Halloween Statistics: Greenpeace Quit Saving the Whales, Now We Must Save the DataJournalists

Happy Halloween!  This year, I'm going as a very scary statistic.

What do we do when someone with a reputation for caring about the poor, caring about endangered species, etc., uses their reputation to convince the Mainstream Press of a false math account? When they create mainstream story that exaggerates the actual problems - many of which are real - they create what #KirstenLinnenkoper labels "The Plastic Boogeyman" in this month's Recycling International.

Somewhere, deep in our amygdala, English Majors are afraid of math. English majors are more likely to become journalists - or "photojournalists" - than they are to be #datajournalists.  And we are seeing this routine over and over again, as a #CharityIndustrialComplex makes up numbers to scare reporters, who seem at a loss over how to fact-check.

Michal Manas, Baled PETE in Czech Republic, Wikimedia Commons

This year, the #fakestat is "Nine Percent".  Greenpeace snuck their own executive summary onto an otherwise sound piece of plastic recycling research.  And they get mainstream press to report that of all single serve plastic containers sold, only 9% of plastic containers are recycled. The conclusion they allow some reporters to leave with is that only 9% of the plastic in this photo above really gets recycled. At least, I heard reporters say that, and so far, Greenpeace and BAN have yet to correct it.

Nine percent sounds really bad. If you are a city, why even bother to pay for collecting those containers? If you are a resident, why bother putting PETE or HDPE into the blue bin? On NPR's "It's Been A Minute" a few months ago, the panel glibly announced SPECIFICALLY that of what you put into a recycling blue bin, only 9% really gets recycled.

Compare that to Aluminum containers. Putting aside that these stats themselves suffer from "Formal Sector" bias (many aluminum cans get recycled in China and Africa and India, where there is no formal "spreadsheet" to track it), the 9% Greenpeace statistic is awful compared to Aluminum Cans.

"Notably, while the Aluminum Association has reported a 45.2% consumer recycling rate for aluminum cans, the RRS analysis uses 38% as the national baseline to reflect the percentage of aluminum that actually makes it to remelting facilities, after material losses that occur during collection and sorting." 2022 Press Release, Ball Systems and RRS

So they divide recycled aluminum cans by all aluminum cans.

collected in the numerator

divided by cans manufactured in the denominator

The numerator of the Aluminum Statistic are tons of aluminum single serve containers documented to be recycled. (formal sector numbers).  Now, look at the Plastic report calculation, covered in Science.org in 2017... TITLE? 

Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made

"As of 2015, approximately 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated, around 9% of which had been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment."  https://lnkd.in/e_wN-t5j

See that? The numerator is plastic recycling - mostly single serve PETE and HDPE containers, though LDPE Film is also legitimately recovered.  All are reclaimed at higher than 9% rates - if we measure it the way aluminum cans are measured.  But if you follow the link to the study, the DENOMINATOR is all plastic ever produced.  Greenpeace divides the captured recycling containers and divides them by bottles PLUS child car seats, underground PVC pipe, auto bumpers, etc.

Recycled bottles in the numerator, divided by ALL PLASTIC EVER PRODUCED

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In 2005, a year before I started this Blog, retired Greenpeace Founder Patrick Moore published this in the Miami Herald - the same time BAN and Greenpeace started press releases about "ewaste exports"
http://greenspiritstrategies.com/the-environmental-movement-greens-have-lost-their-way/

Special to the Miami Herald

January 28, 2005

Scare tactics, disinformation go too far

I  am often asked why I broke ranks with Greenpeace after 15 years as a founder and full-time environmental activist. I had my personal reasons, but it was on issues of policy that I found it necessary to move on.

By the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. I became aware of the emerging concept of sustainable development: balancing environmental, social and economic priorities. Converted to the idea that win-win solutions could be found by bringing all interests together, I made the move from confrontation to consensus.

Since then, I have worked under the banner of Greenspirit to develop an environmental policy platform based on science, logic and the recognition that more than six billion people need to survive and prosper every day of the year. The environmental movement has lost its way, favoring political correctness over factual accuracy, stooping to scare tactics to garner support.

We’re faced with environmental policies that ignore science and result in increased risk to human health and ecology. To borrow from the vernacular, how sick is that?

Why We Must Recycle (A Cross Reference Blogger to Linkedin Post)

Basel Action Network's Relentless Racism Against Africa's Tech Sector May Succeed

For years, Basel Action Network has insisted on fake statistics about e-waste "loopholes" in the Basel Convention.  The original Basel Convention, in Annex IX, explicitly exempts reuse and repair of electronics from "waste" definitions (list B1110).

BAN's Jim Puckett was a film major, and when he advised someone I was taking with me to see reuse factories in China, Jim told him to "take pictures of children on the scrap".  His other tactic was to make up statistics that were so alarming that they made people accept that it must be terrible. If 80% of X results in something bad, there must be something wrong with X.

- homosexuality, atheism, swimming.... if 80% of it is bad, make it illegal?

https://resource.co/article/basel-convention-require-informed-consent-e-waste-exports

Depressingly, Ghana (which never signed or ratified the Bamako Convention, and consequently benefited by massive mass communications investments, leapfrogging Mali) has its name on a Ghana-Swiss proposal to finally change the Basel Convention to make import of used electronics de facto defined as "waste".  See my comments to Resource Magazine, (Amelia Kelly) which made the mistake of interviewing Basel Action Netwwork but not the Tech Sector importers who are capable of speaking on their own behalf.

"There are 170,000+ mobile phone towers on the African continent today, thanks to the "critical mass of users" of flip phones which BAN tried to stop the export of a decade ago. The privileged wealthy white guy gets to define what is "waste", and the African tech sector experts who made the mobile phone tower investments possible are profiled as "Primitives" or at best "Informal Sector" (as if not knowing how smart they are is a reason to prosecute them). Free Hurricane Joe Benson." - Robin Ingenthron

 This guy loses his job, and the displays get ground up for raw materials... and doesn't get to reply to Jim Puckett's quote (below the fold)

Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 2: Lithium and Indium

The photo below is actually related to blog 2, the problem of under-investment in recycling rare earths. $300 million for EV battery recycling may be too much, but $0 for indium may be too little.

Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 2: Lithium and Indium 

We need to be "small c" conservatives. "It doesn't take a genius to see the world has real problems, but it would take a whole roomful of morons to think [throwing government money] can fix it." (paraphrase from The Watchmen, 2009). Or better yet, yes, do fund these programs (at least to the degree government has subsidized mining and nuclear energy development), but make sure you have conservatives managing conservation.

The Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 1 took a critical "what could go wrong" with well-intentioned environmental policy to supply Electric Vehicles with recycled content Lithium batteries, focusing on a Wall Street Journal article on the shortage of Lithium batteries for planned "recycled content", and a more detailed focus on the need for more mining by Hans Eric Melin.

Government funding of Lithium recycling capacity ($200M in the "Inflation Act" budget) may not make a lot of sense if there's a shortage of batteries to recycle... or if it requires cannibalization of reuse markets.  The hospital shouldn't build a morgue so big that it needs to toe-tag every patient to feed it.

But the history of nuclear power - funded enormously by government research - may make a different case.

To make the case that it does make sense to invest SOME government funding in recycling, I'll now focus on the opposite problem - I can't find a buyer for indium bearing "black glass" from our Good Point Recycling flat screen TV reuse and recycling program.