How (too) Quietly The E-Waste Big Lies Are Buried.

(please help)

Our group Fair Trade Recycling has given everything we can to stop the systematic, colonialist, racist laws which benefit the raw material hungry smelters at the expense of the savvy technicians in the emerging markets. Personally, I've taken a lot of flack for naming names (like "80%" J.P."fishing as a boy" M.A., and P.L. - after talking to them). I researched and exposed how GPS tracking device "studies" were rigged in 2015...  trying to prove the false claim of 80%, the NGO and MIT Sustainable City Lab avoided tracking a single CRT television, which represented over 50% of the e-waste at the time. 

I don't have time to edit this, and fewer than 50 people will have time to read it. But the Big Ewaste Lie has not been buried, and is beginning to stink, and threatens a pandemic of bad law based on flawed, uneducated, systemically racist environmental policy. The students researching environmental studies today will report the history of waste colonialism in future theses, reports, and podcasts.

The trade press helped a bit to cover and correct the story, but is still largely unwilling to correct a false headline that put people like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson in jail.  Just this week, Resource Recycling reprinted false claims - which they certainly knew to be false - because they were repeated at a European conference. 

In the same EScrap News which repeated the false claims - described to me by head editor Dan Lief as one of some "different opinions" rather than as disproven falsehoods - there is a story by Colin Staub about the consequences. I like the teams at Resource Recycling, Recycling Today, Recycling International, Scrap Magazine, WasteDive, Waste360, etc. I go way back with recycling intellectual titans like Chaz Miller, Jim O'Keefe, Jerry Powell, Manfred Beck, DeAnne Toto, Rachel H. Pollak, Brian Taylor, and even folks who left the scene (e.g. Waste Age's Amanda Smith-Teutsch). We certainly don't want to bite the hands that feed our press releases.

But there's a crime occurring, and it keeps happening. There is a lot of money around #blackwashing.

#Greenwashing is well defined, when a polluting industry (e.g. extraction) launches a "pilot project" or "campaign" or far-off "goals". What #blackwashing refers to is the subtle inference that people paying more for something that industry wants are suspect, have a higher hurdle, or must prove a negative. Joseph "Hurricane" Benson was asked to disprove what the UK prosecutor referred to as "common knowledge" that the majority of what he purchased would go to African landfills.

Someday, those secondhand TVs will be discarded in Africa, and collected from the alleys by "garri-boys" (Cameroon slang for big talking small fries) and Scrap Metal Men like my friend Olu Orga, who changed his station in life by developing a "third hand" reuse market for computers he was bringing to Agbogbloshie.  I introduced Olu to Adam Minter, and Olu brought us around Agbo introducing and translating and explaining what is going on there.  WHY ARE PEOPLE INTERVIEWING PUCKETT AND ANANE, AND NOT OLU ORGA?

Money talks.

The TVs that Hurrican Joe exported from the UK don't last forever - just four times longer than they do in Europe. When the capital city of Accra became wealthy enough to upgrade to flat screen TVs, northern Ghanaians like Olu started "thirdhand" businesses, salvaging electronics from the city, repairing them, and selling them as far north as Burkina Faso (Fair Trade Recycling's crew also took @Adam Minter to Savelugu in the far north to meet Ibrahim, a man repairing a Japanese CRT television and adding a TV remote control function to it as long as he was in there).

But while Chinese recycling smelter buyers (and chip reuse markets like Shenzhen and Guiyu) realize that Africa has a lot of metal scrap to purchase, the Japanese and Belgium smelters still concentrate on a strategy of #blackwashing. They contribute money to (figuratively) kill the secondhand dealers - to figuratively chop off the hands of the secondhand trade. 

And the trade press is treating the crime as a "different opinion." 

We understand that the press is a bit like the Roman Cathoic Church in the time of Cortez... They did prey and history records improvements that "civilizing" Catholics did for Latinx America. But they get a lot of the gold. The best they can do is run the ads for Planned Obsolescence (anti ink cartridge reuse), Big Shred (circuit board refiners), and play a role in the Charitable Industrial Complex. But the crime of the BIG LIE has been exposed, documented by university research, and popularly conveyed by accessible authors. Running an occasional Op Ed for Fair Trade Recycling's "different point of view" is a panacea if you keep directly quoting M. "Fishing As A Boy in Odaw River" Anane and treating him as a spokesperson for Ghana. I have met him twice, interviewed him, he's a joke. The newspaper he claimed to work for is in Kano, Nigeria. He makes his living taking Euro Photo Journalists on slum tours to validate their "holding up a (Black) Mirror" theories that result in the arrests of people like Olu Orga and Hurricane Joe Benson.

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Money from the Big Shred advertising started 20 years ago, R.St.D's HP "crush crush grind grind" ads aimed at ink cartridge buyers. Dan, Jarod, Colin, Tara, Jef, Bobby and Jerry should remember those ads, and the 2001 Anti Gray Market Alliance donation to China's Communist Party that resulted in the raids on ink cartridge remanufacturing (and anything having to do with printers) in Foshan the year after. The Foshan Ink Remarket Massacre led to "Exporting Harm", the idiotic "study" of e-waste exports that spawned the BIG LIE that 80% of used electronics trade was bad for the environment, rather than extending the lifecycle. Guiyu is a Big Lie that will not Die. Or dye - any upstream sampling of the Exporting Harm river would lead to the largest textile industry on the planet, and big pipes dumping runoff, and the same chemistry of pollution as non-ewaste associated rivers - as explained in this blog 10 YEARS AGO. 

Yesterday I spent 45 minutes on the phone with a Japanese circuit board scrap buyer, who was hitting the Zoom pavement trying to find leads. He said that they are seeing a shortfall of scrap, and his job was to make sure the refinery was not idle - the recycling smelters are designed to operated 24/7.

He'd been in the job about 6 years, talked about having read my articles and blogs. He said he felt bad about lies being spread about the reuse market, but that his job ("selfishly") was to stop anyone from getting the scrap for his smelter.

How exactly does that differ from European Raw Material Mining Colonialism?

Cortez The Killer was after gold, and treated as a hero after destroying the Aztec Nation and melting their statues. Our recycling trade magazines are certainly not in league with Belgium's Leopold II, but are also educated enough to know that it was not all that long ago that Congo was being stripped of raw materials, nearly a century after the US Civil War and the end of slavery. #BlackHistoryMonth has a chapter on EXTRACTION. 

Leopold II, French in full Léopold-Louis-Philippe-Marie-Victor, Dutch in full Leopold Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor, (born April 9, 1835, Brussels, Belgium—died December 17, 1909, Laeken), king of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909.

The raw material refining industry is hell-bent on destroying the Secondhand market, and is in a strong push to do to secondhand electronics what the Basel Convention unwisely, or uncarefully, did to the plastic recycling industry last year.

Fifteen years ago, we were patient as the do-gooders honestly believed 17" SVGA desktop monitors imported to Hong Kong were sent to Guiyu (no. no. no.) I cannot honestly repeat the number of lies this blog bird-dogged, and how many were researched by the academic detectives and Memorial University, USC, PUCP, ASU, RIT, and vetted in peer-reviewed journals like Discard Studies. 

Why Guiyu outpays EU for circuit boards. Duh.

Now is the time to admit facts. African junkyards are the eventual downstream for both brand new and secondhand and thirdhand exports.  Africans cannot be told to only buy new electronics made in Europe, USA, Japan and China. Africans have a #RigthToRepair.

I told the Japan smelter buyer that if his company is smart, it will partner with the Tech Sector, the highly educated Africans who - like Olu Orga - have a modest connection to scrap metal yards like Agbogbloshie. They need to TRADE with Africa, not to BAN THE TRADE with Africa. What is about to occur under the Basel Convention proposed re-write is to hand the scrap metal market AND the secondhand reuse market to CHINA (which is exempt as non-OECD). 

Jim Puckett's kid is now old enough to read the blog and find out why his dad is on the verge of going down in a very ugly post-colonialist history, a continued gambit to keep raw materials in the hands of the white nations, cutting off the hands of the people without whom Africa would never have had the critical mass of users to fund an economy of cell phone towers and internet cable. There needs to be a partnership to PAY Africans for their scrap if Africa outbids Big Shred for 20% of collected electronics. Using environmental law and racist, ethnophobic language ("rice paddy", "slum", "counterfeit", "dump", "primitive", "ghoulish", "witches brew", "orphan", "skeletal", "informal" to name a few), and pictures of kids posed on a thirdhand monitor used for a decade in an Accra City office before being sold for scrap to Olu, is going down in history.

I cannot keep doing this alone. Adam, Josh, Josh, Reed, Ramzy, Eric and others need to stop this. Go to Fareed Zakaria. I want no recognition, I'm the John Brown in this story (The Good Lord Bird is great reading, 1/3 through). Crazy. Mad. But willing to sacrifice everything to stop the collateral damage and friendly fire.