That's my favorite self-quote from the past 10 years. I got to deliver it to a European Conference on E-Waste, seated side by side with Basel Action Network's executive director, Jim Puckett.
"Shame Blowback" sometimes takes years. But Karma Occurs.
After the laughter subsided, I told the audience that it is a bit absurd that they are relying on the advice of two white American men to explain the situation with used electronics in Africa's Tech Sector. Adam Minter later told me that #OwnVoices was a hashtag which framed that dynamic. The following year, Emmanuel Nyaletey was invited to present to the same conference audience.
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| 2007 Film Falsely Claimed these were illegally dumped. Lie, |
Quickie documentary videos of Africa-bound sea containers shocked Europeans into twisting the Basel Convention - which explicitly identifies intent to dump, not intent to recycle or repair, as illegal - to a snare for African and Asian and Latin Americans in the reuse sector. Joe Benson was entrapped in that snare, which was baited by Jim Puckett with false claims, delivered in less than flowering Halloweenish descriptions of African Cities ("A Place Called Away"), that 80% of the trade Africans engage in is a "sham". "Millions of tons" "pawed through" by "orphans" in "the largest e-waste dump in the world".
"...It is appalling that some, wishing to exploit export of techno-trash for their own profit, are now denying what hundreds of journalists and government officials have witnessed in Ghana at Agbogbloshie. We have had holocaust deniers, climate deniers, and now Agbogbloshie deniers? Please." - Jim Puckett
That's a pretty heavy ladle of Shame flung my way, in a public forum. If that's the way it works, why is it necessary to hide the damage in the GPS-bearing equipment? Why not, ever, put GPS trackers in the CRT TVs that Africans stopped importing 8 years ago?
Well, this is well-trodden ground for the blog. What's original is copied and pasted above. In 2015, Jim Puckett is publicly claiming not just that I had no experience in Africa, not just that he was the authority, and not only stood firm on his fake statistic in a public and permanently visible setting. He calls me a "holocaust denier"? Every venemous accusation made against Joseph "Hurricane" Benson can be made against anyone who cites World Bank statistics, which clearly indicated (TVs per household, 2001) that African city dumps don't contain banana peels and coconut shells.
When I got the Recycling Trade Press to ask Puckett for his source... The videos taken 10 years ago captured Michael "Fishing as a Boy" Anane making patently absurd claims, that 500 sea containers per month were being "dumped" at Agbogbloshie (actual number - zero, ever), a place he claimed to have grown up in, swimming in the Odaw River. Yes, "fishing as a boy" in the 1990s. The Odaw River lagoon is in the center of a 3 million poplulation metropolis, and has been the center of the Old Fadama slum and Accra city dump since the 1960s.
The utter flagrancy of "documentaries" which don't do basic background research may be excusable for well-meaning environmentalist liberals with post-colonial and elective-upgrade guilt. But the OEMs (Planned Obsolescence), the European-USA scrap metal industry (Big Shred), and Basel Action Network at some point knew much better.
You see, the very film in the documentaries shows sea containers being unloaded in Tema, miles away from Agbogbloshie. And the scrap they show being dismantled in Agbogbloshie is 10-40 years older than the equipment being unloaded in the sea container.
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| African True Claims about Agbogbloshie 2015. Who was right? |
In 2015, Puckett was clearly aiming to discredit - heck, SHAME -me. But watch the 2015 interview with Fair Trade Recycling's Emmanuel Nyalete that year. Who is more credible?
The value of the units, if scrapped, could not have paid for the voyage. The percentage Jim claims are unrepairable could not account for the TVs per household in Ghana (not enough new units are sold to explain ownership). Basel Action Network claimed the impossible.
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| Bye-bye Colonialist Waste Definitions |
I told Jim Puckett this more than ten years ago, over and over, in a friendly way. He told me Joe "Hurricane" Benson was "collateral damage". But here in TheConversation, he calls me "Mr. Ingenthron", and explains to everyone that I'm a liar equivalent of "Holocaust Denier".
Puckett's wiggly little shaming firehose is going limp. He has threatened me to my face to support him. No, I'm sticking with the falsely accused importers, the Africans who are the Agents of their own trade decisions. I don't export junk, the only possible way it can happen is for Jim to stick a GPS razor blade in my Apple.
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| # GPS put in CRT TVs? |
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