German and Vermont Plastic Bans - Go Fund Me a Mountain

So first the headline - Germany takes the initiative to ban all single use plastics by July 2021. It's being applauded and heralded all over Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. See coverage on ABC News this morning:

Germany bans single-use plastic straws, food containers

Germany is banning the sale of single-use plastic straws, cotton buds and food containers (AP)

Here is a better idea. Support our Fair Trade Recycling Offset plan. I've been talking about it for years, and have now set up a GoFundMe page with a goal of $25,000.  We will then pay for litter collection out of Ghana streets in the weeks before the monsoon rain washes thousands of tons of plastic litter into the ocean we all share.

(Ed. - Originally, FTR's Offset Program was launched specifically for e-waste recovery. We now see ocean-bound plastic as the main target. Our estimate is that it costs $1000 of effort to collect one additional ton of properly sorted plastics from a mature USA recycling program. By contrast the same $1000 would pay to divert ten tons of ocean-bound plastic from Africa's cities, before a monsoon washes that plastic out to sea, where it will cost $10,000 to capture the one ton again).

Vermont's plastic bags are not the problem. Voting to ban the plastic is little more than virtue signalling. Recall where ocean litter comes from.

Plastic recyclers in Tamale, Ghana

2020 GlobalEwaste Statistics Partnership. Fresh Start? Hmmmm

First, let me apologize if I got off on the wrong foot with Dr. Ruediger Kuehr of United Nations University. We were introduced to one another about 15 years ago, through indirect networks (EPA DC contacts etc). He was presented to me as a more moderate voice on the E-Waste Export debate than Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network, or Ted Smith of Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.


That's kind of typical of official reactions when one hysterical account (BAN.org) that "80% of E-Waste exported 80% of the time, and 80% of that is dumped and lost to the circular economy" is questioned sharply by someone (yours truly) who had a certain degree of credibility at the time. Regulators try to find someone at a median between Robin and The Ayatollah of EWaste, and fund them to get at the truth.

Ruediger's been at the receiving end of research funding for over a decade. And he's filled the role of compromise chef, admirably. A compromise between talented tech sector importers, and the bigots who labelled them "primitive recyclers"...

I haven't finished starting the 2020 "Global E-Waste Statistics Partnership" report, "Global EWaste Monitor 2020" yet.  But in the introduction, this paragraph stood out.

"Only 17.4% of this was officially documented as properly collected and recycled."

I see what you did there. It's a very precise statistic, down to the decimal, about what data you have. But it also continues a backhanded European narrative about the so-called "informal" sector (which I call either the Tech Sector or Scrap Sector according to what is happening).

This is #whitesplaining why the Africans I filmed (below) are not to be trusted. If they were trusted, the charitable industrial complex funding might grind to a halt.