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 write 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."
 |
| 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".
To show how the 80% waste exports works, I tried it myself last week... I bought the Rag Day 2021 shirt new off the rack of discounted T-Shirts at a Chinese-owned Bazaar in Barcelona Spain, and paid to bring it to Middlebury, Vermont.
The black T-shirt cost me 2 Euros, a small sacrifice to own the famous "Rag Day 2021" Memento.
If I donate it to a Textile reuse company, it probably wouldn't sell in the USA, where people are sensitive to the dates on an otherwise brand new shirt. It would go to a grading facility, probably in Texas or Ontario, accepted (not thrown out, with the high heeled shoes, single shoes, ski boots and winter sweaters that poor countries won't buy), and sent to a third party BUYER - a grading company, perhaps in Benin or Guatemala - where it will be graded further for pricing for secondhand retail shops in different neighborhoods in different countries. My guess is that it would go to one of the "B" grade markets in Northern Ghana (Savelugu) or Burkina Faso rather than an "A" grade shop in Accra or Lagos. But my guess is based on talking to people with decades more experience in "textile reuse" and rag-picking than I have.
Grade C or D t-Shirts graded out in Texas or Ontario might go into the automobile rag market, or shredded to make the greyish fluff in the interior of automobile upholstry or baseballs.
The marketplace for used textiles is constantly evolving, going through shortages but more frequently "gluts" due to cheaper and cheaper clothing (both new and used) and more affluent buyers in Emerging Markets. In Savelugu in 2015, Ibrahim was still repairing CRT TVs, imported from Japan in the 1970s, to install TV remote control receivers he harvested off of more recent discards (I took author Adam Minter to meet Ibrahim in Savelugu the following year, and he appears in the concluding chapters of Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale)
My advice to Basel Convention Delegates is show immense caution when a Crusader decries "Waste Externalization" and "Dumping" and seeks to "save" consumers in consuming countries by adding to the noise and regulation, based on "40%" or "80%" or any FIXED PERCENTAGE claim to describe a complicated and dynamic market, where city discards (worn out after years of use) are found at dumps mixed with plastic monsoon stormwater runoff, perhaps next to a shirt that was mistakenly purchased by someone who THOUGHT that it would sell in a now glutted market, and now is adjusting the next purchase order accordingly.
That FIXED PERCENTAGE claim is always a red flag, because the graders and buyers and shopkeepers and consumers are all making adult decisions how to spend their money, and not a single person involved in that market has any incentive to pay for material they they throw out in Ontario, or Benin, or which doesn't sell at the market in Accra. I don't know what the correct "percentage" is, but when I see someone who claims it's a fixed known data point, claiming "Waste Colonialization"... well, it reminds me of the Christian and Muslim missionaries who came to lecture Africans a century or two ago, building institutions, mosques and churches on claims they know who is going to Heaven or Hell.
Africans I know don't distinguish a great deal between the Western Colonists and Western Missionaries.
Chaucer said it best in his poem "The Legend of Good Women" https://lnkd.in/dTjJmS-h at the time of these international Priestatollah Missionaries were institutionalizing morality.
"A thousand tymes have I herd men telle,
That ther is Ioye in heven, and peyne in helle;
And I acorde wel that hit is so;
But natheles, yit wot I wel also,
That ther nis noon dwelling in this contree,
That either hath in heven or helle y-be"
No comments:
Post a Comment