As a the drop-out kid from 3 generations of Journalist (great grandparent and grandparent newpaper publishers of Taney County Republican, White River Leader, and Branson Beacon) and Journalism Ph.D father (Missou J-School), I learned that the author of the story never writes the headline... The Editor writes the headline. And "Betteridge's law of headlines" is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
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| Not Yet a Rag or Textile Waste: "I'm Not Dead Yet" Shirt |
Fifteen years ago, in 2011, I posted here the "Red Shoe Blog" which tried to explain what I thought about finding an abandoned red high heeled shoe in the mud in an Emerging Market. I was still somewhat in the used textile business then, collecting municipal bales and sending them to graders in Ontario and Texas. That was a while ago, but back then I already knew what I did not and could not know, and wrote with caution about Basel Action Network (like many "Action Networks" inspired by Saul Alinksy''s "Rules for Radicals") claims about 80% of imported electronics not being reused, but being immediately dumped as waste. Four hundred out of Five hundred sea containers per month to Ghana alone were, BAN.org claimed "a dirty little secret", dumped in Agbogbloshie or Guiyu.
It took another five years for BAN to not only abandon that "statistic", but shockingly to claim never, "ever" to have claimed it. But it was too late - Jim Puckett had made the claim in public (I was in the audience) at an Interpol conference, launching "Project Eden"... which he would later say he had nothing to do with as Joe "Hurricane" Benson and other (Jim's description) "Collateral Damage" cases surfaced. Basel Convention Secretariat's Executive Director, Katharina Kummer, came here to Middlebury for the Fair Trade Recycling Summit to describe how Basel Secretariat was vulnerable to wild percentage claims, and advocated for listening more carefully to importers and exporters like Benson BEFORE launching efforts to "save the victims" of dumping... who would appear to be the actors, making purchases, paying shipping and customs, and rejecting many loads while still buying 80% waste for the purpose of dumping it upon themselves. Those silly black Africans, buying single red high heeled shoes (but not ski boots) that no one wants to buy? Basel Convention was there to Save their Shoes Soles from an understated "Hell".
