Showing posts with label #datajournalism. Show all posts

Reuters #JunkJournalism: @JoeReuters Brock's Anti-Recycling #Shoegate Gone Wrong

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m5bblM1yVw

Joe Brock of Reuters "spent months" putting GPS trackers into perfectly wearable shoes, sent them to a Singapore textile and shoe grader, who both exports good reusealbe shoes and delivers junk and mismatched shoes to a Dow-funded downcycling operation that grinds up the shoes for beneficial use - to be made into rubberized gym tracks.

His thesis at the beginning of these months of reporting is that addressing the problem of non-exportable shoes is illegitimate unless all of the shoes are recycled and non are reused.

Look, I'm glad that my local hospital has a legitimate morgue. That does not make the recovery room evidence of greenwashing or a crime. Is Dow contributing to the environment by creating a legitimate end market for non-reuse shoes? Is Dow intending to shred the shoes for planned obsolescence purposes to keep the secondary market from competing with them for customers? Either would be a story... but we get #junkjournalism instead.

"Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them at an Indonesian flea market"

Here we go again. Joe Brock of Reuters spends a lot of time and money to show a "scandal" in recycling, following the well-worn path of #gotchajournalists who fail to talk to a single business or trade expert. It's alarming Reuters Editors let this shark-jumping reporter get so far.

Bloomberg columnist and bestselling Recycling Author Adam Minter chimes in via Twitter that he sees this report as an example of "Waste Colonialism".

As a defender of savvy reuse and repair workers in emerging markets, to me Joe Brock poses next to journalistic #CollateralDamage like a TrumpKid who shot a rhino. The Singapore recycler (Yok Impex) looks like he's doing exactly what he should - put good pairs of shoes in the reuse bin and mismatched and damaged shoes in the recycling bin. Dow is funding the latter.

The most important thing in the history of this blog is boring. Secondary research. Data journalism.

The most important "unique" insights I've been credited with were available to everyone, in plain sight.

- World Bank and IMF Data on electricity demand.

- Digitimes data on display device manufacturing in the 2000s

- @GrahamMytton's 1983 "Mass Communcation in Africa"

Electricity demand (IMF, World Bank) correlates strongly with device ownership and use.

Device ownership and use does NOT correlate as strongly with device production and sales (Digitimes).

Historical device ownership correlates strongly with secondhand device sales.

"But I've seen the photos!" #povertyporn is easier to witness than #datajournalism. That's the problem.

Happy Halloween! This year, I'm going as a very scary statistic.

What do we do when someone with a reputation for caring about the poor, caring about endangered species, etc., uses their reputation to convince the Mainstream Press of a false math account? When they create mainstream story that exaggerates the actual problems - many of which are real - they create what #KirstenLinnenkoper labels "The Plastic Boogeyman" in this month's Recycling International.

Somewhere, deep in our amygdala, English Majors are afraid of math. English majors are more likely to become journalists - or "photojournalists" - than they are to be #datajournalists. And we are seeing this routine over and over again, as a #CharityIndustrialComplex makes up numbers to scare reporters, who seem at a loss over how to fact-check.

Michal Manas, Baled PETE in Czech Republic, Wikimedia Commons

This year, the #fakestat is "Nine Percent". Greenpeace snuck their own executive summary onto an otherwise sound piece of plastic recycling research. And they get mainstream press to report that of all single serve plastic containers sold, only 9% of plastic containers are recycled. The conclusion they allow some reporters to leave with is that only 9% of the plastic in this photo above really gets recycled. At least, I heard reporters say that, and so far, Greenpeace and BAN have yet to correct it.

Nine percent sounds really bad. If you are a city, why even bother to pay for collecting those containers? If you are a resident, why bother putting PETE or HDPE into the blue bin? On NPR's "It's Been A Minute" a few months ago, the panel glibly announced SPECIFICALLY that of what you put into a recycling blue bin, only 9% really gets recycled.

Compare that to Aluminum containers. Putting aside that these stats themselves suffer from "Formal Sector" bias (many aluminum cans get recycled in China and Africa and India, where there is no formal "spreadsheet" to track it), the 9% Greenpeace statistic is awful compared to Aluminum Cans.

"Notably, while the Aluminum Association has reported a 45.2% consumer recycling rate for aluminum cans, the RRS analysis uses 38% as the national baseline to reflect the percentage of aluminum that actually makes it to remelting facilities, after material losses that occur during collection and sorting." 2022 Press Release, Ball Systems and RRS

So they divide recycled aluminum cans by all aluminum cans.

collected in the numerator

divided by cans manufactured in the denominator

The numerator of the Aluminum Statistic are tons of aluminum single serve containers documented to be recycled. (formal sector numbers). Now, look at the Plastic report calculation, covered in Science.org in 2017... TITLE?

Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made

"As of 2015, approximately 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated, around 9% of which had been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment." https://lnkd.in/e_wN-t5j

See that? The numerator is plastic recycling - mostly single serve PETE and HDPE containers, though LDPE Film is also legitimately recovered. All are reclaimed at higher than 9% rates - if we measure it the way aluminum cans are measured. But if you follow the link to the study, the DENOMINATOR is all plastic ever produced. Greenpeace divides the captured recycling containers and divides them by bottles PLUS child car seats, underground PVC pipe, auto bumpers, etc.

Recycled bottles in the numerator, divided by ALL PLASTIC EVER PRODUCED

In 2005, a year before I started this Blog, retired Greenpeace Founder Patrick Moore published this in the Miami Herald - the same time BAN and Greenpeace started press releases about "ewaste exports"
http://greenspiritstrategies.com/the-environmental-movement-greens-have-lost-their-way/

Special to the Miami Herald
January 28, 2005
Scare tactics, disinformation go too far
I am often asked why I broke ranks with Greenpeace after 15 years as a founder and full-time environmental activist. I had my personal reasons, but it was on issues of policy that I found it necessary to move on.
By the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. I became aware of the emerging concept of sustainable development: balancing environmental, social and economic priorities. Converted to the idea that win-win solutions could be found by bringing all interests together, I made the move from confrontation to consensus.
Since then, I have worked under the banner of Greenspirit to develop an environmental policy platform based on science, logic and the recognition that more than six billion people need to survive and prosper every day of the year. The environmental movement has lost its way, favoring political correctness over factual accuracy, stooping to scare tactics to garner support.
We’re faced with environmental policies that ignore science and result in increased risk to human health and ecology. To borrow from the vernacular, how sick is that?

#Distraction From Extraction #4: Negativity Bias in Affective Picture Processing

Another blog descended from a morning tweet. As the global poor emerge in modest economic power, the "elective upgrade" of secondhand goods will result in lower repair rates. There are billions more discarded flip flop shoes in African streets and gutters today than when I lived there 30 years ago. But that just means the raw materials are building up in countries with lower wages - which, like repair and reuse markets of decades ago, represents an OPPORTUNITY for Recycling.

Like the repair export trade, that starts with undoing false, biased, and stereotypical imagery. The opportunity here is for the extraction industries to fund the cleanup in the place it is cheapest to do so.

Robin I
@WR3A
Been researching, meditating on, blogging about, intellectually debating, dialectically testing, and discovering truths about reuse and repair since 1977.

Elective upgrade (buy a new broom, donate the old one) works when world population is growing unsustainably.

#extractiontax

Flashback to 2015. WR3A issued a press release that Agbogbloshie was largely a "hoax" (as far as a significant percentage of waste there being dumped by rich countries, it being a "pristine fishing village" twenty years earlier, it ever having received a sea container, it being remotely significantly close to "largest e-waste dump", or the scrap sector workers there being remotely involved in anything but collecting scrap metal, or the burning waste being significantly electronics rather than automobile wire and tires, or separation of copper from aluminum "by hand" being less environmentally sustainable than Big Shred in OECD nations.... etc).

Reuse advocate calls Agbogbloshie ‘a hoax’

That 2015 resulted not only in an Op-Ed from the NGO describing me a denier and apologist, but a targeted GPS tracker delivered to a non-public location, hidden inside a $150 laser printer (another sold that week on ebay). And readers may recall that a year after, I was named, my clients were named, and shamed, in the NGO and MIT collaborative "Monitour".

Fortunately, thanks to the 2013 Fair Trade Recycling Grant project ($469K project involving Memorial University, University of Southern California, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru), and a wealth of World Bank and IMF data on the history of the electric grid in Ghana, the outcome was a documentary in defense of the Geeks of Color and three books confirming my hypothesis. (J Lepawsky, A Minter, J Goldstein)

The question remains, how did Michael "Fishing as a Boy" Anane ever attract PBS Frontline, INTERPOL, German photojournalists, UNEP, and 1990s glam rockers to hype up a local auto scrapyard in a random African City as being the biggest e-waste story on earth for the next 5 years? His very claim completely discredited him, and any background check revealed the newspaper he claimed to work for does not exist. I interviewed Anane in person on 2 occasions, and when asked the source of his information, he cited the discredited NGO that promoted him to "expert". Complete boondoggle.

Did you know this is an African's universal power supply for lightboard backlight remanufacturing?

Or did you think it was "e-waste"? If so, why?

The Ptolemy-Liability Trap: Simplified Recycling Lifecycle Narratives Tend to Revolve Around You

The Vermont free-mail, coupon-funded newspaper "Hometown" is published and mailed by the Burlington Free Press - which, with its Headliner newspaper, follows the opposite, paywall approach, online. So I'm in a bit of a quandary in presenting the snapshot, below, of the opening paragraphs of the article. Well, it's a fair use claim, and also it's common practice for newspapers to show the "lede" (opening paragraphs), so here's what catches my attention this morning.

Burlington Free Press Thanksgiving Edition

Burlington Free Press Thanksgiving "Hometown" Edition

Joel Banner Baird of Burlington Free Press may well have started a "recycling" story for the same reason that @AdamMinter told me those stories normally appear around holidays.... they are easy to write, require little more than a google page one of research, and seem to appeal to everyone. They are not time sensitive, so a reporter can write it a week ahead, and get home for the holidays faster. But at least in the opening paragraphs, Baird bluntly avoids the normal "gotcha" narratives common in holiday journalism (someone made millions of dollars recycling trash was the go-to in the 1980s, your recyclables didn't really get recycled in the 1990s, lather-rinse-repeat for every buyers-market, sellers-market cycle). It leads, but does not bleed.

The opening interview with Michael Noel (nice holiday namesake) of TOMRA, the master-redemption center recycling provider and owner of most supermarket reverse-vendor container machines, avoids falsely choosing between either "It was the best of times."

...Or, "It was the worst of times".

Which is the most environmentally sustainable Container for my holiday beer?

Michael Noel tells Joel Banner Baird "The short answer is, it's complicated". That is an honest answer to the decades of environmentalists (spoilt brat) privileged demands to "choose" the "best" beer container, vs. the equally misguided alt-right "recycling is Bulls**t" waste-makers. Both camps are uber-susceptible to cognitive dissonance (or perhaps vice versa, those prone to cognitive dissonance probably lean toward extreme positions). The more they choose one answer (only use this one vs. nothing matters, environmentalists are wrong), the louder they both get. Outrage is not Expertise.

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First, let me apologize if I got off on the wrong foot with Dr. Ruediger Kuehr of United Nations University. We were introduced to one another about 15 years ago, through indirect networks (EPA DC contacts etc). He was presented to me as a more moderate voice on the E-Waste Export debate than Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network, or Ted Smith of Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

That's kind of typical of official reactions when one hysterical account (BAN.org) that "80% of E-Waste exported 80% of the time, and 80% of that is dumped and lost to the circular economy" is questioned sharply by someone (yours truly) who had a certain degree of credibility at the time. Regulators try to find someone at a median between Robin and The Ayatollah of EWaste, and fund them to get at the truth.

Ruediger's been at the receiving end of research funding for over a decade. And he's filled the role of compromise chef, admirably. A compromise between talented tech sector importers, and the bigots who labelled them "primitive recyclers"...

I haven't finished starting the 2020 "Global E-Waste Statistics Partnership" report, "Global EWaste Monitor 2020" yet. But in the introduction, this paragraph stood out.

"Only 17.4% of this was officially documented as properly collected and recycled."

I see what you did there. It's a very precise statistic, down to the decimal, about what data you have. But it also continues a backhanded European narrative about the so-called "informal" sector (which I call either the Tech Sector or Scrap Sector according to what is happening).

This is #whitesplaining why the Africans I filmed (below) are not to be trusted. If they were trusted, the charitable industrial complex funding might grind to a halt.

A Separate Peace: E-Waste Activism's Collateral Damage

"Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even death by violence"

For over 10 years, this blog has thoroughly documented the false narrative that "exports" are driven by "waste externalisation" and "avoided costs" rather than by "importers" in the "Tech Sector" of emerging markets. The blog managed to land a few "swordfish", such as Adam Minter, Reed Miller, Josh Goldstein, Josh Lepawsky, NPR Marketplace, USA Today, and many more Ph.D's and press.

The false statistic that 80% of used electronics was "sham" recycled has been exposed. - not least importantly by the main NGO itself. Despite trying to rig their last EU GPS tracking study by not affixing GPS to things Africa doesn't want, BAN.org found only 5% export. Despite embarrasing MIT and Oregon PBS with the rigged 2016 GPS tracking study, the NGO E-Stewards racket continues to bring millions of dollars into the lush Seattle offices. Despite questions on the bare faced exploitation of children's photographs in the "third world" dumps, who receive nary a penny from the millions raised, the NGO stands unapologetic.

"Sodom and Gomorrah", "primitives", "ghoulish", and other halloweeny words remain slurs against the talented valedictorians of the Tech Sector in emerging markets. It was racial profiling by the left. That's what structural racism and implicit racism is all about.

The NGO has largely found they don't have to promote lies as fervently, that OEMs with anti-gray-market designs and "big shred" investors who don't like competing in the Good Enough Market will fund them anyway. Why issue lies today, if the money tree is shedding fruit from the lies you told (about Agbogbloshie, Guiyu, etc) a decade ago?

REASON.COM Sees Joseph "Hurricane" Benson as a Legit Operator, Racially Profiled by Do-Gooders

And FairTradeRecycling.net makes another plea to BBC's Raphael Rowe...

Justice delayed is justice denied.

But it provides hope that this reviewer, Editor @brianmdoherty, focused on one of the crucial lessons from Adam Minter's book, Secondhand. Affluent people should not be writing rules for what less affluent people are allowed to reuse and repair. If they do so insist, don't kid yourself, Richie, that you do so for Africa's environment. "Project Eden" was not just a cringeworthy named project, it was total collateral damage to the reputations of Africa's best and brightest.