - and how it grew to swallow our attention and become reported in the press as the largest illegal envionmental crime of our time... #ewastegate.
I'm working on the Agbogbloshie Report, and there's a lot of background that I can't really fit into it. Since I haven't published on the blog in over a week, I thought I'd share some of the edited references which provide some history and perspective to #ewastegate.
People who don't know what they are talking about, making it up as they go along, get much farther if they festoon their reports with imagery of poor children. It's like UNICEF, except not a penny, not one tiny penny, goes from E-Stewards donors to the poor in the photos. It's macabre poverty porn, the Charitable Industrial Complex, and the history of the credible, peer reviewed reports which got us here are profiled below, so that we hopefully won't make the same mistakes again.
While I was producing this chart in 2008, I made a serious blunder. It doesn't have any children's photos.