Environmentalists Must Learn From Misdiagnoses: How CRT TCLP Would Affect Asbestos, Solar

First, by request, here are the photos the blog "Halloween Images of Scary Black People" pointed out a decade ago.  The blog was about language used to flog normal activities, rendering them repulsive - or heroicizing the same image (using Wordsworth's "The Village Blacksmith" to describe metal recycling compared to the way BAN.org described metal recycling at Agbogbloshie).

The BAN NGO was so proud of one photograph - of a man carrying copper and aluminum wiring (from scrap automobile harnesses inside a 1970s Magnavox kitchen tabletop TV case) - that they use it on their website masthead, and in annual fundraisers for "Giving Tuesday".  BAN offers readers who feel sorry for the "primitive" man the chance to donate $25-1000 to their NGO.  How the young man will benefit from your donation isn't exactly clear.

But as we pointed out in 2012, that self-same Magnavox kitchen-table CRT television was very, very, very unlikely to have arrived - as BAN repeatedly claims - "days earlier", or as a result of environmental externalization. Even back in 2012, that 1970s TV was an ebay collector's item selling for over $100. It bore no earthly relation to the TVs BAN or Greenpeace filmed unloaded at African port of Tema in 2009, or Jim Puckett's infamous updated photo of Africa's "primitive" Tech Sector.

Here is a picture of the top selling album in Nigeria in 1978 - by Africa's "Elton John" of the 1970s, the artist crowned as "Prince Nico Mbarga" (whose lilting song "Sweet Mother" from the same album remains Africa's chart-topper to this day).

Soooo, there's no evidence at all that the man in BAN's photo is carrying a TV imported used in 2012, vs. imported new or used in 1977. But BAN's practice of pushing the plastic casing as evidence of environmental injustice is ironically quite bigoted. BAN's unspoken assumption is that if-not-but-for villains like Joe "Hurricane" Benson, Agbogbloshie would be full of swimming and fishing young Michael Ananes, littered only with banana peels and coconut shells.

INTERPOL's (Higgins and Lindemulder) "Project Eden" was cruelly naive about African city waste. 

There wasn't a hint of any scientific method behind BAN's diagnosis before INTERPOL started serving up Project Eden subpoenas.  If anyone had taken to review the number of households per 1000 residents with at least one television, available from IMF and World Bank data (collected when the banks financed one of five hydroelectric dams in Ghana, for example, between 1965 and 2005), or other baseline data (like what's upstream of Guiyu), they'd see that environmental policy can't be left to White Savior Barbie.

The misuse of science actually predates BAN and Greenpeace.  It started when I was a boss at Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s, when Dr. Timothy Townsend mis-applied the Toxic Characteristic Leachate Protocal or TCLP Test to an intact Cathode Ray Tube - and declared the waste hazardous.

Below is a warning for how this would have been a misuse of TCLP if applied to outdoor facing Asbestos tiles - and how it will be a misuse of TCLP if applied to Solar Panels.  Once scientists and environmental engineers use toxic tests of inert, environmentally stable devices (in both cases, permitted outdoors for their intended lives) to scare people with hazardous labels, an industry will develop to monetize the misapplication. Big Shred will be the ironic result, as millions of inert, non-toxic Cathode Ray Tubes were run through shredders rendering them friable and reachable and toxic when they were not, before.

Asbestos:  Dusty, airborne asbestos is a carcinigen. If you breath the dust, you can get lung cancer. That's (overly) simple.  But no one at EPA treated Johns Mansville asbestos TILES - the solid, unbreathable, non-friable, durable hard tiles on the outside of my house - as hazardous. If EPA said "let's do like TCLP and grind the asbestos tiles into dust", then the non-friable (non windborn) tiles would be lumped together with the dusty insulation.  Industry would relish charging for non-blowable, non-inhalable asbestos tiles... and might start to shred them. Imagine, per CRT policy, that Big Shred then "treated" the solid non-friable asbestos tiles as it treated the CRTs - shredding the non-friable (CRT or tile) to render it friable.  So stupid, it's almost unimaginable, except that once EPA did it to CRTs, BAN and others in the charitable industrial complex took it a step further and began treating reused CRTs as "discarded" rather than "sold". And that problem was juiced with scary Halloween descriptions of black people who we imagined had never seen a TV before.

Solar Panels: The next problem waiting for misdiagnosis is surplus solar panels. They are solid, like cathode ray tubes and non-friable asbestos tile. If someone decides to imitate Dr. Timothy Townsend and grind the panels up, some of them may fail for cadmium. Then, industry may label the secondhand market for solar panels hazardous waste, and creating a liability for donors.

This will be disastrous, as the biggest environmental benefit may come from 20% reuse rates. Panels are being "electively upgraded" all the time, when people have a roof repaired, or when it is too difficult to site greenfield solar and therefore more appropriate to upgrade panels.

A 50% efficient panel in West Africa generates more kilowatt energy than a 100% efficient panel in Vermont.  Grinding up 80% of the panels is probably going to be a waste of energy, even if the 20% reuse are indeed captured for reuse.

More on this topic when I present on a panel of solar panel recycling experts, at NERC.org, this fall.