The Independent in the UK goes way back in the annals of waste-blaming. The Independent was one of the first to herald the arrest of Joseph "Hurricane" Benson, accepting that the African born technician was somehow making a financial gain by exporting used televisions for dastardly intentions - anything but reuse and repair. I tried corresponding with The Independent's reporter for years. Even when Benson was released, and Interpol's Project Eden closed after multiple researchers found Agbogbloshie's waste to be domestic city of Accra devices, not recent imports, the Independent never followed up.
So today's headline seems uncannily responsive to my last blog about the intelligence of dolphins. Weird.
E-waste found contaminating dolphin brains: ‘This is a wake-up call’ Toxic chemicals in dolphins and porpoises seem to originate mostly from television and computer screens
Vishwam Sankaran
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/pollution-electronic-waste-brain-dolphins-b2928621.html
The chemicals are absolutely associated with Liquid crystal diode chemistry in modern flat panel display devices. I'll grant that right away. But there's nothing in the article or paper to support the allegation that the chemicals were released at the end-of-life of the devices, which is in the definition of e-waste.
I left a comment reminding The Independent that in 2002, river samples taken in Guiyu, China, were blamed on remanufacturers of CRT monitors in Guangdong - which were all downstream, south of the river collection. And just a few miles upstream was the largest textile and tannery manufacturing base in the world, where pipes ran out of the factories dumping greenish sludge straight into the river.
This pattern of making environmentalists feel guilty and responsible goes back to the "Crying Indian" litter campaign of the early 1970s, which deflected bottle bill deposit legislation by making the litter about the behavior of the end consumers, rather than producer responsibility. But it's worse because with litter it really is about waste, there really is a shared responsibility between the producers and the consumers who discard the bottles.
But with Guiyu and Agbogbloshie, the press immediately accepted that chemicals like lead in the Odaw River lagoon came from recently imported television screens - and not from decades of automobile lead acid battery recycling at the same site, generated by African automobile scrap.
The question about the LCD chemical in dolphins brains is open as to whether it is released at midnight - the mining and extraction stage, or at 3 o'clock when the chemicals are refined in smelters, or at six o'clock when the new screens are being manufactured.... or if they came from used devices mismanaged by Joe Consumer.
Planned Obsolescence.
Racial Profiling.
Charity Industrial Complex.
Vishwam Sankaran seems well-intended. But the reporter needs to ask whether the presence of LCD chemicals in dolphins came from "waste" generated by consumers, as e-waste is generally defined, or whether the manufacturers of the same chemicals at factories in China are mishandling their sludge and biproduct.
I'm rooting for reporters, I come from a Journalism Family, and I pay for and contribute a lot to my consumption of the press. This blog is not anti-press. If it was a fan blog about Manchester United or Chelsea football, it would be critical of own-goals and losses and scapegoating of fans.
Visit the factories where the LCDs are made. Visit the smelters which produce the chemicals. In the 1960s, environmentalist activists in the USA found a lot of pipes dumping sludge into American rivers. I met the Massachusetts content creator who made the Keep America Beautiful crying Indian campaign - actually hired him for a bit during my time at Massachusetts DEP. He was a nice enough guy. But the "Indian" was an Italian actor.
If the definition of e-waste includes mining, smelting, refining and manufacturing of the devices, all fair. But most people put that label solidly on recyclers like myself. I've visited remanufacturers who purchase the LCD screens. It's possible they are releasing waste, but it's not possible that they are purchasing virgin chemicals from smelters. Let's find out where the pipes are buried.
Vishwam Sankaran
Science and Technology Reporter
Vishwam Sankaran is an early career science and technology reporter based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, writing for The Independent since April, 2021. They are a recipient of the 2021 EurekAlert! Fellowships for International Science Reporters, and their works have been featured in outlets including The Next Web, The Wire Science, The Life of Science, ThePrint and The Weather Channel. Since they began a full-time career as a science journalist with The Press Trust of India (PTI) in 2019, Vishwam has covered extensively across domains of science and technology, including life science, artificial intelligence, climate change, and space missions. Vishwam is passionate about understanding emerging trends in all fields of science, technology, environment, as well as health.
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