The previous blog opened with a some photojournalism chestnuts from a decade ago - when Greenpeace slipped reporters a mickey, and showed journalists a sea container full of identical CRT TVs from a hotel upgrade shipped to Tema, Ghana - and then a 70 year old black and white Magnavox kitchen table TV housing in Agbogbloshie. What should have been proof that Agbogbloshie was an #ewastehoax was passed around as evidence of #environmentalinjustice.
There IS environmental injustice on display - it's when Western NGOs conflate the recent importer, the valedictorians in the Tech Sector, the "Geeks of Color", with wire-burning "primitive" recyclers from the slums who eventually gather used imports after DECADES of reuse in the #goodenoughmarket.
This week, we see evidence of the same tactic, via another NGO. "How Romania Turned Into an Illegal Dumping Ground for EU Waste".
Check out these photos from the article, which claims that "rusting" metal farm equipment is "burned" in Romania landfils. Shocking, but not in the way the writer intended.
The claim that the "rusty" meatals are "burned in landfills" after being purchased in Western Europe is bigoted, stupid, and every bit as stupid as the 2010 claims that Joe Benson was importing the 1970 kitchen Magnaox watched by Prince Nico Mbarga.
Property Colonialism
The photos at the top of the article clearly show legal ferrous metal scrap. It's explicitly totally legal in the Basel Convention under Annex IX, list B. As evidence that it's legal, I've shares several times in the Basel Action Network's letter of PROTEST against it being legal. And BAN's listing of the UN Agency tat supported the legality (UN Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD) on BAN's "wall of shame".
Scroll down a bit and the FRERL Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty shows a garbage dump in Romania, one that appears to me like any city dump - mostly plastic packaging, and I don't see any ferrous or non-ferrous metal at all.
The wealthy who can't distinguish between valuable scrap and discarded waste label those who are smart about the distinction as "victims" or "primitives" or "criminals" - all at once, in the same article.
New Vocabulary Term: Property Colonialism. This is borrowed or adapted from the term Waste Colonialism coined by Adam Minter in 2020's Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale. Adam does ask why wealthy white people's "waste" vocabulary is deemed the "correct" language. But by calling it "waste" he's succumbing to the same language.
This is about property rights. The Right To Repair, when practiced by Africans and Asians, is disliked by Original Equipment Manufacturers who have fought bitterly and asymetrically against the "gray market" for decades - since before the publication of Vance Packard's 1960 bestseller "The Waste Makers".
Adam Minter makes no mistake and has shined welcome light on the bittersweet plight of the #RightToRepair - and RIGHT TO RECYCLE - in the former colonies. The poor take a rich person's broken thing and make it ready for the good enough market, creating a critical mass of users which supports the infrastructure for data, internet, mobile communication, TV stations, etc.
But it applies equally to the scrap sector, the recycling trade Adam profiled in his 2015 best seller "Junkyard Planet". Labelling scrap as "waste export" and then taking a picture of NOT SCRAP works well enough on do-gooders.
The OEMs are already running ads in the USA that depict farmers, independent auto mechanics, and Do It Yourself DIYers as stalkers, data thieves, people stalking out daughters. I hesitate to compare anything to Emmet Till, but when you see what the charitable industrial complex did to Joe "Hurricane" Benson, and how few Americans and Europeans have offered an apology or even a second guess, it says a lot about Colonialism.
Gold and Ivory extraction followed the speartip of Christian Missionaries, and Planned Obsolescence is making the same property theft via the blind to fact NGOs who fundraised mightily on Joe Benson's false accusations.
Ok I'm repeating myself for 15 years. But more people are coming around and smelling just how bad a job environmentalist tools did in identifying Environmental Injustice, and the perverse way it was made to claim more and more material property from the Emerging Markets.
You arrested and jailed people for repairing stuff because they are black. The Right To Repair movement needs to quietly address Jim Ok Boomer Puckett's 1974 racist collateral damage. Look what Jim tried to do to ME, personally, to shut me up (Chicago Patch, dropping dime to EPA, GPS tracker not randomly distributed to my client with no public drop off). I'm a white educated blogger, capable of defending myself. But when I see the awful things Puckett has done to hard working, skilled repair and recycling people, and how his efforts are funded by Big Shred and Planned Obsolescence, I can't believe how long it is taking to correct the lynching.
https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-garbage-asia-european-union/31429822.html
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