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.

There is a good answer to Adam Minter's Secondhand Star Wars Question - why in the future is parts harvesting and repair everywhere, but metal recycling is nowhere? It's answered by another question - why expend energy to destroy fabricated parts with potential reuse? In the future, POPOs Big Lies are forgotten. (Youtube Link "How we think about Recycling is in Need of Repair").

Take the rest from today's 5-tweet Simple Truths. (Photo from AlJazeera False Claim "Ghana's Ewaste Magnet" article represent Fair Use - the photos show goods so old they could NOT have been imported "recently"). Interesting that AlJazeera, of all publications, fell for the twisted "friendly fire" and false claims denigrating Africa's Tech Sector. They are so rabidly anti-colonialist that the POPO OEMs got AlJazeera to fall for the claim that secondhand reuse is exploitation, while the African metal mining subsidies, on which colonial OEMs depend, continues. #RighteousnessTrap

https://twitter.com/WR3A/status/1369983556446003203

Robin I

@WR3A

1/5 No one ever explained to me how "imported from OECD" is somehow an indicator of lower quality used goods, which non-OECD countries should avoid buying.

Madness. Planned Obsolescence conspiracy by OEMs.

Tracking down a 2015 laptop chip repair in Ghana, 2017

If YOU were poor, would arresting you for reuse/fixing stuff help?

2/5 What Planned Obsolescence (e.g. ink cartridge anti-gray-market refillers) needed was a fake statistic like "80% of waste in Lagos was dumped by OECD", or pics of a kid at a dump, or lies about Tech Sector.

Most at Basel Convention party mean well, but lies poisoned the SYSTEM 

3/5 Needy people, uncannily, made do with "good enough" used batteries, used cars, used computers, & provided the critical mass of users necessary for economic investment in cables, towers, and satellites.

Environmentalists fear to admit collateral damage, and big lie persists. 

4/5 Stacks of CRT TVs, imported to Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, do eventually wear out or get upgraded. That is NOT an export crime. The crime was claiming stacks of CRTs 20 hours north of the port in Tamale Ghana, were imported days earlier by Agbogbloshie scrap metal men.

5/5 And the recent crime is posing poor people on top of 50y old stuff to support a false claim, a big lie, about Repair Sectors. OEMs are doing it now to #RightToRepair USA repair shops. 

Privileged producers, subsidized by raw material extraction, denigrate reusers and recyclers.

"BEHIND HER FEET" is an allusion to the Netflix Mystery Series "Behind Her Eyes" (I've watched 3 episodes).  There is a story that the protagonist is trying to uncover... something that belies a false story, a past crime where we cannot figure out who is the victim.  See the water-bearing girl posed on a 1990s computer monitor at the Old Fadama scrapyard in central Accra. Said to represent "the largest e-waste dump on earth", as evidence that Agbogbloshie is a "magnet" for the "world's e-waste".  What I see is a barren landscape. Why, in a metropolis of nearly 5 million people, most of whom own TVs, cell phones, and computers for decades, is there SO LITTLE e-waste?  The answer is that Agbogbloshie scrappers, like Olu Orga of Tamale, harvest anything that can be reused, to provide the "good enough markets" in the Northern Territories like Tamale and Savelugu.

Now watch the PetroChemical (plastics) industry learn to leverage the Big Lie Creator in Seattle (Basel Action Network) to bemoan RECYCLING of plastic rather than oil spilling virgin plastic. "Likely to be" illegal is advice from their attorneys, because they've been proven to know they were lying in the past. Useful idiots...