New York Times Opinion Editor Tim Schneider introduced us all to another "tell all" author, Alexander Clapp, with the headline "The Story You've Been Told about Recycling is a Lie". It's been forwarded to me by a half dozen colleagues, readers, and scholars, who know that these "Recycling is a Lie" claims have been the whole reason this blog exists.
It's strange. "Health Care is a Lie". "Barber Shops are a Lie". We never see those finger waving headlines. But somehow a writer gets a flight - and yes, Alexander Clapp's focus in the Op Ed is on Agbogbloshie, in central Ghana - stays in a hotel and spends a few days with poor African primary school dropouts who burn wire (mostly from automobile harnesses, not electronics) which been in use in the city since the Akosomba Hydroelectric Dam was built in the mid 1960s. And how he's an expert, telling everyone that people like me are lying about recycling.
I will start by disproving Mr. Clapp's completely false claims about Agbogbloshie, and then if I have time, take on his judgement of plastic recycling in Southeast Asia - which I've also visited decades ago.
Tim Schneider, let's start by taking about ELECTRICITY in Ghana, the number of televisions per household, and see if you can distinguish between the geniuses in Africa's Tech Sector and the primary school dropouts in Agbobloshie, and how the mystery is how good African Techs are and why that explains there is so very little E-Waste in Accra City dumps compared to a city of 5M in the US or Europe. I sent Mr. Clapp a link to a 2011 Op Ed I had published in Vice, and sent him a Linkedin and X.com invitation to meet.
To the NY Times Editors (Tim Schneider et. al.)
While international Recycling is certainly not perfect, the patently false claims made by Alexander Clapp author of a new book Waste Wars: in "Recycling Is a Lie" have been called out by dozens of University research studies and noted authors such as Adam Minter (Bloomberg columnist and author of Junkyard Planet and Secondhand).
I will start with my many filmed interviews of the so-called burner boys of the Agbognloshie described in the piece, at the scrap yard in Accra Ghana, whom I've introduced not just to Minter, but to many other reporters with integrity.
No one has ever seen a sea container unloaded there. The idea that African city junkyards are fed directly by USA exports is absurd to anyone who has spent any significant number of years there (as I have).
The E-Waste there is collected from the streets of the city of 5 million by men with push carts. They collect it from the millions of businesses and households in Ghana who have had electricity since the 1960s.
The answer is that they repair and reuse electronics far longer than wealthy westerners do. Yes, Africans do conservation better than we do. A lot better. Poor people tend not to throw working stuff away.
Data exists. Electricity consumption. Televisions per household. Lack of sales of new electronics. If the electronics they buy and test are really burned as junk, what is using the electricity and creating the blackouts and brownouts from record demand? If there were over 300 TV stations in Africa when I first arrived in 1984, who was watching them? Where did the critical mass of users (UN term) come from who made those investments possible? There were no BestBuys or Walmarts. But there were thousands of talented Geeks of Color, who deserve credit for creating African Mass Communications. Summing them all up as wire burners is a liberal own-goal.
It's distressing that authors fail to interview ANY, not one of, the talented importers in Africa's tech sector, and to see the NYT profile them as wire burners is painful. Those wire burners (who I also know pretty well), by the way are mostly burning automobile harness wire from the scrap automobiles. Racial profiling is not something do-gooders are immune to.
If you don't do any secondary research and expect a city of 5 million people to have a dump full of coconut shells and banana peels, it hardly qualifies you to call Africa's talented tech sector liars about what they are capable of selecting testing and reusing. The Op Ed calling us liars doesn't have any data at all. The words "much of" did not use to pass editorial muster.
I don't have time to explain how plastic buyers fly here and inspect the plastic they buy and pay for not just the plastic but the shipping and the customs fees. But start with plastic consumption in rapidly emerging markets and you see that the plastic waste photojournalists see there was domestically generated.
Who is the liar?
My son (now 28) spent a 7 week internship with Karim, a TV refurbished in Ghana while at Middlebury College. There is just no way Alexander Clapp can pass himself off as an expert if he believes wire burners are buying used electronics from Americans.
How can you explain the electricity, the TV stations, the traffic, the mobile phone towers in Africa if you are so much better at recycling and repairing than they are?
See the youtube video by Alex Wondergam, "In The Life: Scrap Metal Men" to see how the scrap at Agbogbloshie is collected, busines-by-business, house-by-houses, street by street. And you will start to get a feel for the mystery here - why is the Accra dump so SMALL????? Because of men like Karim. And I wanted to make sure people in my son's generation got to experience circuit-board-level repairs that Americans once did 50 years ago.
Same history in Asia, by the way. I wonder if Alexander Clapp or Tim Schneider has ever heard of Simon Lin, Terry Gou, or Lee Kun-hee? All three started out like Karim. As did Steve Jobs and Michael Dell. See? If you can stop racially profiling the Tech Sector as "primitive recyclers" you might learn what I did.
