The Privilege of Recycling Righteousness

 Waste Hierarchy vs. Litter.  Keep Atlantic Beautiful.

There is a privileged disconnect between weathy nations' obsession with recycling rate of plastic, when the emergency is ocean-bound litter in emerging markets. I don't care if it's recycled, I want to see litter collected before monsoons send it to sea.

Visit WasteAid.org 

Over the past two decades, I've been delighted to see hunger decline globally, disease vaccination rates gain, mass communications tech spread across the poorest nations, and, quite significantly, the income per capita in so-called "third world" nations triple. Most scholars now refer to developing countries as "Emerging Markets" based on double-digit annual per income growth and spending.

Still, they have a ways to go. And environmentally speaking, many African, Asian and South American Communities are at the awkward stage of environmental regulation the USA saw in the 1950s and 1960s, when cars were dumped in American Rivers, and bottle bills were driven by LITTER, not by a heartfelt need to recycle.

There is a reverse normal curve when it comes to recycling and growth of income. Very poor nations recycle the most, because the value of the material is a high wage, they cannot afford to throw it away. In places like Kumasi, Ghana, the metals from cars are segregated into far more categories than an American recycler would ever bother to. 

But when the income of a nation doubles or triples, from very poor to modestly lower class, you start to see disposables being consumed - bottled water in Africa (or plastic bagged) - but not collected. The awkward period when - like my grandparents farm in the 1960s - garbage is being produced by higher and higher levels of packaging, but at best being burned in barrels, and at worst, dumped on roadsides.

And that's what is going on in Emerging Cities, many of which are on the coast, or along one of 7 rivers that dump into the 5 oceans.

Can You Lose 50 Pounds In 12 Months? The Hot New #Clickbait #EWaste Diet!

 Can You Lose 50 Pounds In 12 Months?

Shameless promotion of "e-waist"

Technically, I'm not sure I make it. I've only lost 46 pounds, to be honest (that's strictly going by my physical medical exam, not home scales).

The Editor of Resource Recycling Magazine, Dan Lief*, told me that the staff (Cara Bergeson, Bobby Elliot, Colin Staub, Rick Downing,  Jared Paben, Jef Drawbaugh...) had assigned me a nickname of "Clickbait Robin".  That was a gentle chiding, suggesting that some of my stories - like Retroworks de Mexico, perhaps - were more fluff than substance. Low-calorie fare.

Coming from a journalism family (Dad was Mass Communications Professor at U of Arkansas, his parent and grandparents worked at / owned a County newspaper), I don't take it as an insult that I get my point of view out there any way that I can. Chaz Miller, Jim O'Keefe, Brian Taylor, DeAnne Toto, Rachel H. Pollack, Dan Sandoval, and even Cole Rosengren know that I can be tongue-in-cheek, and deadly serious, at the same time. If you are going to use a weight-loss, or journo name-drop, as your clickbait, you better have really lost the weight, and be truthful if it's 46 (this AM, seems 47 lbs) and not 50 pounds you've lost.

(Mark Hickey at Waste360... have not met anyone there yet, and the trade paper's silence on the controversy over racial profiling of used electronics traders really should be addressed)

Many Blog Posts are Emails To Academics: Urbanization Politics of Agbogbloshie

This is an email I just sent to a European graduate student, who is attempting to do a major research (thesis?) paper on Agbogbloshie.

I always have taken time to encourage researchers. It is part of my "fishing for swordfish, surrounded by perch" philosophy of blogging. The blogs are ignored by most people, because most people don't have the bandwidth to really focus on them, or to do a deep dive, or review ground already covered.

But these emails and blogs reach people who are truly concerned, and who ultimately discover that there is an almost sinister systemic manipulation of "do-gooders" empathy to accomplish monetary gains. I usually talk about the Western (and now Asian) lobbies - Big Shred, Planned Obsolescence, and Charity Industrial Complex.  But in this morning's email to the Swiss based graduate researcher, I like to remind us that Africans have Agency, even if some of their agency is systemically marginalized by the desire for shiny white consciences. 

In Accra, Ghana, it's the land value stupid. Agbogbloshie, for decades (IMF and World Bank papers go back to the 1960s) has been an urban scrapyard next to the Old Fadama slum.  If you want to know what is ultimately going to happen, read about the Kowloon slum in Hong Kong. All the "recycling" story is just using BAN propaganda to leverage demolition and expulsion of some of the most valuable real estate in one of the richest African urban centers.

It's not about you, or your old computer.

Basel Action Network Continues Campaign of Racial Prejudice, Systemic Vocabulary Abuse, GPS Sabotage

 Every BAN press release is a lesson in vocabulary manipulation, not science.  

NGO sanctimonious vocabulary demands a rebuttal

For example, an enormous predictor that Jim is exaggerating are the words "waste" and "likely".  Jim of all people knows that "used goods" and "waste" are defined separately in international law, and that the key to guilt is intent. Otherwise, every brand new item that landed overseas - if it failed under warranty, or was damaged in shipping - would be a violation of international law.

BAN has, for two decades, tried to erase the fact that the most knowledgeable actors, the ones most in control of the trade, the purchasers least likely to waste money, are the oveseas buyers. They do not pay to ship "waste" with the intent to avoid costs they would certainly not incur, in the rich nations where they purchase surplus goods. The Action Network was exposed for fabricating a high percentage of waste (80%) (GPI blog, 2013) They did so in order to cause journalists and environmentalists to skip the side of the story from Joseph "Hurricane" Benson, and the overseas Tech Sector he came to represent. BAN issued macabre photos of dumps, where the junk being processed is mostly automotive and mostly was imported to those countries when Joe Benson would have been an apprentice TV repair tech in Nigeria... decades earlier.