Part 2: How (too) Quietly The E-Waste Big Lies Are Buried.

 Ok, here's a short but important point about the Basel Convention, and the press releases (like today's from Basel Action Network) that seek to expand it to cover normal non-toxic secondary raw materials like plastic, ROHS compliant circuit boards, and even secondhand reuse.

#FLOWCONTROL

"Non-OECD" meant one thing in 1960 when the (all white country) OECD was assembled (Japan was an afterthought).  "Non-OECD" meant a completely different thing in the mid-1980s when the Basel Convention sought to keep pollution abatement costs / regulations in OECD nations from being subverted through international dumping (like the Trafigura toxic waste scandal of 2006).

"Non-OECD" is, today, a caricature of 72% of the whole world. It's a post-colonial era systemic system of flow control that has been used by Western Nations to try to keep their Big Shred companies from competing against what is now the MAJORITY of manufacturing capacity.

When OECD was established in 1960, and even during the Basel Convention drafting in the 1980s, the manufacturing base that needed raw materials and produced toxic waste was, outside of Japan (and emerging South Korea and Taiwan, ignored as "Non-OECD outliers" in the 80s), the argument could be made that "OECD" was a decent shortcut to define which countries could make the rules about raw material flow control. 

By 2010, 82% of the World Population was in "Non-OECD" nations.  Massively modern and highly regulated environmental oases like Singapore want nothing to do with becoming "OECD", as it's just a way that neighboring hegemonist China might take over Singapore's role in sea container coordination.

It would have been inconceivable when the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development was formed that manufacturing investment would turn out by the chart below, five years ago.

While the Basel Treaty was perhaps unconsciously self-rewarding in the 1990s, it began to take on protectionist undertones by 2001.  China began to ignore Annex IX, B1110 used goods (explicitly legal) in order to protect the nation's manufacturing from competition with reused goods from the west. Europe began to re-define the reuse market Annex - which explicitly allowed goods purchased for the intent of reuse and repair - to require "fully functional, tested working" to correct Europe's math mistakes in over-capacity Big Shred (Europeans assumed that when they electively upgraded their consumer goods, that the goods went into a landfill, which was a brazenly arrogant and stupid assumption which the East Europe used car market had long ago blown to smithereens).

Today, plastics are the raw material which the mighty of the Non-OECD are trying to control the market competition for.  Everyone actually IN the global trade of raw materials knows by now that the facile depiction of "rich" and "poor" nations is a pathological lie. The fact that racial imagery is used to define it is just more of the same - it's about scaring people in the West who have never imagined that the OECD stopped being the center of the manufacturing universe decades ago.

Today - 2021 - the manufacturing base has no more relationship to white countries (er, OECD) than banana consumption. The global market for bananas is as diverse as the global supply of manufactured parts. I can buy bananas cheaper in Sweden than I can out of season in Peru. And the manufacturing, re-engineering, re-manufacturing, warranty returns, thirdhand goods, plastic recycling, ship recycling, etc capacity is a complete non-sequitor when "Non-OECD" is played.

Non-OECD still means, to many people, "@$%hole countries". I've asked Mr. Magoo in Seattle to come off of his "primitive" characterizations for 18 years. The environmental or "green" community has succumbed to #blackwashing its own recycling industry, and its Right to Repair, like a slowly boiled frog that can't recognize the stereotypes coming back to bite.

The use of photos of a 1970s kitchen model CRT Magnavox, carrying automobile harness wire, on a barren landscape, continues to be used to define places like South Africa, which is now one of the largest manufacturing bases for HiSense televisions. Basel Action Network proudly displays the photo below - more than a decade old, when the TV in the photo was finally discarded after 3-4 decades of use, to define people's ability to sort, disassemble, repair and recycle by their race. 

The Chinese "Belt and Road Initiative" is about controlling the flow of goods and raw materials. Basel Convention has eroded into the same waste colonialism, control of the secondary raw materials market. Europe used it for EU's purposes, and now has left the gun on the table for the Non-OECD to use to #flowcontrol the same "waste" commodity markets.

"Because nobody should have to choose between poverty and poison" was the motto, as if that's the end sum of the jobs and consumer ownership that Africans and Asians should be allowed to participate in. Decades later, it does not occur to BAN.org that the image of the plastic 1970s TV case might have been generated by an African household - or by 1970s pop star Prince Nico Mbarga of Nigeria (whose 1977 album featured the same on the record cover).

#FLOWCONTROL

"Non-OECD" went from being un-self-aware racial stereotype in 1960 to "competing with us for raw materials" in the 1990s, and today, the whole flow control issue is slipping into a Chinese "Belt and Road Initiative" gambit.  Europe risks losing control of the whole secondary raw materials market just when Africa is recognized as being a larger supply of scrap automobile metal than Western Europe is.

Mr. Magoo in Seattle is the unwitting accomplice in a massive world struggle to control raw material flows - but ONLY recycled raw material flows.  The Basel Convention does NOTHING to control the actual source of most pollution - virgin material mining.  Which, after all, is where Trafigura's toxic drums trace back to...