Poison Apples 4: BAN Report on Canadian Export - 9% Export Despite Rigged Sampling!

Nine Percent!?!?

Nine Percent is a nine-member Chinese boy group formed by the survival show Idol Producer by iQiyi in 2018.

Nine percent is also the result of BAN's E-Stewards new report  on a rigged process to show illegal ewaste export is still a thing to pay them money about.

Rigged as in 14% of all the devices BAN tracked were sent to one company (which BAN has engaged in a lawsuit against). And BAN didn't track things they knew would not likely be exported.

Basel Action Network, the owner of the "E-Stewards" authority program, is still using GPS trackers to try to ramp up business.  In a new report distributed by email, BAN has given a subject headline that "Canada still Exporting e-Waste to Developing Countries"... Using a clever but well trod journalism trick, "still" is meant to imply something significant is contained in the report.

Let's boil the information down from page 1.

1) Zero CRT televisions tracked, despite being 60% of Canada's e-waste stream.  That's a major sampling bias if your claim is about "Canadian e-Waste".

2) The devices "chosen" for export tracking - LCD monitors, CRT desktop monitors, and printers - were identified in BAN's 2016 report as the most likely items purchased by export markets.

3) BAN "Poisons the Apples" again, claiming to have secretly "rendered the devices economically unrepairable".  Like the 2016 report, the sabotage is not visible, it's hidden (and not competently done - in 2016 several devices were found repaired and in use anyway). Why do that, other than defeat screening and quality control procedures by the accused Canadian exporter?

4) BAN again conflates the Basel Convention - which explicitly allows reuse and repair and even recycling exports to developing countries - with their proposed AMENDMENT, which they admit has not been passed or ratified by either the Convention or Canada. So their claims of "illegal" activity by Canadians are clearly false and defamatory.

Despite all this spin, the result of the GPS study is   9 %

And if CRT TVs had been tracked, it would have been less than 3 percent!!!  This report shows an NGO flailing its fingers on the keyboard!!!





Despite BAN's gross efforts to rig this study, the conclusion is astounding... only 9.12% of the devices in hot demand, disguised as good, sabotaged for reuse were exported. Nine percent is a far cry from BAN's claims of 80-90% illegal exports!

And if the TVs had been tracked, and sabotage visibly done, BAN would have shown less than 3% - a far cry from 80%.

Not that kind of Profiling

I am still reading the report, and coverage, but wanted to get this blog out so that people focus on what BAN is doing,  The tracking is possibly illegal in the first place. The sampling bias was never responded to in 2016, but MIT ethics specialist have told me that MIT will not participate in another such study after the gross violation of ethics standards in 2016.

Not least of which is BAN's financial interest in the outcome, which is spelled out boldly in the report. BAN claims that their report shows Canadians should pay them to use the E-Stewards standard, rather than R2.  But the report shows less material exported by Canada than by BAN's own USA E-Stewards in the 2016 study.

Again, it is shocking that 14% of all the devices BAN tracked in Canada were sent to one reuse non-profit, whose leader BAN has engaged in lawsuits with (not disclosed in BAN's report?)

A little call out to Bojan Paduh, whose ERA non-profit received scathing attention by BAN. I have met Bojan by skype. His family were Bosnian refugees from Sarajevo during the 1990s genocide (my kid goes to UWC in Mostar, Bosnia, and Paduh and I were both there for family reasons in August this year). Bojan is not a racist and does not boycott Pakistan's tech sector. BAN has a legal court case history with ERA which BAN does not appear to disclose in the report.

BAN has a profit to make and an axe to grind, an unscrupulous sampling method, and a racial profiling campaign.  But all they have to show for it is 9% exports.  SHAME on E-STEWARDS.  This is where your e-Stewards money goes. Sponsors like Samsung need to hear from buyers in emerging markets, how Bosnians and Ghanaians and Nigerians and Pakistanis and Singapore and Indonesian geeks feel about their loud campaign to defame them. Six billion people are being insulted. It's a big market, and Samsung has nothing to gain by supporting this garbage.