5. How Too Quietly Big EWaste Lies Buried: Top Five E-Waste Lies Mapped

Let's ReMap the Five Biggest E-Waste Lies (before the April Fool's Blog traditionally comes out).  In Part Five, let's look at five geographic places the bodies of the truth were buried underneath a pile of false narratives and bogus "E-waste Export" claims. If you are doing a thesis or term paper on electronics recycling this semester, take the blue pill and see how normal ordinary places were sensationalized with poverty narratives despite prima facia evidence that the story was bogus.

We can forgive reporters and news producers like Solly Granatstein (CBS 60 Minutes) at the proximate time that they report. We can roll our eyes at well-meaning do-gooders who react to false claims with alarm, out of a sense of liability. 

But I question why so few reporters do as Ira Glass did following his sharing of Mike Daisy's Foxconn exaggerations and lies. This American Life is alone in re-tracing its steps, and learning that activists and environmentalists are not immune from biased reporting, sensationalism, and creating bricks that build the House of Big Lies.

The Big Lies are about PLACES visible on Google Earth. Please, I need some unprejudiced university student help to link and map these, and I can provide the photos.

1.Guiyu.

2. Foshan

3. Basel

4. Accra

5. Hong Kong

Punjab / Faisalabad is the Sixth Man... Penang, Malaysia gets honorary mention.

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.