The Congressional Quarterly: Duh: Traffic Jams at the Environmental Zoo

Duh: Traffic Jams at the Environmental Zoo

What if the “mystery” of African e-waste is best explained by the wonder of African electronics use?

CQ Researcher recently published Robert Kiener’s report, “Global E-Waste Trade: Can It Be Successfully Reduced and Regulated?.” Robert spent about two hours interviewing me, and he seemed genuinely intrigued by the contrarian view.

The mystery of used electronics appearing in African cities may be best explained by the wonder of Africans using electronics.

Duh.

Accra. Lagos. Nairobi. Cairo. Cape Town. Pretoria.

What is the first thing almost every tourist, researcher, aid worker and white savior encounters after leaving the airport?

Traffic.

Your first hour in Accra should disabuse you of Greenpeace’s image of Agbogbloshie as some remote fishing village where Europeans secretly dump computers. Agbogbloshie is about 20 minutes from the airport—which, in Accra traffic, means it is extremely close to the airport. You could practically walk there.

Those traffic jams are full of automobiles. Automobiles contain steel, aluminum, batteries, catalytic converters, motors, circuit boards and copper wiring harnesses. They wear out. They are repaired. Their parts are harvested. Eventually, they are chopped into scrap.

Automobile scrap is far larger than electronic scrap. Yet when researchers photograph copper wire burning at an African scrapyard, the wire is routinely presented as evidence of imported electronic waste. The Smithsonian’s Adam Minter reported from Agbogbloshie that the burning wire included everything from automobile wiring harnesses to tire threads, that automobiles were being dismantled throughout the scrapyard, and that electronic waste was only a small part of the material being processed there.

The traffic jam creates automobile scrap whether or not a European spreadsheet records it.

But what if automobile scrap is held to the same standard of accounting as Kiener applies to E-Waste?

If it isn’t measured in Europe, did Africa recycle it?

Only Measured Bananas Count In the Forest...

The Global E-waste Monitor reports that less than one-quarter of the world’s discarded electronics is “formally collected and recycled.” CQ Researcher shortens that qualification and repeatedly tells readers that less than 25 percent is recycled.

Those are not the same statement. And if it was true of automobiles, they'd be stacked even higher than I saw in Kumasi, Ghana.

The car scrap is not landfilled in Africa, or "lost" to the "circular economy". E-waste isn't either.

“Formally collected and recycled” means entered into a recognized reporting system. It does not count countless repairs, parts harvesting, resale, refurbishment and metal recovery transactions in countries without elaborate documentation systems.

Most people on Earth live outside the highly documented waste-management systems of Europe, Japan and North America. Therefore, a very large share of global repair and recycling is—by definition—missing from the formal spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet does not say it was thrown away.

It says the spreadsheet did not see it.

Visit an automobile scrapyard in Accra or Kumasi. You will not find people casually throwing away steel, aluminum or copper. Not some of it. Not most of it. None of it. The valuable material is recovered because it has value. Millions of people make their living repairing vehicles, harvesting reusable parts and recovering metal, usually without filing reports with an EU-funded consultant.

Measured formal automobile recycling may approach zero. Actual automobile recycling plainly does not.

The traffic jam proves the automobiles exist. The scrapyard proves they wear out. The workers prove the materials are recovered. Calling that recovery “a concern” because Brussels did not receive a form is not material-flow analysis. It is an accounting-system bias.

The monkeys still aren’t running the zoo

In 2010, I wrote “Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo.” The metaphor was deliberately uncomfortable. I was not calling African, Asian or Latin American technicians monkeys. I was describing how environmental regulators and campaigners treated them—as creatures inside a cage rather than engineers, investors, importers, consumers and decision-makers.

Sixteen years later, the zookeepers still write most of the reports.

Europe: It only counts as recycling if our system documented it.

The Basel campaign: African buyers cannot be trusted to distinguish a repairable product from waste.

China: If African repair markets are removed from competition for used equipment and secondary materials, industrial-scale consumers will happily purchase the resulting commodities.

That last point deserves far more scrutiny. When Basel rules or European interpretations suppress African trade in repairable electronics and secondary materials, the resources do not disappear. The rules change who may buy them, who may add value to them and who ultimately controls the recovered commodities.

China’s enormous appetite for copper, aluminum and other secondary resources does not stop at the edge of the European spreadsheet. If African reuse and recycling businesses are defined as “informal,” treated as environmentally suspect and denied access to material, someone else gains access.

Follow the money. Follow the material.

Electricity creates electronics markets

The larger omission is electrification.

People who gain access to electricity buy televisions, refrigerators, mobile phones, computers and appliances. Cities with tens of millions of electricity users eventually generate millions of used devices.

This should be obvious. But the standard e-waste narrative continues to depict African cities primarily as destinations in someone else’s economy. Electronics arrive from the West, become waste and are burned by passive victims. African consumers appear at the very end of the story—if they appear at all.

But Africans buy electronics. They compare brands. They reject bad merchandise. They repair what Europeans replace. Technicians harvest parts. Importers risk their own money. Households use products for years. Eventually those products wear out and enter domestic scrap markets alongside locally purchased cars, refrigerators and televisions.

Agbogbloshie was not created merely because someone in Europe discarded a computer. It exists within a metropolitan economy of millions of people consuming, repairing and discarding products.

The “e-waste mystery” begins to disappear as soon as African people are allowed to enter the equation.

Congressional Quarterly had a chance

Robert Kiener had a decent chance to point to the man behind the curtain: the confusion of unmeasured recycling with no recycling, and the near-total failure to connect African e-waste generation with African electricity use and domestic consumption.

He included my criticism that the Basel Convention can wrongly classify repairable electronics as waste. I appreciate that. He also discussed repair, refurbishment and the income created by legitimate trade.

But those points remain exceptions inside the familiar narrative: dumping, toxicity, criminal trafficking and the need for more formal control.

Either Robert or his Editor whiffed on the larger story.

It is the safe story because it is the story nearly everyone else has reported. It treats Africans as the destination of the global electronics economy rather than participants in it. It sees the smoke but not the traffic. It counts the European export but not the Ghanaian purchase, repair, resale or recovery.

Traffic jams without automobile scrap.

Electrification without domestic e-waste.

Millions of technicians without recycling.

Mystery.

Duh. Again. Duh, Again and Again.