#WhiteManSplaining Letter 2024: Dear Emerging Markets

February 25, 2024

RE: Basel Convention And OECD Superiority

Dear Emerging Market Tech Sector Buyers:

The purpose of this letter is to explain to you why international laws are drafted by privileged societies purporting to protect and "save" your society, which we have labelled "informal" and "primitive", in order to achieve certain goals which you may not relate to.

1. Protect ourselves from perception of liability for responsibility

2. Shift the burden of proof onto you, the buyer, that what you seek is not stupid externalization of our environmental burdens

3. Protect investments into high-investment machinery and labor-saving shreddiing equipment

4. Retain in our national interests in raw material values.

The first endeavor places a value on our reputation among other WhiteMan Press and Publicity industries which is greater than the value you could ever achieve for creating a critical mass of users necessary to support investments in mass communications in your developing countries. We understand, remotely, that your Nollywood (Nigerian Hollywood) industry and television stations and satellite infrastructure depends greatly upon the affordability of televisions and phones and other communications devicds. However, the potential for the perception of an allegation that we, as whitemandsplainers, might be externalizing an environmental cost poses risk to our much larger value of ownership, real estate, and control over the system of trade. It is better for us that you stay in your place.

Inspired by LCS 2010 Presentation in Alexandria, VA, introducing

Jim Puckett of BAN and Michael "Fishing as a Boy" Anane

Don't Let #CircularEconomy Mean #PropertyColonialism

 The previous blog opened with a some photojournalism chestnuts from a decade ago - when Greenpeace slipped reporters a mickey, and showed journalists a sea container full of identical CRT TVs from a hotel upgrade shipped to Tema, Ghana - and then a 70 year old black and white Magnavox kitchen table TV housing in Agbogbloshie. What should have been proof that Agbogbloshie was an #ewastehoax was passed around as evidence of #environmentalinjustice.

There IS environmental injustice on display - it's when Western NGOs conflate the recent importer, the valedictorians in the Tech Sector, the "Geeks of Color", with wire-burning "primitive" recyclers from the slums who eventually gather used imports after DECADES of reuse in the #goodenoughmarket.

This week, we see evidence of the same tactic, via another NGO.  "How Romania Turned Into an Illegal Dumping Ground for EU Waste".

Check out these photos from the article, which claims that "rusting" metal farm equipment is "burned" in Romania landfils. Shocking, but not in the way the writer intended.

The claim that the "rusty" meatals are "burned in landfills" after being purchased in Western Europe is bigoted, stupid, and every bit as stupid as the 2010 claims that Joe Benson was importing the 1970 kitchen Magnaox watched by Prince Nico Mbarga.

Part 2: How (too) Quietly The E-Waste Big Lies Are Buried.

 Ok, here's a short but important point about the Basel Convention, and the press releases (like today's from Basel Action Network) that seek to expand it to cover normal non-toxic secondary raw materials like plastic, ROHS compliant circuit boards, and even secondhand reuse.

#FLOWCONTROL

"Non-OECD" meant one thing in 1960 when the (all white country) OECD was assembled (Japan was an afterthought).  "Non-OECD" meant a completely different thing in the mid-1980s when the Basel Convention sought to keep pollution abatement costs / regulations in OECD nations from being subverted through international dumping (like the Trafigura toxic waste scandal of 2006).

"Non-OECD" is, today, a caricature of 72% of the whole world. It's a post-colonial era systemic system of flow control that has been used by Western Nations to try to keep their Big Shred companies from competing against what is now the MAJORITY of manufacturing capacity.

How (too) Quietly The E-Waste Big Lies Are Buried.

(please help)

Our group Fair Trade Recycling has given everything we can to stop the systematic, colonialist, racist laws which benefit the raw material hungry smelters at the expense of the savvy technicians in the emerging markets. Personally, I've taken a lot of flack for naming names (like "80%" J.P."fishing as a boy" M.A., and P.L. - after talking to them). I researched and exposed how GPS tracking device "studies" were rigged in 2015...  trying to prove the false claim of 80%, the NGO and MIT Sustainable City Lab avoided tracking a single CRT television, which represented over 50% of the e-waste at the time. 

I don't have time to edit this, and fewer than 50 people will have time to read it. But the Big Ewaste Lie has not been buried, and is beginning to stink, and threatens a pandemic of bad law based on flawed, uneducated, systemically racist environmental policy. The students researching environmental studies today will report the history of waste colonialism in future theses, reports, and podcasts.

The trade press helped a bit to cover and correct the story, but is still largely unwilling to correct a false headline that put people like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson in jail.  Just this week, Resource Recycling reprinted false claims - which they certainly knew to be false - because they were repeated at a European conference. 

In the same EScrap News which repeated the false claims - described to me by head editor Dan Lief as one of some "different opinions" rather than as disproven falsehoods - there is a story by Colin Staub about the consequences. I like the teams at Resource Recycling, Recycling Today, Recycling International, Scrap Magazine, WasteDive, Waste360, etc. I go way back with recycling intellectual titans like Chaz Miller, Jim O'Keefe, Jerry Powell, Manfred Beck, DeAnne Toto, Rachel H. Pollak, Brian Taylor, and even folks who left the scene (e.g. Waste Age's Amanda Smith-Teutsch). We certainly don't want to bite the hands that feed our press releases.

But there's a crime occurring, and it keeps happening. There is a lot of money around #blackwashing.

#Greenwashing is well defined, when a polluting industry (e.g. extraction) launches a "pilot project" or "campaign" or far-off "goals". What #blackwashing refers to is the subtle inference that people paying more for something that industry wants are suspect, have a higher hurdle, or must prove a negative. Joseph "Hurricane" Benson was asked to disprove what the UK prosecutor referred to as "common knowledge" that the majority of what he purchased would go to African landfills.