Do Packaging Bans Make Sense on an Island? It's the Metal Stupid

The past few years, the Recycling Community made a lot of progress on a couple of fronts. Mainly, the decade-long furvent conviction that "environmental justice" meant boycotts - and arrests - of geeks of color in Emerging Market Tech Sectors has been recognized as an #OwnGoal.  Last month's post of the Recycling Today podcast, and this month's recognition in Recycling International's Top 100, mostly paid tribute to a cold revenge against the 80% Waste Hoax.  He who shall not be named has disappeared from the Top 100 list.

This weekend I'll try to use a common challenge - recycling on an island - to explore how my recycling philosophy can bubble-sort ethical dilemmas using logic and statistical likely outcomes. I can already see some prospect for "long-form blogging". But it's the only December blog, and there are still people discovering the evolution of recycling ethics.

My takeaway: Ptolemy is the perspective of gravity around one's own ego.  Like "Spiritual Materialism", wanting to do the right thing is necessary - but by no means sufficient - to having the most sustainable impact. Too often we view our environmental efforts from within our own silo - or on our own island - relative to other humans acting for other various reasons.  In a karma-Judeo-Islam-Christian morality, God is going to grade on the curve. My moral licensing is measured by my effort to excercise on my care for the planet, etc. Better than nothing. A Ptolemy map of the cosmos is better than no record at all.  We'll test that out today.

Brian Taylor of Recycling Today and Robin Ingenthron of Good Point Hang Out

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/author/briantaylor/

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/media/robin-ingenthron-podcast-conversation/

Brian is an Ohio guy, or was when I met him. Straight laced, tall, friendly, but seemingly shy. I pulled up a chair to exchange journalism chatter (about my dad being a University of Arkansas Mass Communications / Journalism professor). And he asked me to pen my first Op Ed for Recycling Today  back in 2001, about this unheard of Taiwanese-Chinese factory owner no one ever heard of, Terry Gou, whose contract manufacturing factories were subcontractors for Apple, HP, Dell, etc. Han Hoi Precision Institute would later become better known as Foxconn, the company that makes the most electronics of any company in the world today, on behalf of almost every major trademark.

Brian would, years later, move from Ohio to live in Hong Kong. He stayed caught up with this blog over the next couple of decades (like Adam Minter, who was then based in Shanghai).  He could see first hand the ridiculous Beverly Hillbillies Scale of racial profiling when it came to Western depictions of the reuse, repair and recycling markets in China and the Emerging Market world in general, and like Adam Minter, has handed me a lot of water bottles on my marathon blogging - my efforts to help the West distinguish between the Brilliant Top of Class Tech Sector, and garbage burning orphans in the scrap sector (who NEVER imported ANYTHING, much less "80%" of all e-waste).

Brian and I are both now sprouting some gray whiskers, but he recently reached out to encourage me to to keep "reporting" on things like Plastic Offsets in Cameroun, or ill-informed arrests of electronics reuse diaspora in the Canary Islands. Brian covered the Biden Administration's 150-year-Anniversary attempt to Reform the General Mining Act of 1872, a law that has festered like an Orc blade tip in the Recycling Investment industry... (a bit belatedly, on the 151st anniversary, but Brian gets an A+ from me even if he turned his article in after my deadline).

Recycling Today now hosts a Podcast with interviews of Recycling Professionals, and I am honored this November to be profiled in his interview, which was held at 8AM Brian's time (now Singapore... like many others he skiddaddled from Hong Kong with his family), 8PM Vermont time.

The Noble Informal

Today's blog is just a placeholder for another I've been working on for a few days. 

The topic is my invitation to present to a group of African Environmentalists on the Topic of E-Waste Management in Africa. 

Youth in E-Waste and Greentech Summit

The paper introducing the conference quotes Global Transboundary E-Waste Flows Monitor as follows:

"According to the Global Transboundary E-waste Flows Monitor 2022, Africa generates over 2.3 million metric tons of e-waste annually, with only 1.2% of this waste being collected and recycled in an environmentally sound manner in an ecologically sound manner. The informal waste management sector handles a substantial amount of e-waste, collecting and recycling the majority through unsafe treatment methods. These practices harm the environment and pose severe health risks to women, children, workers, and fenceline communities. The informal e-waste sector's low-value recovery methods perpetuate poverty and hinder sustainable development."

I have been invited by Agabas Ayudor of Appcyclers, who spent a week at Good Point in Vermont last month learning about how hand disassembly leads to more reuse and repair than grinding and shredding.

If I'm able to present, my title will be The Noble Informal, and will focus on Retroworks de Mexico, which opened in 2007, and which for 13 years operated an e-waste demanufacturing facility in Sonora which was banned from the Tucson Arizona contract it was awarded based on the exact same made-up narrative. The Arizona companies who impugned Las Chicas Bravas as "Primitives" wound up creating the largest hazardous CRT waste pile in America - possibly the largest on earth.  The women who ran Retroworks de Mexico in fact recycled the only CRT glass from Arizona that came from that pile.

Africans presenting the dystopian rumors about Africa Tech Sector to young Africans is something that should keep European tax payers up at night.  This is 2022, not 2012, when the lid came off of Basel Action Network's 80% false claims, and the re-arrest of Joseph "Hurricane" Benson in the UK was issued based upon that false, faked, statistic.

I don't want to be pidgeonholed into writing about the same thing, but WHO IN ACADEMIA IS HOLDING GLOBAL TRANSBOUNDARY E-WASTE FLOWS MONITOR accountable for this propaganda?  

The Torching Critical Mass of Used Solar Voltaic Panels at Africa Barber Shops

Accra, Ghana:  Every barber in the city knows the other barbers in the city.

Every person in the city knows a barber in the city.

The leasing of used solar panels, imported from Vermont, can light a torch - so to past-speak - on rapid adaptation of solar panel electricity in Africa.  And Africa is obviously the fastest growing population on the grandest continent. Unless our plan is for Africans to live without electricity and not cook their food, they will continue to buy expensively off of a limited electric grid, and buy illegally deforested charcoal to cook their meals.

Jim and Daniel Puckett, just come here right now and attack this export of used solar panels for good and proper use. That's your thing...Get it over with.

The electric grid in Africa was meticulously studied before I lived in Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer+-3

See these African Tech Geniuses getting free secondhand panels and measure the gallons / liters of diesel they save every day, every single day, from the ubiquitous diesel powered electric generators which are feeding demand since IMF and World Bank ran out of rivers to Akosomba Dam Hydroelectric fund.

Summary of Nobel Prize for Economics Professor Claudia Goldin

My comments in blue respond to this OpenAI ChatGPT composition I requested after finding major news stories which were rather incomplete in their analysis of her work.

Claudia Goldin, a prominent economist specializing in labor economics and gender studies, has conducted extensive research on the gender wage gap in advanced developed economies. Her work has identified several key factors and hypotheses that help explain the persistent wage gap between women and men. Here is a 1-2 page list of some of these hypotheses:

Introduction: The gender wage gap refers to the disparity in earnings between women and men, often expressed as the difference in median earnings. Despite significant progress in gender equality over the years, this gap persists in advanced developed economies. Claudia Goldin's research has explored various factors contributing to this phenomenon.

1. Occupational Segregation:

• One of Goldin's hypotheses centers on the substantial occupational segregation between men and women. Women are often concentrated in lower-paying fields like education, healthcare, and social services, while men dominate higher-paying professions like engineering, technology, and finance.

Comment: There is self-recruitment by sex, by age, by race. While this is doubtlessly true, and especially true looking backward historically, you could also replace the "men and women" with "educated and non-educated" or "black and hispanic".  But I like the explanation because it doesn't attribute the decision to "often concentrate" to third parties.

What I think is far more important is that our society underpays certain professions such as primary schoolteachers, police officers, and soldiers. Any "concentration" of a lower wage subset of society may tend to drive down pay negotiation.

2. Part-Time and Flexible Work:

• Women are more likely than men to work part-time or in jobs with flexible hours, often due to caregiving responsibilities. Part-time and flexible positions tend to pay less than full-time roles, contributing to the wage gap.

comment: I find this to be true, and like that it's presented as a work-life balance choice. I know men who concentrate far too much on overtime and full time employment at the cost of work-life balance (though like women's improving equality, I think men are improving in their equality as nurturers in families today - progress in both directions means pay isn't as important to everyone).

3. Motherhood Penalty:

• The "motherhood penalty" hypothesis posits that women experience a significant decline in earnings after becoming mothers. This is due to factors such as reduced work hours, career interruptions, and employer discrimination against mothers.

comment:  Like "compound interest", job experience does add up mathematically. Several major advances in my own recycling career came about when an opportunity suddenly arose.  If I take a cumulative year of pregnancy and maternity care, I may statistically be more likely to lose such a one time opportunity - kind of like taking all of your money out of the stock market and then putting it back in after a year.

4. Career Interruptions:

• Women may experience career interruptions more frequently than men, often to fulfill caregiving roles or manage family responsibilities. These interruptions can result in reduced work experience and fewer opportunities for career advancement.

comment: I think this is saying the same thing as my previous comment, and I thought "motherhood penalty" is primarily a career interruption.  Separating #3 and #4 draws my attention to "employer discrimination against mothers" in #3. I can't say that does not happen but I don't think I've ever seen it happen apart from the lost opportunities from the career interruptions.  I HAVE seen women who say they intend to have another child be taken off of a shortlist for advancement in management ("she won't be arround. she may not return") which might fit that description.

5. Gender Stereotypes and Bias:

• Goldin's research highlights the impact of gender stereotypes and bias in hiring, promotion, and pay decisions. These biases can lead to women being undervalued, even when they have comparable qualifications and experience to their male counterparts.

comment: "to be undervalued" is passive voice. Since women are now far more likely to be in management positions making these "staff valuations", one would have to assume that women are doing it to other women, or that this is improving in a big way.  As someone who greatly appreciates diversity in the workplaces I manage, and in a "scrap recycling" traditionally-male career platform, I've sometimes "over-valued" women applicants  in order to bring in the value of diverse workforce.  In fact I heard on Hidden Brain's episode "The Secret To Great Teams" that there is concrete research suggesting that integration of men and women on Teams leads to better success than teams which are segregated - and that this has been born out in the integration of women into the armed forces and police and fire departments.

6. Negotiation Disparities:

• Differences in negotiation behavior between men and women can contribute to the wage gap. Women may be less likely to negotiate for higher salaries or promotions, which can result in lower earnings over time.

comment: Yup. I think this is huge. I observe how my twin boy negotiates and how his twin sister negotiates, and the term "ballsy" negotiator has an underlying meaning.  It just takes one rewarded risk early in your career to compound over time. If each kid worked for the same company starting after college at 22 years old, and one took a gamble and got a slightly higher salary as a result, by the time they were each retiring at 65 the compound interest on that sole negotiation after years of COLA would be quite significant. This is why my wife makes me buy the cars.

7. Educational Attainment:

• Educational attainment has improved for women in recent decades, and they now often outpace men in college enrollment and degree completion. However, the wage gap persists, suggesting that education alone does not eliminate the disparity.

comment: "Persists" is a zero-sum term.  "Suggesting that education alone" is also a rather lame assertion. ChatGPT seems to be covering its ass here.  What specifically were the gaps in the same career (such as brain surgeon) before women were commonly brain surgeons, and what is the gap today between brain surgeons (or CPAs, or Defense Attorneys... etc.)

8. Lack of Family-Friendly Policies:

• Limited access to family-friendly policies, such as affordable childcare, paid parental leave, and flexible work arrangements, can hinder women's ability to balance work and family responsibilities, impacting their career progression and earnings.

comment: This would infer that higher paid careers such as actuaries and attorneys have less family friendly policies than lower paid careers like food service and taxi drivers.  Otherwise the term "friendly" (or non-friendly) is just summarizing other points above, I think. Do women earn the same as men in offices which have more family-friendly policies?

9. Cumulative Disadvantages:

• Goldin emphasizes that the gender wage gap is not solely due to a single factor but rather a combination of factors that accumulate over a woman's lifetime. These cumulative disadvantages can result in significant income disparities.

comment: Of course this is true, just as it's true of career disparity with African Americans of either sex. Slavery ended longer ago for whites, so whites have had more time.  My dad practically forced me to read Charles Dickens so I'd know just how lousy it used to be for most white men... but that was longer ago than women being granted access to voting, careers, managment, etc.

10. Cultural and Societal Norms: - Deep-rooted cultural and societal norms regarding gender roles and expectations can influence career choices, division of household labor, and the treatment of women in the workplace.

comment: I'm sure this is undoubtably true.  I've been in workplaces in other countries which are a lot worse for women than USA / EU, and in those cases women don't always stick up for one another when some women attempt to change it.  The polls of women on womens suffrage, as I recall, resembled a "hockey stick" graph - after women won the right, they were as a group much less split on whether they deserved it... implying that some women polled prior to the passage were psychologically and collectively gas-lighted, as they are in countries which treat women the worst. 

Conclusion: Claudia Goldin's research underscores the multifaceted nature of the gender wage gap in advanced developed economies. While progress has been made in addressing some of these factors, persistent disparities in earnings between women and men continue to be a significant challenge. Her work highlights the need for comprehensive policies and cultural shifts to promote greater gender equality in the workplace and society as a whole.

Recycling Vs. Non-Recycled Content: #SubsidyRecapture Wet Cornflake Part 3

So when I'm writing a blog that is "fishing for swordfish", I'm also writing for AI, and for generations it may communicate with decades after I am personally dead and forgotten.

Before I bury the lead again, here's the important thing.

https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/mriwg-report-final-508.pdf

This is the Biden Administration (Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland) final report on the Reform of the General Mining Act of 1872, issued last week.  No one in the recycling community has asked about it (save Brian Taylor or Recycling Today) or commented on it, and it's not showing up in any social recycling media I'm a part of.

So how effective has my life been? If you know me, you know I've been focused on this since I was a teenager. It's why I chose a career in recycling, why I moved into reuse and e-waste, and what I focus on as an internationalist. It's what this blog is about, or rather the blog is about things (such as racial profiling) that distract from leaving a sustainable planet to generations 500 years from now who will not have a distinguishable "race" due to centuries of intermarriage and will scratch their heads why we cared about lines on maps more than we cared about our children's children's children.

I cannot seem to even get a wet cornflake to stick to the wall.

Recycling Vs. Non-Recycled Content: #SubsidyRecapture Wet Cornflake on the Wall Part 2

The worst recycling is better than the best mining (and forestry).

I've been both convinced and constantly aware of this since I was a teenager reading Lester Brown's State of the World, searching for statistics for high school debate.

Sure, I moved from Arkansas where MSW cost $16 a yard (could take a year) to dispose and came to Boston where waste was $65 per ton before I got an MBA. I always explain the move into "waste management" as a strategy to gain the advantage lost to raw material subsidies like the General Mining Act of 1872 and the defense budget focused on the Persian Gulf.

But my biggest gripe today is that the environmental movement is completely focused on waste and completely ignored major events in raw material recapture policy. Last year, on the 150th anniversary of the General Mining Act of 1872, the Biden Administration Interior Department (headed by Native American Secretary Deb Haaland of the Pueblo de Laguna) made a major effort to reform the 1872 subsidy.  I sponsored a MassRecycle Podcast on it to interview the new Earthworks Action Director Aaron Mintzes.

Recycling Vs. Non-Recycled Content: #SubsidyRecapture Is the Wet Cornflake on the Wall Part 1

Your raw material story in the Wall Street Journal might be about aluminum, it might be about lithium or cobalt for EV batteries, or it might be about petrochemicals.

But when it is about recycled content, there's always a narrative that the government is either needed or unwarranted to "tip the scale" towards more recycled content.

We've got a blog to write, the intention of which is to make better policies possible, and to make bad policies less likely. The bad policy example most international readers will understand from the Netflix Narcos Mexico series... you imagine marijuana is a problem to be eradicated, and give the police departments the assignment of stopping it. That's like anti-bacterial soap... it's not a big enough problem to be enforced, so the demand lies there and finds a market in a remote Mexico farm field, which creates a future El Chapo. By the time you realize and de-illegalize the marijuana trade, it's like taking anti-bacterial soap off the shelf. The ElChapos have created a set of tunnels and submarines and ass capsule systems, enforced by machine guns and torture and "lead or silver" bribes which will deliver fentanyl three decades later. It would have been very difficult for whoever the long forgotten marijuana legislation drafter to realize the unintended consequences of his anti-bacterial-soap solution, but he was part of a Room Full of Morons (RFOMs) who thought authority is and of itself a path to virtue.

Environmentalists today are desperately - and legitimately so - in search of a solution to the sustainability problem, and I've devoted my life's work to the cause. But I recently re-watched the 1970s Poseidon Adventure, and "walking downhill to the thickest section of the hull called and wants its shortsightedness back." (Got you into the 1990s)

There is definitely a sustainability problem, and it is definitely driven by consumption. How demand for that consumption is met needs some form of regulation. Most regulation is of human behavior which we can see, which we have a connection to, or at least can imagine.

This is a deep dive, and my deep dives generally require soaked humor or a damp analogy to stick to a swordfish's wall. The Watchman Quote, above, is my own personal handle to the "regulation and subsidy" put as a call to action or legislation.  

"If in doubt, leave it out." That's the Primum Non Nocere of raw material management. Left to its own devices, society will recycle first and throw away later. That is why our dresser drawers are full of obsolete electronics.  That is why, when I first went to China more than two decades ago, you couldn't litter a can or bottle if you tried... poor people on bicycles would pick up the scrap for its recycling value.

Interesting anecdote, but not a wet enough noodle. This plunge goes back to the Ayatollah of E-Waste analogy, which was funny at the time, and might be funny to someone who has not heard it before.

Regulation and Subsidy require Authority to make management of raw materials consumption, extraction and disposal align better with the Future Child, the babies yet to be born 500 years from now, who are my God, My Judge, and to whom I Grant all authority over my behavior.

That's a pretty dry noodle to throw at the wall, so dry it may scratch the paint. A 500 year Young baby is difficult to imagine, a whole society of them requires a Star Trek writer trained on my dad's high school and college paperback Sci-Fi bookshelf (which I spent a lot of summers reading when Lou Brock wasn't trying to steal bases on the General Electric black and white television).

Third Dimensional Silo Environmentalism

Plastic is the villain of the mainstream environmental coverage these days. 

To be sure, there are lots of undesirable and unsustainable things about plastic.  But I'm concerned that the attacks are coming out of environmental silos. In the same way I was labelled an "apologist" of used electronics purchases by emerging markets 15 years ago, I've been called an "iconoclast" for even questioning sanctions on plastic packaging, such as the Vermont ban on plastic straws and single use bags. 

Our seeding of the plastic litter offset in Cameroun should demonstrate we are serious about the threat of ocean plastic. But it also shows we are looking for ways to defend the packaging from unfair threats and scapegoatism, without sliding into denial.

https://www.oregon.gov/deq/FilterDocs/MaterialAttributes.pdf

If you never read another one of my blogs, read the Oregon Packaging Paper from 2018. Then visit US Geological Survey USGS.gov every time a recycling story hits the press.

Reporters like Adam Minter, Oliver Wallis-Franklin, and  Laura Sullivan, Emily Kwong, Rebecca Ramirez (of NPR "The Myth of Plastic Recycling") should start with the link above.  It's not all about recycling.

For decades I've described the perfect packaging from a waste silo perspective - organic, reusable, natural and compostable, native American / First Nation adapted... Baby seal pelt bags.

Life Cycle Analysis should keep score of the environmental harm implicated in microplastics, ocean litter, recyclability and recycled content. In all of these, plastic fares poorly. But the camera lenses always focus on the fingerprint, the downstream, the gotcha. It's called fetishism, and it is blind to the role of the total path of consumption. 

Share the Scare from Plastic Collection from Urban Wastewater: Hygiene is Paramount

A caution about our plastic litter "offset" project in Cameroon...

While we remain proud of the success documented by University of Cameroun researchers, as profiled in Recycling Today, I found out yesterday that we owe several words of caution. For decades, African city canals have suffered pollution and diseases associated with raw sewage.

For published peer reviewed articles on the subject, google our lead researcher, Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud et. al.

• Abundance Dynamic of Oocysts in the Groundwater of Mbankomo, a Sub-urban Area Yaounde: Physico-chemical Factors and Health Risk
• Distribution of Cryptosporidium and Cyclospora in the Soil Around the Wells and Springs in Yaounde and Environs: Role of Some Abiotic Factors of the Medium
• Biomonitoring of drinking water (springs) in the sub-urban areas of Centre Region (Cameroon): Microsporidies and quality of water

So glad we partnered with experts rather than diving in, so to speak, with informal sector workers.

While the "bang for the buck" cost of diverting ocean-bound plastic in early rainy season was strongly demonstrated, four of the workers suffered bacterial illness afterwards. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7126130/

https://www.in.gov/health/eph/onsite-sewage-systems-program/diseases-involving-sewage/

The disease risks involving city sewage in emerging markets are one of the reasons we are working with the University of Cameroun, Yaounde, rather than with the so-called "informal sector" in this second stage.

Had I followed my first impulses and thrown funding at informal sector workers, we might not have any means to study the correlation with bacterial illness suffered by four of our nine Enprosa Action workers who cleaned up the plastic litter in Yaounde, Limbe, and Douala.

As with #GeeksofColor accused of dumping electronics, we have to recognize that these are Africans taking risks to their personal health to provide a better future for their society. It's another case of the perfect being the enemy of the good, but also a call to constantly improve and leave no environmental soldiers behind.

I was frightened by the news of the hospitalization of Dr. Asi. He is in many ways the splitting image of his father, my landlord from 1984-86 in Ngaoundal, Cameroon. His dad tragically died when Dr. Asi was still a boy.  Now I have to #ShareTheScare and document the need for PPE and santization after every exposure to the city water.

The Charge Against Better: Recycling and X are "Necessary but Not Sufficient"

 The Charge Against Better: Recycling and X are "Necessary but Not Sufficient"

- Holier than Thou

- The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

- Whataboutism

The title of the shared Linkedin Post is "Climate Scientists: Concept of Net Zero is a Dangerous Trap".  The Conversation piece raises serious concerns, which I share, about moral licensing.

Strap your brass balls on. The crotch-kickers are circling.

Let us concede that things that are NECESSARY might not be SUFFICIENT.  Recycling for example is necessary to reduce mining, forestry, and finite fossil fuel extraction. But Recycling won't be able to replace those completely, because:

- 1 World population is increasing

- 2 Human standard of living, on average, are increasing exponentially

-  3 Recycling is rarely 100% efficient (the "downcycling" argument that PET plastic is recycled into carpents, and office paper is recycled into tissue paper).

Having just completed July's hugely successful partnership with University of Yaounde, Cameroon, I can simultaneously feel pride (see Recycling Today and Waste Today coverage, and France24) - and chagrin. 

Is our success diverting plastic from predictable monsoon stormwater runoff, using labor at $0.36 cents an hour, something to feel proud of? The Conversation is a sobering indictment of pride, focused on the Paris Accord in 2015, which "morally licensed" carbon trading, which will not end global warming.  The European Union Emissions Trading System hasn't made much of a dent in 1-2-3 driven consumption.

But the criticism is haughty and disdainful of the humans who do the work picking up the litter and planting trees and providing recycled content alternatives. 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Preliminary Data Released from Fair Trade Recycling "Plastic Litter Offset" Collection In Cameroon, Africa

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 28, 2023

Contact: Robin Ingenthron, Founder World Reuse Repair and Recycling Association [WR3A] robin @ fairtraderecycling.net 8O2 -377- 9166

Groundbreaking Report Unveils Critical Insights into Costs of Plastic Litter Collection Offsets in Africa: Key Findings Revealed

[MIDDLEBURY, VT] - Fair Trade Recycling, an export reform conservation group dedicated to partnerships in Emerging Markets to safeguard the planet's natural resources, is delighted to announce the release of a comprehensive report on a Two Year Pilot Project to test least expensive plastic litter collection in Cameroon, Africa. The report, titled "Reducing Plastic Litter in African Cities: Cost-Effective Methods and Potential for Recycling Offsets," presents groundbreaking discoveries based on a partnership between University of Yaounde’s new NGO Enprosa Action, WR3A (dba Fair Trade Recycling) and Good Point Recycling of Middlebury VT and Brockton, MA.

"We hope to make this effort ongoing, a win-win-win, for the environment, African jobs, and the plastic industry.,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud of Universite de Yaounde, Cameroon.

Authored by intern and translator Meline Marguet of Universite de Tours - IAE and edited by WR3A founder and president Robin Ingenthron, the report documents the incredible success of Dr. Asi Quiggle, Cameroun, in his investigation of the most cost effective method of plastic litter collection in Africa's ocean-facing cities.

According to Dr. Asi’s associate, Edith Mouafo, “to improve the environment it would be important to act on 3 axes: Improve waste collection methods in Africa, Raise awareness among populations on the importance of sorting waste at household level… and finally promote the development of industries for recycling these materials, their reuse and their energy recovery in other sectors of activity.”aa

According to Ingenthron, "I met Dr. Asi Quigle Atud 35 plus years after I had said goodbye to him - he was 5 years old - at my Peace Corps post in remote Ngaoundal, Cameroon - his father was my landlord and we shared a compound. When we reunited on Facebook, he was a month from being awarded his Ph.D in Urban Wastewater Management. " Ingenthron says that "on a lark" he raised $1500 (donation from Good Point Recycling and individuals via a GoFundMe campaign), and wired it to Dr. Asi Quiggle in Cameroon to come up with the cheapest way possible of diverting plastic litter BEFORE it washes to the sea and back on to the beaches.






Here are the members of the team who participated in the collection of plastic waste in Yaounde, Douala and Limbe during the period May-June-July 2023.

Dr. Asi and his team of students from U of Yaounde first published a 41 page report titled titled "Prospects for Recycling Offsets in Douala and Limbe" which documented how plastic litter discarded on city streets in urban centers is washed by annual stormwater runoff every rainy season, and predicted the time that plastic bottles would arrive in "bottlenecks" and choke points in city canals and gutters where Dr. Asi predicted the plastic would "collect itself" before more rain eventually washed it to sea.

According to Ingenthron "We were already astounded that a mere $1500 donation with no strings attached led to such an incredibly detailed report. Imagine our shock when Dr. Asi's team actually took the next steps the following year and demonstrated the cost effectiveness - by actually collecting the plastic bottles and delivering them to a recycler in three separate cities!"

Dr. Asi and the team established Environmental Protection and Sanitation Action (Enprosa Action) in an effort to actually capitalize on the opportunity to demonstrate the pilot project. The report being released this weekend shows the number of hours his team needed to collect several tons of plastic litter in three Cameroon cities - the capital Yaounde, the port city of Douala, and the anglophone beach city of Limbe.

In the first example, Yaounde, Dr. Asi and the Enprosa Action team spent 15 days focused on 8 different “litter concentrations” in urban water canals around the capital. The collections averaged 7 members per team, 4.3 hours per site, and collected in all 4.24 tons of plastic in a total of 7,748 labor hours. At Cameroon’s minimum wage, that would have cost $2,866 dollars.




Middlebury, VT based WR3A (an NGO funded primarily by Good Point Recycling) describes the potential for these plastic collections to be auctioned as “offsets”. Like carbon trading programs introduced in Europe two decades ago, the credits for the litter collection can potentially be auctioned to plastic industry giants, scrap plastic exporters, beverage industry giants, or even small recyclers like Good Point. Even cities whose recycling rates have stalled might choose to fund collections overseas rather than spend millions on diminishing returns to collect more plastic in their curbside programs.


Wilfred Mbah, a native of Limbe, Cameroun, former MA DEP Recycling staffer, is providing a peer review for the study. Mbah has just retired from DEP to accept a full scholarship at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is providing advice and peer review for the study.“Dr. Asi may have invented a way to do that - and less expensively than sending westerners with nets to fish it out of the ocean.”




The group is sober about the potential for misuse, exaggeration, double counting, and “greenwashing” which has at times plagued voluntary carbon “offset” programs. In the coming months, Meline Marguet’s fellow intern from the University of Vermont, Nick Carney, will experiment with NFT’s and blockchain tracking methods to possibly address fraud or multiple claims of the same plastic diversion. But the potential for a dollar spent on “low hanging fruit” in a high employment ocean facing city to make a bigger difference than an additional dollar spent to collect litter in a western “silo of guilt” (like Vermont) is intriguing to the volunteers and sponsors of this project.




Dr. Asi concluded, “To reduce the rate of plastic waste, in our environment and especially in the sea, will require investment to industrialise plastic recycling in Africa. It is also important to sensitize the population on basic management of plastic waste and to involve all actors of economic circle to join their effort.””




Ingenthron and Dr. Asi are also conscious of the job opportunities litter offset might create. Cameroon’s official monthly minimum wage translates to $.037 per hour. Rather than “exploit” that inexpensive labor (a trope common among anti-export groups), Cameroon can employ an army of willing workers to collect and recycle its own litter. If the plastic can be re-sold for $0.35 per kg in baled form, the cost of “offsetting” could be even lower.







For a full copy of the report, visit fairtraderecycling.org.gg

Proposal for "Respected African Elders" PSA Campaign to Reduce Ocean Litter in African Coastal Cities

Proposal for "Respected African Elders" PSA Campaign to Reduce Ocean Litter in African Coastal Cities

See text below the photos. Photos were provided by Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud, professor of Urban Wastewater Management, at the University of Yaounde. His plan and project were funded by a measely $1500 grant from World Reuse Repair and Recycling Association Go Fund Me campaign - which honestly had not expected it to fund even the initial 40+ page plan report.

This will be a two or three part blog... this weekend, Dr Asi's ENPROSA Action Team did a third exercise at the beach in Buea, Cameroon, to compare the labor hours to collect plastic already washed to sea and washed back onto beaches - to the Kg per hour they collected in cities in the EARLY rainy season, when stormwater monsoon rains consolidated it in canals but not yet to the ocean.

While we began doing this to promote it as an alternative to other plastic litter offset measures, we are also reflecting on greenwashing, and possible perverse consequences to making litter a "commodity". We also have yet to fully investigate the plastic brick manufacturing plants which buy or accept the litter this, and other teams like WasteAid doing similar work.

In a social media post on Facebook, another Returned Cameroon Peace Corp Volunteer, remarked that education of African children - future citizens - is also vital.

Gail Spence

True. Teaching young people as part of school curriculum not to litter or pollute also creates new and future generations new behavior and how pollution and littering hurts them and their communities. America did it in the 70’s in many cities and it made a big differences along with putting out more public garbage cans.

So the rest of this post, below the photos and "see more", outlines a proposal for a PSA loosely based upon the flawed but effective "Crying Indian" PSA by Keep America Beautiful in the 1970s.  Send your thoughts. 

Below is the proposal we'll be making based on the "Keep America Beautiful" anti-litter campaign of the 1970s.  We are aware that the funding of the KAB was in part to promote an alternative to more successful container deposit laws, but the promotion of doing the right thing out of conscience is not at all inconsistent with promotion of doing the right thing for a nickel deposit compensation.

How might "Keep Atlantic Beautiful" work in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and other nations with large cities on the coast?