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.  

My Four Principles: Recycling Is My Karma Yoga

This is not a religious blog by any means. But my recycling career choice has an origin story. 

When my mother, Janeth Ingenthron (1942-2025) was pursuing a Ph.D degree at University of Arkansas in World Literature, during my teenage years, she would finish an assigned reading and then knock on my bedroom door and throw it on my bed, and tell me briefly about why it was important.

Tao Tse Ching.

Plato's Republic. 

Steppenwolf, Siddhartha...

Bhagavad Gita...

Some combination of smoking pot and feeling guilty about it and being surrounded by Ozark Mountain Pentacostal relatives grew inside me... And I also read my pocket Gideon's Bible New Testament, and talked to Mom about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John... same story but different perspectives and lessons.

In a nutshell, cutting to the chase, I decided that becoming a hermit monk philosopher would keep my conscience nice and shiny, but that generations who would look back on us, the way I was looking back on these historical philophers, would care about what we consumed and polluted, and what we left for them.

That's why Recycling became my choice. It was a religious, philosophical choice. If I live on this planet, I will consume finite resources, and the best way short of asceticism was to justify my existence by saving waste. Recycling was my karma yoga.

Ten Years Since 2015: The Agbogbloshie Fever Broke

From 2015 to 2025, the story of e-waste exports has been more or less at an impasse. Academic peer reviewed research has supported this blog's thesis, which is that the e-waste filmed at Agbogbloshie city dump was domestically generated by the residents and businesses of the City of Accra. But sensationalists (like Alexander Clapp) still make money off of the easily told story of externalisation, in a world of Trump-Globalism-Is-Bad believers.

The role of journalism, and the role of the human amygdala ("if it bleeds, it leads") in selecting stories to report, is a frequent subject of the blog. I came from 3 generations of journalism on the Freeland (middle name) side of the family, my late father was a Journalism professor (fellow graduate of University of Missouri J-School, classmate of Jim Lehrer), and my long relationship with Emerging Markets (from the Nestle Boycott of 1982, which drew me into Carleton College Student Government to my International Relations degree and semester at the UN in Geneva, to Peace Corps and beyond) has frequently put me in a leadership position to call out false reporting about places like Agbogbloshie.

But it's also a challenge to keep this blog "fresh" and not to repeat myself. The Recycling Trade Press writ large eventually acknowledged it was participating in "poverty porn" for the sake of shredding equipment ad revenue and conference attendance (Editor Jerry Powell told me "it's not the steak, it's the sizzle" when - effectively - acknowledging to me privately that he realized Chinese recyclers were being racially profiled).

 https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2015/11/10/exporting-deception-disturbing-trend-waste-trade-denial/

E-Scrap News not only printed this in 2015, but RE-printed it in 2018, by which point the Basel Action Network's own staff was quitting and the fever should have broken.

This is why I simultaneously feel obligated to continue blogging, and at the same time want to give up. It's harder and harder for me to repeat things that are obvious, but the defense of racial profiling is not exactly something other than what we are all called upon to do. 

The Prophesy: Great Grandchildren in the Future Will Care About Our Generations Consumption

The "Bene Gesserit" April Fool's Blog had a "prophesy".

PRESS RELEASE: Recycling Sisterhood Bene Gesserit of Sustainability Thwarting Harkonen Waste Management

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 1, 2025

Waste Arrakis: Elite Recycling Sisterhood Revealed as Bene Gesserit to Thwart Harkonen Waste Empire

BOSTON, MA – In a stunning development uncovered today (April 1st, obviously), a covert order of elite recycling professionals has been outed as none other than the secretive Bene Gesserit of sustainability—a powerful collective silently shaping the environmental future of the galaxy... one compost bin at a time.

The Prophecy: Children and great-grandchildren yet to be born will care whether we kept the water pure and made finite world resources last, and they will appreciate the sustainability we try to care about today.

Operating for decades under the guise of state officials, nonprofit leaders, and municipal department heads, this fearless group has been secretly resisting the expansion of the galactic menace known as Harkonen Hauling Waste Management, along with its sinister subsidiaries: Harkonen Mining (motto: "Strip it faster!") and Harkonen New Produce Obsolescence Corporation (creators of the 6-day toaster).

When the Harkonen Waste Wars latest battle brought on gaslighting of recycling participants, markets, businesses, and workers - with bold "RECYCLING IS A LIE" Blimps floating over Earth Day Festivities, it awakened a quiet set of sorceresses who have been supporting the environment for decades, as described in the Great Book of Recycling.

Meet the Sisterhood of the Circular Economy:

• Brooke Nash (MA DEP) – High Reverend Mother of End Markets and Master of the “Waste Not” Litany.
• Megan Schulz-Fontes (NERC) – Keeper of the Northeast Waste Path and Mistress of Materials Flow.
• Laura Olivier (Earthworm Recycling) – Whisperer of Compost, Summoner of Worm Armies.
• Reagan Bissonette (NRRA) – Wielder of the Spice of Source Separation; Prophetess of Post-Consumer Peace.
• Gretchen Carey (MassRecycle) – Queen of Education Outreach, feared for her deadly accurate eco-haikus.
• Terri L. Goldberg – Supreme Auditor of Hazardous Substances and Knower of All That is Buried.
• Kathi Mirza (MA DEP) – Code-breaker of Collection Data; her spreadsheets strike terror into the hearts of cartels.
• Waneta Trabert (Newton MA DPW) – Commander of Municipal Resistance, known as “The Waste Whisperer of Walnut Street.”
• Abbey Massaro (MassRecycle) - Vision Mother of the Context.

The Prophecy: Future generations around the world will benefit from one person's impact - each of our impacts. What we are doing today will matter.

The Conflict:

As Harkonen forces spread cheap plastic packaging, fake recycling apps, and new operating systems that turn working laser printers into boat anchors, the Bene Gesserit Recycling Order has activated their plan: The Great Diversion. It includes zero-waste Jedi training, organics mind-melding, and an AI-powered Extended Producer Responsibility sandworm.

“We must conserve for the next generation, the prophesized children of the future,” said Nash during a recent council. “We will not permit the waste stream to flow unchecked.”

Sources say the Sisterhood has infiltrated multiple board meetings under the cover of “public comment periods” and is rumored to have hypnotized several corporate executives with repeated chants of “Reduce, Reuse, Refuse.”

The Prophecy: Mothers will see the importance of the world their children's children will inherit.

"Extract! Carbonize! Brickware! Dispose!" - Harkonen Waste Motto

What’s Next?

A climactic battle is rumored for Earth Day, in which the Sisterhood will ride in on solar-powered e-bikes to challenge the Harkonen clan at their last known landfill stronghold, armed with reusable tote bags, carrot peels, and a binder of intergalactic waste bans.

When asked for comment, Harkonen CEO Vladimir Dumpstrakh simply muttered, “Curse those witches of waste... they sorted everything.”

The Prophecy: A kinder, gentler, more sustainable Sandworm can be nurtured and bred, to make our Spice more sustainable...

Anne McGovern, Christine Beling, and Susan Cascino, Laura Dubester, Lynn Rubenstein - and many others whose claims that the Sisterhood existed were scorned as Recycling Lies - are passing out the Prophesy Popcorn.