Another blog descended from a morning tweet. As the global poor emerge in modest economic power, the "elective upgrade" of secondhand goods will result in lower repair rates. There are billions more discarded flip flop shoes in African streets and gutters today than when I lived there 30 years ago. But that just means the raw materials are building up in countries with lower wages - which, like repair and reuse markets of decades ago, represents an OPPORTUNITY for Recycling.
Like the repair export trade, that starts with undoing false, biased, and stereotypical imagery. The opportunity here is for the extraction industries to fund the cleanup in the place it is cheapest to do so.
Been researching, meditating on, blogging about, intellectually debating, dialectically testing, and discovering truths about reuse and repair since 1977.Elective upgrade (buy a new broom, donate the old one) works when world population is growing unsustainably.
Flashback to 2015. WR3A issued a press release that Agbogbloshie was largely a "hoax" (as far as a significant percentage of waste there being dumped by rich countries, it being a "pristine fishing village" twenty years earlier, it ever having received a sea container, it being remotely significantly close to "largest e-waste dump", or the scrap sector workers there being remotely involved in anything but collecting scrap metal, or the burning waste being significantly electronics rather than automobile wire and tires, or separation of copper from aluminum "by hand" being less environmentally sustainable than Big Shred in OECD nations.... etc).
Reuse advocate calls Agbogbloshie ‘a hoax’
That 2015 resulted not only in an Op-Ed from the NGO describing me a denier and apologist, but a targeted GPS tracker delivered to a non-public location, hidden inside a $150 laser printer (another sold that week on ebay). And readers may recall that a year after, I was named, my clients were named, and shamed, in the NGO and MIT collaborative "Monitour".
Fortunately, thanks to the 2013 Fair Trade Recycling Grant project ($469K project involving Memorial University, University of Southern California, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru), and a wealth of World Bank and IMF data on the history of the electric grid in Ghana, the outcome was a documentary in defense of the Geeks of Color and three books confirming my hypothesis. (J Lepawsky, A Minter, J Goldstein)
The question remains, how did Michael "Fishing as a Boy" Anane ever attract PBS Frontline, INTERPOL, German photojournalists, UNEP, and 1990s glam rockers to hype up a local auto scrapyard in a random African City as being the biggest e-waste story on earth for the next 5 years? His very claim completely discredited him, and any background check revealed the newspaper he claimed to work for does not exist. I interviewed Anane in person on 2 occasions, and when asked the source of his information, he cited the discredited NGO that promoted him to "expert". Complete boondoggle.
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| Did you know this is an African's universal power supply for lightboard backlight remanufacturing? |
Or did you think it was "e-waste"? If so, why?
The failure by the righteously indignant environmentalists of the OECD to interview Joseph "Hurricane" Benson or Emmanuel Nyalete or Grace Akese or any of the thousands of African tech sector import entrepreneurs ("sham recyclers", "primitives", "waste tourists", etc) speaks volumes. But how did well meaning people fall into this righteousness trap, so hard, so long, and at such scary and scarring volumes?
There's an entire field of psychology devoted to human reactions to photography, and "if it bleeds it leads" above-the-fold risk reaction. Just for example, this 2015 NIH study.
The Negativity Bias in Affective Picture Processing Depends on Top-Down and Bottom-Up Motivational Significance
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172529/
Thanks again to my journalism professor father - "Doctor I" - I was bathed in lectures about #PsychoJournalism, #PhotoJournalism, #DataJournalism, and implicit bias (all conservative positions - dad was raised by staunch republicans and we had energetic arguments and debates for years - I miss him). I'd also been taught the history of what is now recognized as "poverty porn" in the Ozarks, and the way the "hillbillies" appropriated our own stereotypes in Branson (The Presley and Bald Knobber shows piggybacked on the Beverly Hillbillies, Snuffy Smith, L'il Abner, etc). Agbogbloshie twenty somethings Awal, Razak, and Yaro made hay out of burning tires for tips in central Accra.
The beneficiaries are mining and petrochemical extraction industries, whose raw material subsidies continue as we are all distracted by pics-of-kids-at-dumps. So follow the money. The Big Shred, PlannedObsolescence, and #CharitableIndustrialComplex are stealing our attention from the #Extraction subsidies, mining and pumping oil in developing countries.
Crop the black person out of this Ghana scrap photo (me, Tamale Ghana, 2015) and presto, it's less "primitive", less "by hand", less "ghoulish", less "informal". WHY? "Negativity bias", and the assumption that liberal politics and awareness of privilege theory and externalization hypothesis prevents the false imprisonment of the tech sector workers, like Joe Benson, in UK prison cells, funded by British taxpayers, on the word of INTERPOL, who championed Mike Anane as a credible source in 2010. One black African accused another black African, but your bias - not research - dictated the outcome.
Follow the money...
Where does the NGO get its funds?
Who rewards the "primitive" method?
And why did so few of us react to the most IRONIC PHOTO COLLAGE in environmental history?
Perception - Bill Clinton? Reality - L'il Abner? Jed Clampett?
We are watching the story of "primitive" recycling and "sham" export markets change before our eyes, just as I watched the Branson shows (including "The Bald Knobbers") mature from vulgar stereotypes of my family, to modern cool.
Perception
Reality
"Good is better than evil because it's nicer!"
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