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.
These lies are about places, places an undergrad student can research with Google Maps, or Facebook. Places you can type in this blog's search box, and find links to facts and proof that #righttorepair isn't just under attack in the USA and Europe - it's being napalmed with lies about emerging markets.
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| No Good Point Recycling is not burying e-waste in my Vermont yard this morning... |
1. Guiyu, China. Exporting Harm claimed to have water samples from Guiyu, China which showed evidence of toxic e-waste practices. It was a "hook" for CBS's Granatstein and many others.
Read the study. There is no "upstream" sample, no before-and-after, and no description of exactly what electronics recycling process would release arsenic, etc. Much later, Shanghai-based reporter Adam Minter asked me what he should look for in Guiyu. I told him the chip reuse market, and what industries were upstream (I had never been to Guiyu, but could deduce both based on the logistics and economics, and the BAN.org Exporting Harm water samples). Adam found a huge, multi-story, IC chip remarketing hub (the only explanation for Guiyu to outbid EU for boards from East Coast USA). Upstream, he witnessed China's largest tannery and textile mills dumping water directly into the river.
We are nearing the 20th anniversary of Exporting Harm, and it's still being lied about.
2. Foshan, Guandong, China. CBS 60 Minutes claimed to "follow the trail" of thousands of CRT monitors in Hong Kong to Guiyu. There wasn't a CRT monitor to be seen there. They went primarily to remanufacturing factories in Foshan. CBS was given photos.
Scott Pelley and Jim Puckett circled import yards in Hong Kong filled with 1990s era 17-inch CRT desktop monitors. Jim Puckett uses the line "dirty little secret" to tell Pelley that the CRTs are not reused, but processed primitively for raw materials. I gave Michelle Rey (Granatstein's colleague) film of the actual CRT remanufacturing factories in Foshan, south of Hong Kong. CBS claimed the monitors went to Guiyu, north of Hong Kong. The economics and logistics, again, were impossible. But Granatstein's team got a Polk Award for the story (Wasteland), and it led to a massive INTERPOL crackdown (cringeworthy-titled "Project Eden") to shut down the re-manufacturing, repair and reuse industry.
Thirteen years ago. Foshan China SKD factories are still being lied about.
3. Basel, Switzerland. Basel Convention Annex IX explicitly said that reuse and recycling not intended for or resulting in release of illegal toxic waste (Annex VIII) is legal. BAN.org - despite having written letters to Basel Convention protesting the Annex IX "loophole" - repeatedly claimed that USA recyclers were "violating international law".
Even though the law requires no travel or eyewitness investigation, reporters consistently repeated the lie that export for recycling and reuse were illegal or suspicious under the Basel Convention. It's mindless reporting to repeat such a boldface lie. The number of publications (Guardian, BBC, Independent, Economist, Time, CNN, NYT) which simply repeated the white-is-black claim is scary. It's like watching a child being labelled a terrorist (repair is illegal dumping?) based on the fact it is a child. Nothing stupider. Scary.
4. Old Fadama, Accra, Ghana. The industrial area of Old Fadama in central Accra is the home of a normal sized urban scrapyard - Agbogbloshie - in the middle of Ghana's capital city. It is not a "fishing village", or the"biggest e-waste dump on earth".
Despite photographic evidence from the accusers proving it cannot possibly come close, the press proved liberals can hear their own dog whistles. They reported Agbogbloshie Ghana receiving hundreds of sea containers of 80% waste per month, despite zero sea containers ever ever ever shipped there. Despite film of young scavengers collecting 40 year old junk TVs with scrap metal in push carts through a metropolis of 3M urban Africans, a photo of a sea container unloading CRT televisions recently imported to the port of Tema, carefully stretch wrapped and padded in the container after Joe Benson claimed to have purchased them from a hotel takeout (upgrade of working CRTs to flat screens).
The lie is obvious. Prima Facia.
5. Hong Kong's EcoPark. The EcoPark opened in 2016, with a modern $250M investment in legal electronics scrap recycling. It was called "primitive" and a "rice paddy" after GPS trackers put in scrap printers were found there.
Hong Kong is wealthier than California. Printers were massively overrepresented there because the Hong Kong EPA classified them as legal to import, non-hazardous waste. BAN wrote letters objecting to Hong Kong's classification. MIT Senseable City Lab was given evidence of all of this shenanigans, but never followed up, despite being offered several Ph.Ds who could describe the goings-on. The printers that were outdoors were the result of a construction delay at EcoPark. The legal recycling company owners explained they met with the Hong Kong EPA and were told printer scrap can be processed outdoors, display devices and PCs could not be. The fact that the scrapyard PBS was brought to had printers, printers, and only printers, backs up their claims. PBS never set foot at EcoPark, never interviewed the importers, and relied on BAN to tell them what they were filming.
Honorable mention (6th Defamed Man)
6. Punjab / Faisalabad. India and Pakistan don't have a single accused city - they are more often referred to as "national" e-waste dumps. But almost everything in every photo is clearly not recently imported - many of the devices shown as evidence of import are selling on ebay for $150 at antiques or "vintage" collectibles.
I hesitate to put the geographic location on the blog, lest I do to the valedictorians there what I accidentally did to my friends in Penang, Malaysia (another top ten in recycling's anti-defamation case). But we tracked the GPS tracker BAN and MIT listed in the 2016 Monitour report... it had one of the most detailed positions, indicating it was in an urban area with lots of mobile phone towers. The CRT monitor - one of the few tracked - was traced to a Faisalibad seller of monitor-to-TV conversion kits.
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