5. How Too Quietly Big EWaste Lies Buried: Top Five E-Waste Lies Mapped

Let's ReMap the Five Biggest E-Waste Lies (before the April Fool's Blog traditionally comes out).  In Part Five, let's look at five geographic places the bodies of the truth were buried underneath a pile of false narratives and bogus "E-waste Export" claims. If you are doing a thesis or term paper on electronics recycling this semester, take the blue pill and see how normal ordinary places were sensationalized with poverty narratives despite prima facia evidence that the story was bogus.

We can forgive reporters and news producers like Solly Granatstein (CBS 60 Minutes) at the proximate time that they report. We can roll our eyes at well-meaning do-gooders who react to false claims with alarm, out of a sense of liability. 

But I question why so few reporters do as Ira Glass did following his sharing of Mike Daisy's Foxconn exaggerations and lies. This American Life is alone in re-tracing its steps, and learning that activists and environmentalists are not immune from biased reporting, sensationalism, and creating bricks that build the House of Big Lies.

The Big Lies are about PLACES visible on Google Earth. Please, I need some unprejudiced university student help to link and map these, and I can provide the photos.

1.Guiyu.

2. Foshan

3. Basel

4. Accra

5. Hong Kong

Punjab / Faisalabad is the Sixth Man... Penang, Malaysia gets honorary mention.

Part 3: How (too) Quietly the Big Ewaste Lies are Buried ("Behind Her Feet")

BEHIND HER FEET 

Conversation about my 5- Twitter Post today (different photo mashup).

Thesis:  Post Colonialist OEMs continue to benefit from virgin raw material extraction, which was opposed 50 years ago by Environmental Activists. Today, the Planned Obsolescence Privileged OEMs (POPOs) have twisted environmental laws to inflict collateral damage on the #RightToRepair and #Reuse Tech Sector.

They do it with #PovertyPorn, and lies about exports being dumped 80% of the time in small city scrapyards like Agbogbloshie. They use our enviro sense of shame about out own consumption to trick us into shredding stuff that poor people need and want, lest it be one day discarded by the poor after decades of reuse. We unwittingly fell for a Ptolemy Story, that the Circular Economy Revolves around White Countries. We let our atonement #RighteousnessTrap for colonialist past crimes distract from the Mining, Forestry, Petroleum and other Subsidized goods.  Without the raw material and energy subsidies, and extraction from the global south, the value of Secondhand Goods would increase to full potential.