Environmentalist Spiritual Materialism vs. Cost Effective Circularity

This is a theme that - hopefully - runs deep in the tributaries and streams of consciousness throughout this blog... There is a limited amount of time and money to address the simultaneous and related emergencies of mass extinction, deforestation, climate change, toxic releases, and waste management. 

We will be judged, and should be, based on how our generation uses its limited resources as judiciously and economically as possible.  I started my environmental-spiritual aspirations with the premise that children yet to be born, whom I will never meet, and who will never know me, would judge all of us based on how we spend our time and resources, and whether we left them a better place, or a bigger mess.

Back when I was 17, I was thinking about how to direct my own career, spend my own life, as if I was personally going to be judged based on my own actions. Not that it was a bad place to start, but even then I was aware that my "shiny conscience" wouldn't matter much to a child born 500 years from now. If it did, I should have devoted myself to a Buddhist monastery, rather than to our society's collective resource conservation.

Let me propose that we will be judged, by future children or by the Singularity (AI), based on math... how much more sustainable was one rule or regulation over the free market. Primum non nocere - first, do no harm.

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.

Draft 2021 Environmentalism 4.0 DRAFT OPEN LETTER. Add your suggestion or comment, live.

As a fan of Harper Magazine's "A Letter On Justice and Open Debate", and as a career professional Environmentalist on "active duty", I humbly ask whether a similar letter may be overdue in 2021 for the Environmental Community.

Professionals are now more aware of systemic bias, cognitive dissonance, wasteful responses, externalization and circular definitions, and outright collateral damage by politically conservative and progressive "environmental causes".  The "easy" press coverage is to interview the person who represents someone most impassioned for and against the proposal. This further creates cognitive dissonance in the democracy. People become "for or against" things like "plastic", or "carbon", or "waste", without considering realistically that society must regulate its expenditures to achieve the most bang for the buck. That consideration is especially sharp in emerging and developing markets, which can now widely afford devices like cars, computers, and consumption of "fast food", but which lack the disposable income for waste collection.

This has at times resulted in First World "grabbing control" of vehicles of export, e.g. investments in equipment to "shred" devices Emerging Markets wish to purchase, in an attempt to assuage the First World's own "liability" system.  As Carbon and Climate community has long acknowledged, the sky which receives climate-changing carbon does not recognize political sovereignty.  And we need to acknowledge the same in disasters such as mining coral islands for tin, or plastic pollution which is not coming from western recycling operations, but from consumption and disposal owing to rising standards of living in the 1960s-labelled "third world".

I'm not sure this is a good idea, but I suspect that if it is, it would take someone headstrong to suggest it. Might as well be me. (Jack Straw, Greatful Dead, Europe '72)

Draft OPEN LETTER: ENVIRONMENTALISM 4.0

(more)

2020 GlobalEwaste Statistics Partnership. Fresh Start? Hmmmm

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.

NGO Plants Needle in Haystack, Part 1: New Outrageous Claims in #EwasteGate

The news breaking today is that a Seattle NGO, Basel Action Network, is releasing a documentary with PBS about their "watchdog" effort to sabotage LCDs (making them non-repairable) and then track them overseas with GPS transponders.  The first company they have "outed" is Total Reclaim, an E-Steward certified company in their own home of Seattle Washington.

Article at E-Scrap News

Does this sound familiar?  You take electronics which someone wants to reuse, cut wires, and turn it in for reuse and repair.   Someone buys it for repair, and then you accuse them of having shipped it for "primitive" recycling.

#FREEJOEBENSON



BBC Reporter RAPHAEL ROWE cut a wire (thinking export for repair is illegal - should have read Basel Convention Annex IX, B1110 on export for repair of CRT monitors and TVs).

Context:  The Seattle Recycler received about 28.5M lbs of TVs, printers, computers, cell phones - as well as car seats, x-ray machines, and UPS.  The NGO doesn't say that the mass balance is off.  Of the 28.5M lbs, about 28M lbs of garbage-in came back out as baled steel, plastic, non-ferrous metal, and CRT cullet.  What the NGO's methodology is to find a device NOT in demand in the USA (CRTs in 2012 Benson case, smaller flat LCDs this year) but in high demand with overseas repair.  They take one that looks nice, open it and sabotage a wire, then place a tracking device.  When the Recycler has a staff person do sort-for-repair, the GPS is tracked, and the NGO implies that 28 million pounds are in question.

Had the NGO put its GPS tracking device in a random printer or CRT television or Pentium 2 computer, no one has ANYdoubt that Total Reclaim would have long recycled it.  This test is designed to disguise the GPS device in the biggest cherry, the patients who we believe could be saved from the recycling creamatorium.  Then, the NGO uses racist language to describe the "primitive" repair people who make a living by cherry picking luxury clients "waste" for the "good enough" market.

If BAN had put the tracker in a Pentium 2, a printer, a CRT television, virtually anything (aka random sample), they know perfectly well the Recycler would have scrapped it.  They chose the device they did because it has high demand and repair markets overseas, and they tracked it to a place a few miles from where the device was probably originally made... a place with more expertise in the device than anywhere in the world.

Remember, the reason NGO BAN told everyone to be very concerned about the export for repair market is that they told the press 80% was not repaired, but was dumped, in "Digital Dump" or "reuse excuse" language.  But it turned out they were making that up.  And their website still has the same garbage.

"Here to Help" Part 1: Is GAHP a Charitable Industrial Complex Honeypot?

#dennismoorecrime #environmentalmalpractice #parasitesofthepoor #whitesaviorcomplex #whiteguilt #morallicense #charitableindustrialcomplex #heretohelp

[Any photos or screen shots from the following sites below are claimed under the "fair use" exception, they are specific evidence in a commentary, policy critique, and use of public and charitable tax exempt funds]

Demonstration of $75K portion of $1.2M investment:  Turning 1kg of wire worth $0.70 into 0.7 kg of wire worth $1.00 

From the outset, let's acknowledge the do-gooders mean well.  They are here to help.  If they turned out to be what one Africa directed blogger coined as #parasitesofthepoor, or arrested one of Africa's best and brightest Tech Sector employers, it's a "Dennis Moore crime".  Redistribution of recycling was trickier than they thought.