ITAN: Intellectually Toxic Anecdotal Nonsense Problems

There is a disturbing pattern, not just in the Environmental Movement, but probably across all social communication, propped up by ever weaker journalism editorial systems.

Someone publishes an article, or a paper. Take the 2002 Basel Action Network's "Exporting Harm" paper on the river samples of Guiyu, China. 

1. Basel Action Network publishes the paper with a photo of a child sitting on circuit board scrap (posed upon, film major Jim Puckett admitted to me personally, though Jim seems to forget everything he admits over the years).

2. The White Paper makes an assertion that "80%" of used electronics and scrap is exported to places like Guiyu.

3. The White Paper makes an assertion that "80%" (of the 80% above? unclear) is managed improperly in so-called "primitive" conditions.

4. The BAN White Paper shows a single river sample taken in Guiyu with high levels of water pollution - and goes on to associate those samples with the electronics recycling in Guiyu, without ever taking an upstream control sample to establish the source. As documented here more than ten years ago, the Guiyu river sample's arsenic had little to do with any electronics recycling process and was a telltale signature toxic of textile and tannery industries - like Bangladesh's Lourajong River.  Surprise, upstream of Guiyu is the world's largest textile manufacturing hub.

5. Let's assert that practically no one outside of academia ever read the "Exporting Harm" paper. But reporters, in a weakened immune environment of reporting "a story" every time money is spent on travel (Geraldo Rivera's Al Capone Empty Safe, my J-School Dad labelled it), that a story must result.

6. CBS 60 Minutes Scott Pelly may or may not have actually read the BAN "Exporting Harm" white paper, but despite being given photos of the factories which ACTUALLY purchased the computer monitors they circled in Hong Kong, stated that they "followed the trail" to Guiyu.  They certainly did not, and there is not a single CRT monitor to be seen anywhere in the Polk Awarded Wasteland CBS episode.

7. EPA and INTERPOL and e-Waste professionals at this point contagiously spread the Intellectually Toxic Nonsense Problem - resulting in "Project Eden" and the arrest of people in the Emerging Market Tech Sector, such as Joseph "Hurricane" Benson.

8. Let me again assert #5. Contact me by email if you have actually READ the BAN White Paper, Exporting Harm. Guiyu was a hub for CPU chip sorting and grading - as photographed on the cover of UNEP's 2015 infamous E-Waste document."Waste Crime, Waste Risks".  I alleged in 2015 that the author of the Executive Summary of the UNEP document never read the information in their own paper, because the tables and data disproved the allegation on the cover of the document.  I didn't finish BAN's Exporting Harm, but I had just returned from Ghana and certainly read the UNEP document cover to cover. "COFEFE" nonsense.  I was lucky that several in academia followed through after this blog to publish two papers in Discard Studies titled "Criminal Negligence".

9. The UNEP cover photo at top of this blog shows what was going on in Guiyu - in the lower photo.  Sorting individual capacitors and processors for remanufacturing and reuse.  Hardly "primitive". Clearly, the UNEP people were assuming that BAN's white-man-burden descriptions of the activity, based on racial profiling, were so correct that they never asked themselves what the person in the lower half of the cover photo was DOING.

10. ITAN is just my handle for documenting how contagious it is when a film art studies major like Jim Puckett takes a child by the waste and poses the kid on a pile of scrap, makes up a couple of 80%ish numbers, never takes a control sample upstream of a polluted river, and exposes the Intellectually Toxic information to mainstream press.

11. For 22 years since, there has been a massive "Chinese Fire Drill" (that's a rare fair use of that term since the Tech Sector Integrated Chip harvester and sorters in Guiyu use downdraft tables to pull ICs from warmed circuit boards were accused of "primitively burning" them). 

Intellectually Toxic Anecdotal Nonsense Problems are "own goals" throughout the health and environmental industry. People are not reading reports with critical thinking, and the "sexy" or outrage-of-amygdala response leads to sensationalism, which then creates massive UNEP scale, INTERPOL scale, and collateral damage.

I'm not into covid conspiracy theories, but I saw ITAN in the reporting on Covid in 2020-2021.  Similar to the lack of upstream control group river water samples at Guiyu and Agbogbloshie, the attribution of fatality rates due to COVID failed to properly document that the CTC project predicted death rates for all diseases every year, and the predicted causes of death from Alzheimer's, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer etc. were all DOWN significantly those years - because even mild COVID cases were the straw that broke the camel's backs. Certainly "flattening the curve" was necessary to prevent the health care industry from being overwhelmed by a firehose of death, but tracking "total deaths" in journalism was the "main story" because of ITAN.  When life doesn't seem or feel as risky as the sensationalism that drives news networks, it leads to suspicion and conspiracy theories.

Geraldo Rivera set us all up to see what he'd find in Al Capone's vault, and it was a nothingburger.  

At the scale of 8 billion people mining, refining, procuring, repairing, discarding, re-manufacturing and recycling electronics, there is certainly both a huge environmental liability.  It certainly exists today for plastic waste.  

But the ITAN problem is when no one bothers to read the paper stating that only 9% of plastics are actually recycled, so no one catches the mistake that the 9% is not of containers, but of a denominator that includes automobile and structural (piping, e.g.) plastic.  When a reporter like Oliver Franklin Wallis (Wasteland author) reports on plastic waste imported to Malaysia or Indonesia, but cannot for budgetary or covid travel reasons actually visit or interview a single plastic recycling buying professional, he has an ITAN Problem, a responsibility to de-sensationalize what the normal free market does with ALL RECYCLING - move it based on the material's value.  "Waste" is non-valuable commodity that no one wants.  When someone pays 25 cents per kilogram for something, pays people to bale it and load it onto a container for a trucker to bring it to a ship, there may well be some contamination, but that contamination has to be compared with virgin petrochemical plastic refining - which also produces "microplastics".

The ITAN results in absurd solutions - again, back to Basel Action Network leadership - such as a rule that the Malaysia plastic recycler remains in business but can only purchase scrap plastic from the 75% of the world population labeled as "non-OECD", as if limiting them from buying plastic from richer OECD countries will save the world.

Intellectually Toxic Anecdotal Nonsense is a huge, wasted opportunity cost to ACTUALLY address real problems.  The world has plenty of real problems and we really do not have the time to spend on pretend problems made up out of poverty porn photos and misattributed water samples.

Anecdotes are contagiously sensationalized and labeled as "facts."

We have met the enemy and he is us.