Recap: Spain SETEM's Mobile Social Congress E-Waste Session 2023

Spain

[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.

Scrap Metal Men is a 12-minute documentary set in Agbogbloshie, Ghana... We navigate this landscape by following the daily lives of two 'scrap metal men' as they trade and sell metal through congested Ghanaian city roads and markets.

SETEM has now introduced me to new partners like Appcycle in Ghana, which are trying to establish "formal sector recycling".  Agabas of Appcycle in Tamale has actually hired Yaro Muhammed of Savelugu, one of the "Three Musketeers" of Agbobloshie who find themselves under the lens of almost every documentary (Yaro appeared on the cover of the Washington Post on my very first week at Agbogbloshie... the Washington Post article didn't name him, but said he was 15 years old. He was 26).

Ok, I'm now trying to work with Sara at SETEM to find the prosecutor and defense teams of the "Canary Island 43" whose arrest was initially misreported by a factor of 10 (once you removed the weight of the automobiles they were exporting). The past prosecutions, e.g. of Joe "Hurricane" Benson, were based on poverty porn documentaries claiming "common knowledge" that most of the junk at Agbogbloshie was electronics (ha!) and most of those electronics were "recently imported" - a claim even Jim Puckett refrains from making these days.

My beef with E-Life is that not denial that the Odaw River Lagoon in Accra is polluted - it's very polluted, very tragically polluted.  But it has been that way since the 1970s, before any cell phones were invented, and E-Life tries to correlate the pollution to African importers in the Tech Sector.  I flew Emmanual Nyaletey at my expense to meet Edward Scott-Clarke in person, but Emmanuel's counter point of view - pinned to my Twitter profile years before E-Life aired - was ignored. Instead, E-Life uses the plastic casing of a 1960s era TV (as if it had just been imported) to frame a discussion of pollution while filming young men burning automobile harness wire at the site. There's no sign of a single mobile phone being scrapped anywhere at the site, or evidence of the "primitive gold recovery" alleged by E-Life's white experts. And auto harness wire is from cars, duh.

Ed later said by email (I contacted him after the SETEM show) that he thought I'd made up my mind about his documentary before I even saw it.  I told him if that was true, it was based on Emmanuel Nyalete's description of his interview.

A year before paying for his flight and hotel to meet with E-Life, I had interviewed Emmanuel Nyalete about Agbogbloshie. That was a year before I travelled there with him, Olu Orga, Wahab Odoi, Adam Minter, Jacopo Ottaviana, and others. His interview has been pinned to the top of my Twitter account since 2015. 

Here is where I turn the blog over to OpenAI.chatgpt.com  (mixed results in red, so I go back to my madman furious blogging routine below). 

Give up to two pages of documentation of urban water pollution in major African cities between 1975 and 1995

Urban water pollution is a significant environmental issue in major African cities, particularly between 1975 and 1995. During this period, rapid urbanization, population growth, and industrialization in many African countries led to an increase in water pollution, which posed a threat to public health and aquatic life. This documentation aims to highlight the causes, impacts, and management of urban water pollution in major African cities between 1975 and 1995.

Causes of urban water pollution in major African cities between 1975 and 1995

The main causes of urban water pollution in major African cities during this period include industrialization, agricultural activities, improper sewage disposal, and inadequate waste management systems. Many African countries experienced rapid industrialization and urbanization during this period, resulting in the discharge of various pollutants such as heavy metals, organic chemicals, and untreated sewage into water bodies. Agricultural activities such as irrigation, use of fertilizers and pesticides also contributed to water pollution in some African cities.

Improper sewage disposal was a significant contributor to water pollution in many African cities. Most urban areas lacked proper sewage treatment facilities, and many people disposed of human waste and other sewage into nearby rivers and streams, leading to contamination of water sources. Inadequate waste management systems also contributed to water pollution, as garbage, plastics, and other waste products were often dumped into water bodies.

Impacts of urban water pollution in major African cities between 1975 and 1995

Urban water pollution in major African cities during this period had significant impacts on public health, aquatic life, and the environment. Waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery were common in many African cities due to the contamination of water sources by sewage and industrial pollutants. These diseases caused significant morbidity and mortality, particularly among vulnerable populations such as children and the elderly.

Aquatic life was also affected by water pollution, as pollutants such as heavy metals and organic chemicals were toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms. This led to a...

[NETWORK ERROR]  After 3 attempts to "regenerate response" I'm going to leave this for later, but it's a good example of how to ask ChatGPT the right questions about baseline data rather than ask it to generate a ridiculous essay on Agbogbloshie or African e-Waste.  There is a lot of information pollution out there, created or reinforced by photojournalists and the charitable industrial complex, garbage in for artificial intelligence which is not evidently, by itself, capable of asking itself questions about baseline data.

I told the Mobile Social Congress that information about pollution of the Odaw River Lagoon UPSTREAM of Agbogbloshie, and over decades PREDATING computer and electronic waste, abound in IMF and World Bank reports. When I was asked the root cause of the level of disinformation about "the (not) largest e-waste dump on earth", the answer was simple - liberal racial profiling, and the inability of European documentary filmmakers to distinguish between Africans in the Tech Sector and those burning wires in the scrap sector. Racism doesn't look good in green.  

Liberals wanting to blame ourselves for the problems of the "others" were willing if not anxious to believe that mobile phones upgraded by Western consumers were the root cause of African pollution.  That desire to believe we are guilty led to Project Eden, a trap set up to arrest exporters, and that trap worked tragically well in snaring Joe "Hurricane" Benson and the Canary Island 43 (those accused of exporting e-waste in December 2022). Liberals set a trap, it ensnared Africa's growing, brilliant, diaspora-driven Tech Sector, and Racism prevented anyone in the press from making the critical distinction between African urban city wire burning primary school dropout orphans and technical college graduates who are the root cause of Mass Communications Infrastructure investments on the continent. 

Because I criticize "own goals" by my own team of do-gooders, I've been falsely labelled as a conservative, and I risk being invited as a speaker by cynical Fox News and Breitbart conferences. That could lead to a lucrative Tucker Carleson or Dr. Jordan Peterson career.  Not interested. The ditto-head nodding culture of gotcha is worse on the right than it is on the left. Both schools of thought are more schools of fish following their amygdala. My first ever blog was titled "Speaking to the Herd", and I guess if I die this week that would be a theme.

But this is a celebration that I was NOT invited to Fox News or CPAC, I was invited by the liberal environmentalist Mobile Social Congress, and given an HOUR to address our own inflammation of false negative reporting.

That counts as a bigger win than being elected Student Body President at Carleton College, or winning the Arkansas State High School Debate Championship, or losing my virginity. Tongue firmly in cheek here as nothing I've done is saving the world the way I passionately wanted to.  But I recognize that passion to save the world is a gun going off in the hands of poorly trained reporters executing environmental gotcha reporting like French Revolution guillotine mobs.

Postscript:  Four of my favorite and influential professors at Carleton College passed away or were recognized by Carleton recently.  Bardwell Smith and Hartley Clark passed in 2022. Roy Grow received a classroom memorial dedication.  David P Sipfle had passed away in 2017.

Michael P. Zuckert and his wife Catherine taught a freshman colloquium class on Greek culture and philosophy, where I met some of my longest friendships.  They are still going. I have no idea whether contacting them would be pleasant for them or provide any good memories.

They were all very influential to the development of my thought, philosophy, and practice, but I was equally influenced by C. Perry Thomas and Milton Burle, and even high school colleagues at Fayettevill High School. So that's a way of saying that I'm not real real important as a product of any specific college or classroom, but that those classrooms were important to me and who I became.