First a disclaimer - one cannot review, fairly, a book which one has yet to read. I have only read the electronics recycling chapter published in The Guardian, which features in part WR3A member Evans Quaye, who Oli spent time with in Accra.Evans honestly has one of the most modest shops in Ghana, but he did an excellent job of convincing Mr. Franklin-Wallis that the "export bad" story was not remotely fair to Africa's Tech Sector. The chapter ends not with so much a conclusion, but a confusion... cognitive dissonance isn't the ultimate success, but in The Guardian's Environmental newsroom, it represents incredible progress. Oli gets an A.
Another chapter of Wasteland was positively reviewed last week at The New Yorker. I had to have a follow up chat with Oli when when I got halfway through the New Yorker review by Elizabeth Kolbert @ElizKolbert).
Her concluding paragraphs include a very fair analysis by Oli Franklin-Wallis, which for The Guardian Environment standards deserves an A+. The next to last paragraph of the New Yorker article -
There are also practical hurdles. Precisely because plastic is now ubiquitous, it’s difficult to imagine how to replace all of it, or even much of it. Even in cases where substitutes are available, it’s not always clear that they’re preferable. Franklin-Wallis cites a 2018 study by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency which analyzed how different kinds of shopping bags compare in terms of life-cycle impacts. The study found that, to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times and a cotton tote would have to be used an astonishing seventy-one hundred times. “How many of those bags will last that long?” Franklin-Wallis asks. Walker-Franklin and Jambeck also note that exchanging plastic for other materials may involve “tradeoffs,” including “energy and water use and carbon emissions.” When Schaub’s supermarket stopped handing out plastic shopping bags, it may have reduced one problem only to exacerbate others—deforestation, say, or pesticide use.Very fair. But the New Yorker article is titled "How Plastics are Poisoning Us", and it's hard to get to the end of the article without thinking it's based on Penn and Teller's 2004 "Recycling is BS" The LAST paragraph bears Elizabeth Kolbert's conclusion.
It also wasn’t all that long ago that we got along just fine without Coca-Cola or packaged guacamole or six-ounce bottles of water or takeout everything. To make a significant dent in plastic waste—and certainly to “end plastic pollution”—will probably require not just substitution but elimination.
It is hard for me to imagine that readers of this New Yorker article are more likely to wash out their plastic bottles and recycle them. And my fear is that it's a perfect recipe for the current state of affairs - conspiracy theories, shaming, suspicion - that young people may throw recycling as a practice in the rubbish bin as an "ok boomer" moral licensing scheme. If the defending recycling is complicated, convenience becomes the enemy, and there's nothing more convenient than giving up.
It seems to those of us in the recycling industry that most coverage of recycling is dismissive or downright anti-recycling, but that coverage of the only alternatives - mining, petrorefining, and forestry - is too rare. It's less costly for a reporter to get to a city dump - Agbogbloshie is 20 minutes from the airport, 10 from Movenpick hotel - but the publisher or photojournalist gets the same "exotic Africa" credit as if they had visited Kabwe, or the mining portrayed in Siddharth Kara's "Cobalt Red".
"Here's a question that I genuinely want the answer to, I'm not trolling:
"I agree that people in the global south, or whatever you want to call it, should be traded with the same as anywhere else, and deserve the same praise for eco initiatives etc. So my question is: do they not then also deserve the same protections as we'd give ourselves?
because it sounds like you're saying 'don't report it when bad stuff happens because it might discourage people entirely'. But if you don't, you're ignoring injustices (often, it must be said, by s***y practices at our end, not theirs)."
I returned his DM with a clumsy history lesson on how property values and labor costs always affect relocations, and gave him examples in US history - enforcement of Blackstone River protection from textile manufacturing waste caused the textile industry to move from MA to the Carolinas, for example.
Just as Oli correctly assessed that there is a math treachery in the Danish study - that switching from plastic to cloth or paper is lazy lifecycle analysis - he must look at the choice these workers have in finding jobs in their emerging markets.
- Agriculture is honorable, but it's a dead end in many senses of the term.
- Government employment - army, police, fonctionaires - is a better living but a "sharp elbow" culture that adds nothing to the GDP.
- Multinational corporations may open factories for workers to make Nikes instead of recycling plastic, I guess, but The Guardian apparently attacks them too.
- Poaching, child trafficking, Boka Haram... there are lots of other AWFUL ways to make bread.
- But the second worst for the workers is MINING. COBALT RED. DEFORESTATION. Virgin material consumption is harder to visualize, because they tend to be out in the rain forest and don't allow photographers.
- So the photographers shoot the recyclers and repair sector because they are more accessible.
- And "Shipped to" implies active rather than passive activity. Virtually everything "shipped" is "imported by", and when Oli says "we don't know where it goes", he's speaking for himself, not for me and many others in the recycling industry.
Yes, we must respect the environmental good the Indonesians in the photos below are doing. And while they do deserve to eventually have the same protections Western workers enjoy, everyone always starts from where they are. The example of auto battery recycling, which I'll get to in a minute, shows how progress was made over 3 decades, not by banning exports, but by investing in them.
Above are photos from a tour my company made of a plastic recycling operation in Indonesia. The Asian plastic recyclers we visited 20 years ago were certainly not perfect, but like the so-labeled "e-waste" exports on reuse, they were hardly guilty of the environmental damage by alternatives - incineration and virgin material refining. And it's naive to think that if those photographed above were not making recycled pellets out of old electronic plastic that they would not then be carrying sacks of virgin, non-recycled plastic to feed their injection molding machine. If reporters say "we don't know where it goes", they need to be specific about who "we" is. The buyers all know who they are, and in my experience, it's a myth that they are hiding.
If we continue worldwide to consume tons of "Stuff", isn't it better for a higher percentage of the "stuff" to be made out of recycled content instead of mined/refined virgin material? And if you enforce OECD standards as a condition of trade with the recyclers and repair sector, and "pretend" that the same rate of repair and recyclable sortation can and will be done by rich countries, it is a "wish-path" forward that will only lead to more mining etc.
Here is what I'm warning about. It's a case study based on a story that got very wide coverage, in 1994.
In 1994, I was a very young Deputy Division Director at MA DEP, where I was being promoted from Recycling Programs Director. So I was asked to provide talking points to the Commissioner's Press Secretary on the new Greenpeace paper saying that scrap leaded batteries should not be sold back to the countries that manufacture the new batteries because poor people would get poisoned, and you who recycled your battery share the blame.
Would I want my children recycling leaded car batteries in Thailand or the Philippines? No. But if they worked making new car batteries in Thailand or the Philippines, I'd rather that they be doing it with recycled content instead of making my other children mine lead at the Kabwe Zambia lead mine to make the same number of batteries without recycled content.
Oli's question to me ignores my math-based perspective. For every car battery or PETE bottle NOT sold to the manufacturer, either a) someone somewhere is driving a car without a battery or not purchasing a PETE plastic carpet for every ton we didn't sell, or b) the car and carpet sales do NOT stop when you stop recycling, and the whole world got worse. The perfect was the enemy of the good, a French philosopher might say.
To my recollection, the Greenpeace attack on lead acid battery recycling was one of the first "Recycling Is Garbage" stories that now break out like a recurring blister to feed journalism's "gotcha" addiction. Classic "man bites dog". Doing a story that paper recycling saves trees, bottle recycling preserves landfills, recycling creates jobs, was sooo 1970s. Now if recycling is actually NOT good, THAT's a story worthy of John Jonah Jameson Jr.
Here's what Greenpeace uncovered. Auto battery recycling was being described as a success. 85% of new lead acid batteries were recycled content in 1994, and there were landfill bans across the country, universal participation rates.
Greenpeace investigators in 1994 announced that they had tested lead levels in workers and that, for example, "hair samples from local residents living around lead smelters in Indonesia and the Philippines showed levels of lead far in excess of previously known levels" (Which appear to be zero, the "baseline data" issue that bedevils this and future #gotcharecycling reports).
Look, I told everybody, Greenpeace is describing a lead smelter.
Lead smelters are notorious. They supply the lead that is used to make billions of car batteries.
Smelters employ millions of workers. Those jobs are incredibly dicey, and it's true they are easier to perform in countries with low property values. Note I did not say "poor regulation" or "non-enforcement". Property values, even in rich countries, define the amount of tax dollars available to pay environmental regulators to protect those real estate values. This was being viewed by Greenpeace and others as a race-laced "environmental injustice", and without getting into the weeds about the history of property segregation, it's ultimately a crime likely to be enforced against in civil if not criminal court if the offensive effluent creeps near to a millionaire property owner.
The defining issue is demand for lead acid batteries. WHAT ARE THE MILLIONS OF LEAD ACID BATTERIES "MADE OF"?
There are two types of lead smelter - Greenpeace had visited neighborhoods around Secondary (Recycled content) lead smelters.
- Tonolli do Brazil
- Ido Era Muli Logam (Indonesia)
- Alco Pacific (Mexico)
- Philippine Recyclers
- ACME (Taiwan)
- Bergso Metals (Thailand)
These were financed directly or indirectly by automobile manufacturers - and ultimately by everyone buying cars. This is how the economy - circular or cascading or disposable - works. We buy cars with a battery and with our money the car manufacturer finds a battery, one we the consumer generally prefer to be of the "affordable" variety.
Greenpeace had stumbled upon the fetishism - predominantly white guilty fingerprints - and was creating a powerful fundraising opportunity. And Oli Franklin-Wallis and other reporters mean well as they struggle to make the point to me that"holding up the mirror" will force improvements.
They are certainly have a point about that. But what actually happened in 1994 was that Greenpeace lost the case with Basel, because level heads knew that the percentage of recycled, secondary smeltered lead in the cars would otherwise be replaced with virgin leaded ore.
Today, because Greenpeace lost, Auto battery recyclers like international Clarios are winning awards from Pure Earth Institute (formerly Blacksmith Institute, see 2015 blogs about Abogbloshie starting with an A and being at the top of an alphabetical list). Clarios was listed as one of the "World's Most Ethical Companies" by Ethosphere in 2023. So take a look below at the recycling process Clarios uses in making new auto batteries out of scrap auto batteries both generated in and "exported to" "imported by the same countries Greenpeace described the hairs of.
So back to 1994 - Greenpeace did probably help incentized clean recyclers like Clario. But clean recycling is also always the natural economic evolution in emerging markets, in my experience.
What's the score between Oli and Robin? I've conceded that the situation is improving in lead acid battery recycling globally. And I'm aware that Greenpeace pointing to secondary lead smelters had a part to play. But so does income in these emerging markets. Like USA, as incomes rise, so does property value. And as property value rises, regulations and standards improve. That's not just an OECD thing. People in Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, China, Mexico and Brazil move from a bad job to a better one and then can afford to care about their health and property. Greenpeace and Gotchajournalism cannot take all of the credit. HERE IS WHY.
Greenpeace only visited SECONDARY SMELTERS. They don't mention a single PRIMARY SMELTER.
I advised Andrea Carneiro and the Massachusetts DEP Commissioner (at the time was either Dan Greenberg or Tom Powers, can't remember), that you can't shine a light without a dark to put it in. You need to expose the dark corners of recycling to the light of scrutiny. But - as I have blogged for 17 years - in the vacuum of banned, protested, impugned recycling - people would STILL be buying cars with lead acid batteries. And that's the sin of the Greenpeace report, the own-goal, the treacherous edge we must also shine a light on. PRIMARY SMELTING.
Secondary smelters that Greenpeace wrote about in 1994 were using 100% recycled content - lead from old car batteries - to manufacture new car batteries. See Clarios diagram.
In 1994, a very high percentage of the car batteries on earth were still in OECD aka "wealthy" countries. I won't say "most", because part of the "informal economy" fallacy is that no one was writing about how many of the car batteries at the secondary smelters Greenpeace was calling out were from Chinese, Indonesian, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi cars. The traffic jams in emerging markets in the 1990s were obvious to anyone who visited, and must have been experienced by the Greenpeace researchers.
So fallacy 1 is to make data recording - which Oli Franklin-Wallis makes the spearhead of his complaint about "lies" about recycling in Kolbert's New Yorker paper. When I get my copy of Wastehland, I'm going to be looking for the word "data".
Greenpeace in 1994 was silent about car batteries generated by the so-called Third and Second Worlds. They were implying that if the UK and USA etc. stopped exporting the used batteries - an export legal under the Basel Convention, which Greenpeace (and former Greenpeace employee Jim Puckett of BAN) were fighting to "Amend" (Basel Ban Amendment).
So had the exports of used batteries for recycling not been externalized in 1994, what would happen?
- Millions of "undocumented" informal sector car batteries would still be recycled by generators in emerging markets by the same smelters. Boycotting the secondary smelters would not make them go away, and would not result in the new car batteries being manufactured in the UK and USA.
- Recycled content would become more expensive to the new battery manufacturers. Demand for virgin lead mining, per LME and US Geological Survey - follows price of recycled content. If the companies making the car batteries in Taiwan etc. could not find as many tons as they needed from Secondary Smelters, would the West stop buying as many cars?
- No.
- Now we were replaying the own-goal of the 1960s, I told the Commissioner. In copper smelting, the USA had 7 secondary (100% recycled content) smelters in 1960. In the 1990s, one - Chemtco of Illinois - remained. The recycled content smelters were all located near the source of recycled content - USA cities with relatively high property values (as compared to primary mining smelters). But the environmental standards the recycled smelters were held to in high property value geographies killed them, shut them down. The smelters were either abandoned in El Paso or dismantled and sold to emerging markets which now had their own growing sources of copper scrap. Chemetco was closed by 1999 in an environmental enforcement, and today the vast majority of copper recycling occurs in emerging markets.
- What did Greenpeace reporting lead to increased investment in? Sure, I've already granted that businesses like Clario invested in remarkable improvements in recycled content. But it also resulted in the investments into VIRGIN LEAD MINING at hellscapes like the Kabwe Mine in Zambia... just as post 1960 EPA enforcement against secondary copper smelters resulted in only primary copper smelting. The western USA still mines virgin copper ore, but has to export almost all of its recycled copper.
The Guardian Environmental bureau has done excellent reporting ("The World's Most Toxic Town: The Terrible Legacy of Zambia's Lead Mines) on the tragedy of the Kabwe Mine (image search below), which is currently shut down but without doubt is being investigated by Russia's Wagner group, which takes over dicey mining operations across Africa at the speed of Nollywood movie piracy.
So if Greenpeace takes credit for Clario's improvements, should it not also take credit for the investments at Kabwe?
Go back to the good news being told about the #circulareconomy before 1994. Humanity over 100 years had gone from making car batteries out of mined ore refined first by primary smelters and then by secondary smelters (which are often used to re-refined primary smelter outputs by the way, something I gloss over because the net effect of recycling is simply to cut out the primary smelter.
Here is the math problem we need King Solomon to help us solve. What a reporter needs to do is look upstream, look downstream, look at historical records (like AAA's history of the car battery), and try not to serve the increasing anti-recycling cognitive bias that believes supply and demand can exist in a vacuum. In the DM chat, I simply told Oli that his question was "a math problem".
Sticking with car batteries (though this same logic will apply to plastic) here is how you engineer the best possible, if not perfect, supply chain logistics.
Every time 1,000,000 tons of car batteries are made:
- What percent was recycled content?
- What percent was mined content?
- Which - mining or recycling - has a history of making environmental progress?
- Which depends on the active participation of Guardian Readership?
If the 1M tons of car batteries are made of 90% recycled content and 10% mined content, solve the mining problem first. Get to 100% recycled. Then improve the recycling, and of course improve it all along the way if you can. As more vehicles go electric, and the number of legacy scrap cars remains lead acid battery bearing, we will soon reach 100% recycled content in auto batteries... and that is the best way to stop investments in places like Kabwe.
Datajournalism is the antidote to the sugar-high of Photojournalism. That will make or break my eventual review of Wasteland.
The best recycled content is certainly better than the worst recycled content, but the worst recycled content is better than the best virgin extracted content. This is true of plastic. It is true of electronics, and paper. Our consumption is the root cause of the problem, not our disposal footprint.
I look forward to finding time to read Wasteland by Oliver Franklin-Wallis. Despite the title, which still leads to the cringeworthy mis-reporting on used computer monitor imports to Hong Kong by CBS 60 Minutes in Wasteland in 2008. I failed to reverse 60 Minutes in that story during hours-long background reporting for producer Solly Granatstein. But 60 Minutes was fishing for perch (or tilapia), I was fishing for swordfish. Had I not written the counter to CBS award-winning but fatally flawed documentary, I would not have the privilege of speaking/DMing with reporters like Oli today.
Always purchase recycled content, even if 100% of the plastic/lead wasn't captured. If you are going to criticize the differences in claimed rate of recycling and capture rates, look at the mining please. What percent of the ore dug from the ground by African children made it into the car battery Greenpeace would have had us purchasing if they'd succeeded in 1994 (or make the case that the batteries would now have been made in the USA, and that that would have made a bigger difference at the secondary smelters Greenpeace wanted to boycott than Clario did by investing in them.
*Edit: I don't wish to defend Chemetco and other secondary smelter pollution, and accept that proximity to populations is good for recycling economics but creates a higher bar. But the legacy of primary metal Superfund sites is catastrophically greater in scale. Chemetco got cleaned up. Asarco's Murray Smelter in Utah is truly a "142-acre wasteland" ... closed in 1949, with cleanup "ongoing". Even in the desert (or on low property value indigenous American territory), primary lead mining and smelting got chased all the way to Zambia. Secondary Smelting of Lead acid battery recycling gets the credit for reducing the number of these disasters over the past 75 years.
The 142-acre Murray Smelter site is located in Murray City, Utah. This former mineral processing area was once the largest lead smelter in the country. Formerly owned by the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), the site included two smelters: the Germania Smelter and Refinery Works, which operated from 1872 to 1902, and the Murray Smelter, which operated from 1902 to 1949. In addition to lead, primary smelting byproducts included slag, arsenic and cadmium. Smelting activities and waste disposal practices contaminated soil, sediment and groundwater with heavy metals. Following cleanup, operation and maintenance activities are ongoing
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