From 2015 to 2025, the story of e-waste exports has been more or less at an impasse. Academic peer reviewed research has supported this blog's thesis, which is that the e-waste filmed at Agbogbloshie city dump was domestically generated by the residents and businesses of the City of Accra. But sensationalists (like Alexander Clapp) still make money off of the easily told story of externalisation, in a world of Trump-Globalism-Is-Bad believers.
The role of journalism, and the role of the human amygdala ("if it bleeds, it leads") in selecting stories to report, is a frequent subject of the blog. I came from 3 generations of journalism on the Freeland (middle name) side of the family, my late father was a Journalism professor (fellow graduate of University of Missouri J-School, classmate of Jim Lehrer), and my long relationship with Emerging Markets (from the Nestle Boycott of 1982, which drew me into Carleton College Student Government to my International Relations degree and semester at the UN in Geneva, to Peace Corps and beyond) has frequently put me in a leadership position to call out false reporting about places like Agbogbloshie.
But it's also a challenge to keep this blog "fresh" and not to repeat myself. The Recycling Trade Press writ large eventually acknowledged it was participating in "poverty porn" for the sake of shredding equipment ad revenue and conference attendance (Editor Jerry Powell told me "it's not the steak, it's the sizzle" when - effectively - acknowledging to me privately that he realized Chinese recyclers were being racially profiled).
https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2015/11/10/exporting-deception-disturbing-trend-waste-trade-denial/
E-Scrap News not only printed this in 2015, but RE-printed it in 2018, by which point the Basel Action Network's own staff was quitting and the fever should have broken.
This is why I simultaneously feel obligated to continue blogging, and at the same time want to give up. It's harder and harder for me to repeat things that are obvious, but the defense of racial profiling is not exactly something other than what we are all called upon to do.
Other trade journalists such as Brian Taylor of Recycling Today (who actually lived in Hong Kong at that time), Manfred Mann and Kirsten Leinenkoper of Recycling International, and Powell's own editor Dylan de Thomas took risks to their magazines' "Big Shred" advertising clientele to increasingly curtail the printing of Jim Puckett's a priori "statistics", blown apart by Adam Minter in Bloomberg news previously that year.
Puckett refers to me as making an ad hominem attack by defending the Tech Sector from being accused of sending 80% of what they purchase to the city wire burners in his photos... and claims Minter did not see an automobile yard (the photo Puckett used shows burning automobile harness wire I have close ups).
The link above was effectively the last straw, appearing the same year Adam Minter travelled with me to Agbogbloshie to witness it was not an "imported waste" site - in fact it disproved the allegation. It was after Discard Studies and professors from MIT, Memorial U, USC Los Angeles, Arizona State, U of Canada Vancouver, Pontifica Catholica Universidad del Peru, and others completely anialated the author Jim Pucketts claims with hard data (per capital electricity consumption in those countries, for example, would predict exponentially more e-waste in a city like Accra IF NOT BUT FOR the Tech Sector (whom Powell essentially admitted to defaming). Allowing Jim Puckett to label us as "in denial" when he himself had admitted (in the Bloomberg comment section) that he had made the numbers up or misattributed them back in 2013.
Powell's Resource Recycling acknowledgement, TEN YEARS AGO, that the false claims about Agbogbloshie and Guiyu etc. were already discredited in peer reviewed academic journals. I would have hoped that opinion piece would have long been put out to pasture.
The question now is whether continuing to write about this in blog form is beating a dead horse, or more vital than ever. I would like advice how to present the anti-defamation defense of "Techs of Color", which has been vital to me meeting younger international environmentalists like Zoe and Agabas and Laura and Megan... whom have repeatedly asked me not to print their name in the blog, an acknowledgement that it remains a "lightning rod" for the same defamatory accusations E-Scrap News printed on Jim Puckett's behalf in the 2015 opinion piece above.
I almost feel like a Ukrainian soldier. The trade press has a moral responsibility to respond to false claims (like Alexander Clapp's) and not to leave this work to a 63 year old blogger.
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