UNITAR Global E-Waste "Monitor" 2024: Better, but still kinda cringy?

I have yet to read more than the Executive Summary and Table of Contents of the new UNEP Global E-Waste Monitor report, but I can already see that it's being mis-reported.  The "hook" is an emergency, that only 22.3% of e-waste is "documented", and the rest (the Executive Summary implies), is presumed to be "improperly" managed or "lost" to the so-called "informal sector".

Readers may remember this blog previously defined "informal sector" as "a white person didn't enter it into a spreadsheet"... in response to the "Criminal Negligence" 2015 Report.

UNITAR (another UN agency) describes the reports findings as follows:

"Meanwhile, less than one quarter (22.3%) of the year’s e-waste mass was documented as having been properly collected and recycled in 2022, leaving US $62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for and increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide. "

The "five fold growth" in "e-waste" is describing worldwide generation, not just wealthy countries.  This raises questions about the measurement of "undocumented" used electronics... but lets list a few obvious premises.

1.  The size of electronics PER CAPITA is declining due to the miniaturization effect.  In 1992 it peaked because we needed a desk phone, an answering machine, a fax machine, a camera, a radio, etc.... all of which now fit inside the smart phone in my front pocket.  

2. The export market, which the previous 2015 UNEP Report described as "primitive", is mostly for reuse.  So if there was less e-waste generated in the past compared to the future, that can only be explained by the continuous reuse of past devices which continue to be reused and maintained in places like Ghana, Nigeria, Angola, etc.  

3. The UNEP reports conflate the end of first consumer use with "waste generated", as if reuse and repair, if not "documented", is in the "ewaste" volume assesssed.  That would mean that if a white person owns a TV for ten years, and it's purchased and reused by an African for another 40 years, that the "waste" is counted twice - the first time it was "generated" and the actual "end of life" of the TV.

Photo of TV Repairman Ibrahim Alhassan in Savelugu, Ghana, who we introduced to author Adam Minter, who wrote about Ibrahim in the seminal reuse non-fiction book "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale".  Ibrahim was repairing a 1970 Japanese CRT television, or rather improving it by addint a remote control function absent in the original knob-tuned TV.  This TV certainly would have been destroyed by "Big Shred" in Europe decades ago... but hard to describe the African's continuous use and extended life as "primitive"... unless you are a wee bit racially-profilly.

Let's stop at just those three premises - that per capita device weight is falling, EU and USA e-waste generation is falling, and that the UNEP is double counting (or triple counting) the secondhand and thirdhand "global" ewaste generation.

20 March 2024, Geneva / Bonn - The world’s generation of electronic waste is rising five times faster than documented e-waste recycling, the UN’s fourth Global E-waste Monitor (GEM) reveals today. The 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated in 2022 would fill 1.55 million 40-tonne trucks, roughly enough trucks to form a bumper-tobumper line encircling the equator, according to the report from ITU and UNITAR.

Here is a link to some of the photos I took of the Ghanaian Tech Sector - specifically, TV repair.  I was inspired to take these photos by the "poverty porn" photography of EU photojournalists who were filming the very very very small e-waste generation in cities like Accra and Lagos - which generate very little e-waste because there's a large thirdhand and repair and reuse market.  I followed the TVs picked up in the wealthier Accra capital and resold for reuse to the poorer north - Kumasi, Tamale, then Savelugu - and eventually up to Burkina Faso or Niger.

In Adam Minter's first book, Junkyard Planet, he documents the number of "a-waste" automobiles piling up in swamps and fields in the 1950s, until automobile shredding was invented... where? In El Paso Texas.  Because automobile extended life and reuse and repair also migrated to the poorer parts of the USA and Mexico, just like they moved to East Europe from the wealthier west, and the way TVs move to the poorer north in Ghana.

So conflating "undocumented" reuse as "recycling" or "waste management" repeats the cringeworthy assumptions of INTERPOL's "Project Eden".  

The metals and minerals are described as "lost" if Ibrahim's customer fixes and watches the 1970 CRT television?  Seriously?  Poor people using something is an environmental concern??? 

This seems like a "Permanent Error" in the UNEP reporting, but I have yet to read the whole document, and some of the table of contents are actually encouraging.  The "informal sector" appears to be more reasonably depicted in the text of the report, if not in the Summary.

When I was invited out to coffee in 2015 in Lyon, France, by the new Director of the Environmental Division, she told me that they appreciated and understood my objections.  She was from Romania, and said her own brother - a computer reuse nerd - would be described as "primitive" in that year's UNEP report.  She was "sunsetting" Project Eden, but explained she had to do it quietly so as not to jeopardize her staff or department funding.

Perhaps that's the same balancing act UNEP's Global E-Waste Monitor is trying to address.  They need lack of documentation to represent a "concern", or why else would the UN continue to fund them?

The only reason E-Waste volumes are rising is that more people have electricity (see previous blog).  Electricity doesn't use itself.  More people are benefiting from more smaller devices, and eventually, Ibrahim's Japanese CRT TV will not be worth repairing.  If it's sold as an antique or "vintage" electronic, I suppose the copper may be "lost".  But if it's parted out in Agbogbloshie, that copper will indeed not be "lost".  It will be sold, like all the other copper recycled from Ghana, back to China to make new TVs.

Emergency solved.  Maybe the UNEP should sunset this project and focus on poaching and bushmeat trade, like INTERPOL did.  Africans and Asians, too, deserve the #Right To Repair.

😝

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipMzfzExWZCu0JL4vgyyfMzrMr37ypSXeJZotBce98e_7bUjiPWhZI7-DxbJPgMEpw?key=TUl6QWM2UEVwRlQ3a1gyZXJxb3JUckJmNlVQSmxn