Recent E-Waste News Predicted by Good Point Ideas Blog

News headlines travel faster these days through my @WR3A Twitter account and LinkedIn. As compared to the blog, those social media venues compete better for shorter attention spans (including yours truly).

The beat goes on.

That said, it's worth it to link today's news to the paradigms long established in the blog.

For example, former E-Stewards Executive Director has retired rather fitfully, and gone on record that both the R2 and E-Stewards Certifications are flawed... flawed in a way that this blog described a decade ago as follows - They don't know what they are talking about and are making it up as they go along.

Akers told me he was somewhat censored by Resource Recycling editors who are trained to flinch by angry outbursts from Jim "A Place Called Away" Puckett. He filled some gems in by email, but the Op-Ed itself is damning enough.

In My Opinion: Does today’s industry need e-Stewards or R2?

I’ve looked at the IRS 990 filings for both Basel Action Network (BAN), the owner of the e-Stewards standard, and Sustainable Electronics Recycling International (SERI), the owner of R2. The most recent filings publicly available online for both organizations cover 2019.

BAN’s filing shows gross revenue of $838,358 with total expenses of $817,088 for a net gain of $21,270 (the year prior, BAN had a net loss of $77,785). The organization reported only $83,351 in grant revenue, meaning the bulk of the revenue is from e-Stewards. The executive director was paid $133,741. Spending on travel totaled $39,234 and spending for advertising was $7,514. Another $314,701 was spent on other salaries.

The SERI filing shows gross revenue at $1,746,118, salaries of $508,775 and a net revenue of $742,097. The executive director was paid $159,650. Certification fees brought in $1,689,774 in revenue.

Both filings raise some questions. For BAN: Is this program sustainable? What happens to my e-Stewards certification if BAN folds? BAN is mostly a one-man show. What happens if that individual retires or becomes ill? Is there a business-continuation plan to protect my investment in an e-Stewards certification? Was any money spent on advertising to help drive business to e-Stewards or just to recruit more companies into the certification pipeline?

For SERI, the main question is: Is any of its revenue spent to help drive business to R2 recyclers?...

The main question really is: How much of those membership fees are being spent to aid the certified recyclers in the marketplace?

From looking at the 990 filings, the answer is not much.

Pouty Puckett has yet to respond in public to Akers cards on the table, though SERI's Corey Dehmey tried to direct us away from the man behind the curtain, and back to the Wizard of Obfuscation with his response last week.

The difference between R2's SERI and E-Stewards BAN responses to Akers is telling. SERI tries to bore us back to business as usual, but even their own defense opens them to questions raised here in the blog about the TAC or Technical Advisory Committee, which SERI's Op-Ed response claims is proof of industry consensus.  In fact, as pointed out here in the blog, SERI for 5 years deliberately stacked the TAC committee with insiders, left half the seats vacant, failed (as required in the ANAB by-laws) to forward nominees to the TAC to the Executive Board, and actually explained it by saying a larger board which included overseas buyers and residential sector recyclers would "make the changes too difficult to achieve consensus".  In other words, a minority of recyclers was re-writing the standard, and deliberately using a systematic bias through a lack-of-quorum to give specific advantages to the ITAD committee members.... when the majority of tonnage managed through certification is residential.

But watch out for BAN's response. From my personal experience, it will be personal. Jim Puckett, according to people I believe, has been making ad hominem attacks against me and my friends for more than 15 years, based on my questioning his now abandoned as false claims about 80% Exports. The fake stat was all through the press, and Jim was the source of every article. A Place Called Away, describing a ludicrous-speed dumping of "millions of tons" at Agbogbloshie, is the place to start if you want proof Jim is a liar. He re-published it in 2019, in a report that documented that 4% of the GPS devices BAN issued in Europe were exported. Only 4%, in their own biased (no CRTs sampled) study... as you read here, Jim was shameless, manipulating the data that disproved his claims to say "the UK was the biggest culprit" (15% exports). 

As documented here in reporting on Basel Convention Secretariat funded studies, 15% is perfectly acceptable and useful as a percentage of exports. What Jim's 2019 report did was distract from the fact it disproved his claims, dog-whistling @GuardianEco and other knee-jerk anti-globalist press that black people cannot be trusted with used electronics - with photos that show nothing at all wrong except the color of the skin of the repair person. Jim himself posed himself taking the picture of the African monitor repair operation, which had no mixed e-waste, no CRTs, all inspected non-random monitors for reuse. 

Whether Jim himself is a racist is a question for academics. What he is, as Akers notes, is a non-science film major. At the most recent E-Scrap Conference in Chicago, I showed him that one of his more crazy claims that a 1970 kitchen Magnavox TV in Nigeria on a kids head was "recently dumped" was more likely the 1979 TV on the cover of Prince Nico Mbarga's "Sweet Mother" album. "I took that photo, I don't understand your point", and he turned away.

So this blog is basically a historical example of a lifelong environmentalist - Robin Freeland Ingenthron of Fayetteville Arkansas and Middlebury Vermont - building up anti-bodies over decades. This is how you stand up to bullyboys like Jim Puckett. You spend nearly 20 years documenting that you care not just about the environment, but about false claims and collateral damage. If you are lucky - as I have been - your video of Joe "Hurricane" Benson - the biggest victim by far of Jim Puckett's shameless 80% "statistic" - gets viewed by people like Adam Minter, Josh Lepawsky, Jenna Burrell, Samantha McBride, Robin Nagle, Ramzy Kahat, and many others who have the patience to add and subtract facts and fictions.

Also in recent news - and deliberately buried here far below the blog fold because I hate to even give the story a link - is evidence that Jim's tactics will outlive him.

@GuardianEco runs a story claiming that World Health Organization "reports" that 29% of Nigeria's environmental harm is from e-waste management. What an incredibly precise number, 29%. But there is no report. There is nothing at WHO website indicating there's a report. There's nothing by which to assess a key question - 

29% of WHAT? Cases? Cost? Pollution levels? Case Fatality Rates? Lung cancer? There's just a guy who claims to be a consultant to WHO who says that 29% of something bad in Nigeria is linked to "chemicals in used electronics" that somehow effect "the lungs".  

Like Mike "Fishing as a Boy" Anane, and Awal "Sony made in France" of Savelugu, Africans are learning from Jim Puckett to use specificity of a claim as evidence of expertise or knowledge. What Discard Studies "Criminal Negligence" referred to as modest claims "built" on gathered "facts" build into a narrative. If you have the gumption of Jim Puckett, you will make a very specific claim about a percent, get it cited by various press, then cite the press as your source.

The "fallacy of specificity" relies on the public's assumption that a very specific number is more reliable - and a guess is more likely to pass as a "fact" if it's shrowded in decimals. The press then is used by the Certification Sellers as proof that a) a problem exists, and b) only they can solve it, and c) that solving it justifies paying them money.

The blog was long ago alerted by an astute comment from @AdamMinter that stories like this get past the editors desk during holiday weekends. The Guardian has a staffer who recently reached out to me for an hour zoom interview, so I have hope... but if he tells Jim Puckett he is talking to me, the arrows will fly. Prema George, the replacement to Bob Akers, did not respond to my LinkedIn invitation - but Jim Puckett told me at the Chicago Conference that "he knew" I had reached out to her.

Christine Beling, a colleague at EPA in New England, told me in 2006 (I have not used her name before) that she had approached Jim Puckett without telling him that she knew me as well as she did, to ask his opinion. He tried to shank my reputation with a jagged reference that I was a "big exporter". When I was in high school in Arkansas, I shrugged off being called a N** lover, and did so with pride, giving multiculturalism a big wet kiss in front of white supreme bullies. I'm not a hero, but I got anti-bodies. And perhaps that's the lesson of the blog.

This tactic of angry scolding has also been documented by academics and former Basel Convention Director Kummer-Pierry, and documentarian Juan Solera - all on the receiving end of Jim Puckett's self-righteous temper tantrums. And long time readers of the blog know there was no bigger target of Puckett's pouty wrath than Robin Ingenthron. The mysterious planting of the GPS device by MIT resulted in a wrongful claim by Puckett which MIT legal department recoiled from. This is asymmetrical warfare, I throw facts at the naked empower from the bushes.

I'm happy to have drawn the fire, and survived. I'd like to think that had an effect in embolding @DiscardStudies, @Rubbishmaker, Bob Akers, and others afraid of cyber lynch mobs on the left and right. I don't spend as much time finding new heroes and heroines like @GraceAkese or @EmmanuelNyalete, but I see the #OwnVoices movement taking ownership of their own discarded material. 

R2 and BAN are not the vatican, and Galileo and Copernicus have nothing to worry about in the long run. Happy to have drawn fire, sad that it was late in shutting down #cringeworthy "Project Eden".

March on.