A Modest Hypothesis: Did Guiyu and Agbogbloshie Make the River Cleaner?

A professor visiting China emailed me this morning and jokingly asked what he should look for in Guiyu or Wuhan in his spare time.

Sometimes a pithy email response makes the best blog fodder. My response:

You don't need to really go to Guiyu or Agbogbloshie if you have Google maps. Just find press coverage of Basel Action Network or Blacksmith Institute's toxic River sample. Then identify the river and find a site a few kilometers upstream and then Google search for contaminated water samples upstream.  

Based on that evidence, Guiyu and Agbogbloshie are making the river cleaner (though of course that is because the samples upstream were taken years earlier when it was even worse).

Science!!!

I'm referring of course to the Guiyu river samples from the largest textile factory hub on earth, upstream from Guiyu, whose water samples are nearly identical to the Bangladesh Lourajong River samples downstream from the Bangladesh second-largest textile manufacturing hub on earth.  Surprise, Guiyu's samples look the same as the river samples of the textile effluent samples upstream from Guiyu.  

And World Bank and IMF funded river samples upstream of Agbogbloshie's Odaw River Lagoon showed a dead river upstream a decade before computer scrap existed to export.

The modest proposal - since the BAN.org samples were taken a decade after the previous upstream samples, and since China and Africa's environmental standards are slowly improving, is this evidence that "primitive" recycling is cleaning up the river?

Of course not. But declaring a sample at a downstream point is proof that the river was cleaner upstream from the single sample is mereley a test that shows Western Journalism is sometimes incapable of asking necessary and intelligent questions... at least if you throw them a "globalism gotcha" bone and a few "witches brew" halloweeny words - and of course photos of little brown children with 1970s TVs to stand upon or pose atop their heads.

The current America First zeitgeist suggests something that of course The Onion beat me to...

Nation's Toddlers Critically Under-Photographed, Says U.S. Aunt Coalition

We need to photograph more of our own neglected children.