[Update: Now my address is on Youtube. And very impressive Battery Recycling Expert Hans Melin Eric comments on Linkedin here]
Three weeks ago I returned from a strange and wonderful invitation to speak to a conference in Barcelona. Spain's Mobile Social Congress closed with my session on a Friday evening following the end of the larger European Mobile World Congress (MWC) which is the equivalent of Europe's CES if CES was specific to mobile phone technology.
Thanks to an invitation from Claudia Bosch and Sara Dominguez and SETEM, I had a chance to "cross-examen" a documentary they'd shown at a previous conference - 2018's E-LIFE by Ed Scott-Clarke. They showed the one-hour documentary, then gave me alone the stage for the next hour.
Now I don't know everyone at SETEM, I only know a couple of people who could not have been surprised when I sharply criticized that documentary. I had a number of facts to share, and I used them.
And I beat that thing like a pinata.
As background, I was interviewed by Ed Scott-Clarke, but not used in the documentary. That's not important. But more importantly, I had flown in Ghana Tech Sector expert Emmanuel Nyaletey - a superb public speaker who grew up very close to Agbobloshie... and Scott-Clarke didn't use him either.
First things first: Who is SETEM? Here's an English translation of their web page.
We are people who want to change the world. We believe in a culture of international solidarity that is respectful of the dignity of the peoples of the South and aimed at denouncing and eradicating the structural causes of inequalities.
The SETEM Federation was born in 1995 as the result of the association of the SETEM associations of different autonomous communities, each with its own legal entity, but all with a common objective: to raise awareness among the Citizens about North-South inequality and its causes, promoting the personal and collective transformations necessary to achieve a fairer world.
So this progressive, environmentalist organization had a few years ago learned about the E-Waste dumpsite of Agbogbloshie and made several trips to "save the Africans"... and while learning more and more about the place, some of my contacts there realized that something wasn't adding up. For one, there was never a sea container. No one has ever seen one there, much less "400 to 500 per month". The materials were being collected by young men with push carts from around the city of Accra... just like the ubiquitous African scrap carters that abound on streets of Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville - and the Canary Islands.
During my hour tearing apart Edward Scott-Clarke's documentary, I had another documentary playing behind me without sound - Scrap Metal Men, In the Life, by Alex Wondergam.
