Can Someone Explain Basel To Me?

The only thing that the Basel Convention does is infringe trade in scrap (which was not "waste" when the Convention was first written but later became a concern as a "loophole") between the "rich" (OECD) and "poor" (not OECD) people. 

Bring back the Negro Leagues to Make Recycling Great Again???

Because it certainly allows every Malaysian or Indonesian plastic recycler to buy whatever they want from the 75% of the world that is "not OECD."  The pictures, however sad, do not show anything not explicitly allowed by Basel Convention.

The Convention just advocates that poor people can buy from other poor people, but they cannot buy from rich people. Rich People (OECD) can sell used stuff to other rich people, poor people can recycle stuff from other poor people.

NO ACTIVITY IS CHALLEGED. Only IDENTITIES (nationality) are profiled.

It is purely segregation sold as a moral quality.  And fortunately, the Fair Trade Recycling board member Emmanuel Nyaletey will be on the panel to ask these questions to the audience... next to Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network next Wednesday in Orlando.

The Guardian Environmental Division Experiences Situational Irony

Carmignac photojournalism award: Ghana and e-waste

Photojournalists Muntaka Chasant and Bénédicte Kurzen and investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas have documented the flow of electronic waste between Europe and Ghana for the 13^th edition of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award

By Muntaka Chasant, Bénédicte Kurzen, Anas Aremeyaw Anas and Fondation Carmignac

The opening paragraph of the Guardian's weekend E-Waste Ghana Story is fascinating, because it goes on to completely disprove itself in award-winning own-goalism.  The Guardian attempts to actually do what we've been calling on them to do for more than a decade - interview the diaspora and the Tech Sector in the Importing Nations, and don't focus on Basel Action Network and Greenpeace's whitemansplaining of how people buy stuff for reuse.  In so attempting, not unlike 2015's UNEP Waste Report "Waste Crime Waste Risks" (where the documentation completely obliterated the Executive Summary, see "Criminal Negligence" reviews in Discard Studies), the Guardian completely nails its own coffin.

Jerry Sekou Adara: “I had a dispute with the environment department here in Holland and we went to court. I asked them: ‘How do you come to the conclusion that these goods are waste? Who checks them?’ Deciding that something is waste is like going to the doctor. You’re told what illness you have. Don’t say a television is waste beyond repair just because you plugged it in and didn’t see any image. The judge in court was a lady and a very good judge. I said to her: ‘Look, this laptop is not waste when it’s on your table, but it is waste when in African hands.’” She knew I was telling the truth. The economy is good for the people here – they don’t suffer – and what they think of as waste here, somebody will use in Africa.”

ITAN: Intellectually Toxic Anecdotal Nonsense Problems

There is a disturbing pattern, not just in the Environmental Movement, but probably across all social communication, propped up by ever weaker journalism editorial systems.

Someone publishes an article, or a paper. Take the 2002 Basel Action Network's "Exporting Harm" paper on the river samples of Guiyu, China. 

1. Basel Action Network publishes the paper with a photo of a child sitting on circuit board scrap (posed upon, film major Jim Puckett admitted to me personally, though Jim seems to forget everything he admits over the years).

2. The White Paper makes an assertion that "80%" of used electronics and scrap is exported to places like Guiyu.

3. The White Paper makes an assertion that "80%" (of the 80% above? unclear) is managed improperly in so-called "primitive" conditions.

Part 1: Why You Can Be For African Development, Or Against Secondhand Imports, But NOT BOTH

Almost anything mined can and should be reused before that material is mined again. Almost anything mined can and should be reused before that material is mined again. Almost anything mined can and should be reused before that material is mined again.

Ask them.

The photo above was taken this week in a city in Spain.  It shows three carters.  Carter is a legal term (see New York City statute) for the job of pushing a cart through the street to look for items discarded by businesses and residents that can be economically salvaged and should be reused, repaired, or recycled.

This photo is interesting because it humanizes the carters.  I tweeted a photo last week of a carter showing up to scavenge a waste container ten minutes after a previous carter had already sorted through it. In the photo above, two carters have idled their own carts to help a third repair the broken wheel on his own cart - which contained a computer and microwave ("e-waste").

It's also interesting because it's an opportunity to follow the cart, and see that 80% of it is sold locally to European formal sector scrap yards, by the African immigrants. The only things they keep to ship home are working and repairable devices... to countrymen who develop Africa, not dump on it.

Basel Action Network's Relentless Racism Against Africa's Tech Sector May Succeed

For years, Basel Action Network has insisted on fake statistics about e-waste "loopholes" in the Basel Convention.  The original Basel Convention, in Annex IX, explicitly exempts reuse and repair of electronics from "waste" definitions (list B1110).

BAN's Jim Puckett was a film major, and when he advised someone I was taking with me to see reuse factories in China, Jim told him to "take pictures of children on the scrap".  His other tactic was to make up statistics that were so alarming that they made people accept that it must be terrible. If 80% of X results in something bad, there must be something wrong with X.

- homosexuality, atheism, swimming.... if 80% of it is bad, make it illegal?

https://resource.co/article/basel-convention-require-informed-consent-e-waste-exports

Depressingly, Ghana (which never signed or ratified the Bamako Convention, and consequently benefited by massive mass communications investments, leapfrogging Mali) has its name on a Ghana-Swiss proposal to finally change the Basel Convention to make import of used electronics de facto defined as "waste".  See my comments to Resource Magazine, (Amelia Kelly) which made the mistake of interviewing Basel Action Netwwork but not the Tech Sector importers who are capable of speaking on their own behalf.

"There are 170,000+ mobile phone towers on the African continent today, thanks to the "critical mass of users" of flip phones which BAN tried to stop the export of a decade ago. The privileged wealthy white guy gets to define what is "waste", and the African tech sector experts who made the mobile phone tower investments possible are profiled as "Primitives" or at best "Informal Sector" (as if not knowing how smart they are is a reason to prosecute them). Free Hurricane Joe Benson." - Robin Ingenthron

 This guy loses his job, and the displays get ground up for raw materials... and doesn't get to reply to Jim Puckett's quote (below the fold)

Elective Upgrades Supply Good Enough Markets

Elective Upgrades Supply Good Enough Markets

Is imitation the sincerest form of apology?

There is a guilt dilemma in "First World" aka "Wealthy" aka OECD consumer markets.  While there are repair and delayed gratification reuse trends (my company sells about $25k per month worth of TV parts to USA repair shops), there is also a lot of guilt about "elective upgrade", which remains the driver of most new sales.

Organizations like Basel Action Network and Greenpeace made a false assumption about 2 decades ago that "e-waste" was a product of equipment failure and inability to repair. That Americans, Japanese, South Koreans, Germans, Brits and Italians patiently wait for their CRT televisions, flip phones, and Pentium 4s to become hopelessly unrepairable before buying a plasma TV, smartphone, or i-Series laptop. 

The fact that it is patently obvious to nearly everybody that it was not the case, in hindsight, has been a point of reflection of this blog since I started it in 2006. 

Unnecessary elective upgrades, if indeed they are discarded as "waste" (or sentenced to a desk drawer, attic, or file cabinet) are indeed a wasteful use of mined, refined, extracted raw materials. But if they are reused, they create access for poor people to establish a "critical mass of users" to justify investments in TV broadcast, internet cable, and the estimated 170,000 mobile phone towers today that connect the continent of Africa... all financed by secondhand flip phone sim cards, replaced by black technicians on streets like Lagos, Accra, and Kinshasa.

It's a story older than this bad head gasket... sold to a Cummins motor geek in Florida, who re-exports trucks to rapidly emerging markets. Roads were paved in Appalachia and Ozarks by hillbillies like my grandparents, who could only afford vehicles they were smart enough to buy and fix.

Frederick Douglass 1881 Speech about Abolitionist John Brown

 Finished reading, then watching "The Good Lord Bird" yesterday. 

From the National Park Service museum page for Harper's Ferry... this tribute to John Brown by Frederick Douglass serves as a reminder not to dismiss those who go down fighting for a just cause.

On May 30, 1881, Frederick Douglass delivered a memorable oration on the subject of John Brown at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College. Especially notable was the presence among the platform guests of Andrew Hunter, the District Attorney of Charles Town who had prosecuted Brown and secured his conviction. In his oration, Douglass extolled Brown as a martyr to the cause of liberty, and concluded with the following passages:

Frederick Douglass

"But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harpers Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life.

"The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught.

Profile of Critical Thinking, Mistakes, and Systemic Language

Through approximately 13 years of blogs, I've made a number of errors. There are too many blogs now to really go back and change. And arguably it's a mistake to edit the history of the thought, it is a snapshot of evolution.

When my dear friend and co-founder of the company, Yadji Moussa, drowned eight years ago, I wrote a rather passionate eulogy. I wanted to be honest and not cover up some of Yadji's problems - he had lost his family through drinking and in the 12 years he lived in Middlebury and worked with me, he'd spent an enormous percent of his paychecks frivolously. I thought I'd also been equally complimentary about why he'd been my best friend in Cameroon, and why his family in Michigan still loved him as much as I did. 

Well, I didn't accomplish a Neil Young song about the setting sun. And a stranger from University of Vermont chimed into the comment section about all of the ways my tribute/critique of Yadji's life were implicitly racist.

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.

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? 

“The Circular Economy Doesn’t Revolve Around Us”

Testimony Submitted July 4, 2019

Testimony to the UK Parliament, House of Commons, Environmental Audit Committee.

via Fair Trade Recycling (WR3A.org)

The environmental WEEE policies supported by the UK mean well. They mean fabulously well. When I met Lord Chris Smith at a public meeting to launch INTERPOL’s “Project Eden”, I could see the passion towards ending what was thought to be the scourge of the planet - E-Waste exports.

The UK had made the export (except for “fully functional”) used electronics a crime.  African, Asian and Latin American tech sector importers were labelled “waste tourists”. The House of Commons reported in 2012 that the exported secondhand computers represented a “strategic mineral” interest, and that whether or not they were reused (the HOC report did, to its credit, cast doubt on the “80% waste” statistic proclaimed by Lord Chris Smith), that the UK’s industrial sector needed the metals to remain in the UK’s “circular economy”.

Racketeering and Certification #3: Targeted Collateral Damage!?

How does Basel Action Network define Africa's Tech Sector, who purchase affordable solid state electronics for import, as a "Problem"?

First, look at their words.

Primitive. Pawing. Ghoulish. Skeletal. Rice Paddy. Shantytown. Swamp. Third World. Orphan. Toxic Soup, Witches' Brew, Cadavres...

Next, look at their claims.

80% of all ewaste is exported... Stuff at dumps imported days before... Children and teenagers... Most die within 5 years... Illegal under Basel Ban Amendment... 

Published in UNU Report 2015

And we can't look away from their photos.

At first glance, these are meant, like a tear-jerking Humane Society sad-dog-trick ad, to appeal to retiree church ladies or college PIRG fundraisers.

That is not who funds these ads. The poor kids herding goats at African landfills do not benefit.

Part II assessed BAN's service technique of selling a sabotaged (but nice looking) computer or TV with a GPS tracker inside to someone who does business with Africa or Asia's Tech Sector. Through a "Tracker" service they sell for money, you can investigate a competitor's sales. To legitimize the spy-ware (literally "ware") they try to make it about pollution and children.  They send reporters, like BBC Raphael Rowe, to a dump in a city that has had TV stations and electricity for a half century, and tell the reporter it used to be a lush paradise until bad, bad African repairmen imported waste to burn on it. But usually, they just send the reporter pictures, fake stats, and halloweeny words.

Racketeering often involves a conspiracy, a complicated system of money laundering, even through charities (USAToday). If the IRS investigates this NGO, through a complaint form 13909, there might be a domino effect. If billionaire corporations are privately benefiting from false claims, they could wind up at the sharp end of the Lanham Act. And million dollar settlements may ensue.

Take a look at the photos (below) Jim is taking now....

Apology From Craig Lorch and Jeff Zirkle - Entrapped By BAN

Last week, E-Scrap News and Recycling Today ran an Op-Ed Letter and story about the upcoming sentencing of two electronics recycling company owners from Seattle, Washington.

Craig Lorch and Jeff Zirkle's letter starts with their background as young freon recovery do-gooders, who got into fluorescent lamp recycling, and then into "E-Waste", becoming the largest TV, computer, and electronics scrap recycling company in the NW USA.

Open Letter: Learn from Total Reclaim’s mistakes

Got a call from Craig a few days before the letter, and we had a pretty long talk about the situation. Had a shorter exchange with Jeff just afterwards. Around New Years, I had talked to Charles Brennick, another Seattle area electronics guy spiked by the GPS tracking scandal in Washington. And I've been in regular contact with Bojan Paduh, founder of Canada's ERA, who is in a defamation lawsuit against Basel Action Network for their report describing GPS device trackers they put into electronics dropped off at his site in Canada.  I was a paid expert witness for a fraud case on e-waste recycling in Chicago last summer.  So I have a lot of perspective to share.

It is an ugly business to grandstand, or use a friend's painful prison sentence news story as a soapbox to pontificate on environmental policy.  But in some of these cases, I've been given a green light.

Let's start by acknowledging that fraud is bad.

Let's finish by talking about Total Reclaim's biggest mistake.

Cross Culture 3: Domestic Disputes in African Forestry

The Politics of Deforestation in Africa: Madagascar, Tanzania, and Uganda [Foreign Affairs]... Nadia talks about important environmental issue with permanent consequences, and whether third-party international assistance will be effective.

Middlebury professor Dr. Nadia Horning (one of the hosts of the kickoff session at Fair Trade Recycling Summit in 2013) is on of the few people talking about something important in African resource policy.

Extraction is more crucial than discard, and the most important aspect of waste is whether it influences extraction. This paper discusses the intentions and effects of external solution making.

It's a Domestic Dispute with International and Inter-generational consequences.  Plastic litter will kill a lot of individual creatures that we can see close up, but destroying and cutting road-threads through an entire habitat exposes, degrades, and destroys the entire forest system.

We feel guilt about waste like we feel guilt about negligence.

We feel guilt about consumption in a scarier way.

We feel guilt about domestic violence against a woman in a neighbor's apartment in another way.

How we need to take action, as agents of conscience, demands a little more study than we like to put in. But we at least need to agree to purge the airwaves of uncredible and false accusations.

FALSE CLAIMS

Deauville Prizewinning Documentary to Air at Conference

This is a trailer for a 50 Minute Documentary called "Blame Game" produced by Sideways team in Spain this year.

The producer and filmmaker interviewed Joseph "Hurricane" Benson after he received a 5 year sentence for allegedly shipping TVs - which he bought, and could recycle for free in the UK - to Ghana, during "Project Eden".


Clean Hands Teaser from Clean_Hands on Vimeo.

If anyone wants to interview the filmmakers, I can get you in touch.

Fifth Week of USA College Students Apprentice Program in Africa Tech Sector

Fair Trade Recycling Update:  How Four USA College Students Will Change The Way You See Africa's E-Waste.

Zacharia is amazing

Fair Trade Recycling has a positive message.  Like the message in Hans Rosling's seminal "chimpanzee test" video - that ignited Gapminder in Sweden - our programs teach more about emerging markets.  The 1960s "Third World" images are, themselves, a form of pollution.

This summer we have 4 USA college interns working across 2 continents - Africa and North America - to create a partnership in parts supply.  Two students (U of Florida and Middlebury College) have been working in an apprentice program for flat screen TV repair in Ghana.  They are not just learning about T-con boards and controllers, or how to spot and replace overheated capacitors.  They are seeing Africa's Tech Sector as equals.

"Karim Zacharia is amazing!!!"

I like getting that message.  These two Americans are not "saving Africans".  They are not introducing a new "less primitive" technique. They are being exposed to Africa's best and brightest, to people who may well have been on scholarship to an engineering program if they'd been born in different circumstances.

What NGOs Got Right, Got Wrong About E-Waste Exports: Part 1

It is challenging to take 10 years of blogs about ethical recycling, many written in passion, often written in haste, and channel a message which is nuanced, and not just to be brushed away as "denial".  I come from the same generation, post hippy, late 70s early 80s protester.  I shared the same deep sense of alarm from Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall, Rachael Carlson, etc., about the population bomb, and the finite nature of world resources.  We read Amory Lovins, Barry Commoner.  Jim Puckett, Barbara Kyle, Ted Smith, Shena Davis, and so many others in our 50s and early 60s grew up with the same Siddhartha Gita Vedanta Black Elk Speaks mantras, and spreading like 1860s prospectors to save parts of the world, we sharpened our arrows and powdered our muskets.

The General Mining Act of 1872 was my target.  I hand wrote letters to my Arkansas Senators, Bumpers and Pryor, in 1980, telling them it was unfair to unborn generations to subsidize the pollution of hard rock mining.  The EPA's Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act were focused like a laser on nonferrous smelters, hitting recycled and secondary smelters hardest (not precisely the same thing btw) but also affecting primary mining and smelting.   The most polluting industry was the first to move offshore, and I shared the alarm of my fellow environmentalists in our 20s and 30s over "externalizing" pollution.

World's 10 Fastest Growing Copper Mining Projects (mining.com)


Copper, Lead, Silver, Tin and Gold mining in places like Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Zambia and Peru seemed like an end-run around our generation's attempt to clean up America's virgin mining to throwaway culture.  And the places where those industries moved to were in many ways a social nightmare. Idi Amin, Mobutu Seko Sede, and dozens of other dictators pocketed "registration fees" for these mines and set up foreign bank accounts, giving rise to the alarms of "Resource Curse".

We were alarmed by the same things.  We protested the same things.  And Africa's "mining map" is growing.



Harry Wu recently passed away.  It was thanks to Wu that Americans and Europeans knew about Maos "cultural revolution", which arrested academics for as little as rolling their eyes at Communist Party rallies.  Harry Wu taught us, in the late 1980s, that cheap Chinese toys and tools were often products of slave labor.  We learned about death squads in El Salvador, USA puppet governments like Allende's in Chile.  Globalism was happening, it seemed, for all the wrong reasons.

So what happened.  How did I become what Jim Puckett calls "the biggest thorn" in his side?  We shared so many of the same experiences and same premises.

This is an opening blog to explain what happened, and what BAN and other protest-and-alarm-fueled NGOs have correctly and what they are blind to.  I went to live in Africa for 30 months in the 1980s, and it changed me forever.  But what changed me isn't well represented by poor African children, or poor Chinese children, or halloween language of  "e-waste hell" and "child labor" and "shantytown" and "rice paddy" images.  What changed me are individual people, individual friends, individual rivals, individual students.

Do the actual people in emerging markets serve as nothing more than the NGO's wallpaper?  What divides Fair Trade Recycling from the traditional anti-globalist NGOs of the early 80s is Q-method.  We talk to people overseas.  We get translators, we visit, and we listen.  So we were the first to find out that one NGO in particular was blatantly falsifying data, to the point where it merits a defamation lawsuit.  I loved, adored my family in the Ozarks, but racism is a bridge too far.

Fear of others.

Exoticism.

Poverty porn.

The tactic of scare-mongering is everywhere, and journalists are in on it.  It is easier to make a story exciting and alarming than it is to actually inform.  It's not the datajournalism, it's the photography.  It's not the steak, it's the sizzle.  If it bleeds, it leads.  Journalists and NGOs share the same great and noble mantras of the 1960s and 70s that I do.  They want to save the planet, and basically do what an older generation referred to as "earn their place in heaven".  We didn't call it "to sit beside and hold the hand of Jesus", our reward was more nirvana, more transcendant.

But like the pitfalls of the snake handlers in the Ozarks, we took ourselves too seriously and stopped measuring.

Time to watch again the Hans Rosling TED Talks.    Faith is gravity, but truth is light.  We share the purpose, the gravity, the traction of making the world better for current and future generations.  But Basel Action Network has been selling a product that doesn't work in the low low light of ignorance, and when they are confronted with data and information, they have begun shooting in the dark.

Part II:  What they got right

Another Study Reveals Africa's Tech Sector knows its STUFF (#ewastehoax)

The new 2016 Report, published by United Nations University, is 39 pages.  What is remarkable about it is not only that it arrives at almost exactly the same "ewaste" percentages as documented by academics (like Josh Lepawsky of Memorial University, who was savagely mud-slung by a certain NGO director in Seattle last month).  The #ewastehoax around places like Agbogbloshie has been roundly covered by several academics, Basel Secreteriat (the ACTUAL international organization, not the USA charity using its name), and data journalists.

Again, disclaimer - poverty in Africa isn't fake. Toxics in Africa aren't fake.  What was faked was the narrative that EU and USA recycling programs dump waste and are responsible for the poverty or toxics.

What's remarkable about the UNU study is two things.  First, it uses completely different data sets from MIT, Memorial U, US ITC, and data journalism by #ewasterepublic Jacopo Ottaviana, etc... but arrives at the same conclusions.  For example, the chart below shows that less than 1% of Europe's used electronics are exported intact .

Very, very little of Europe's e-waste gets exported intact.  In fact, I interpret the data to say that Europe is being waaay too conservative - the percentages of working and non-obsolete goods is way higher than what is being sent overseas.

And very, very little of the junk in Africa's junkyards (like Agbogbloshie) came directly.  More than 95% of Africa's "ewaste" is its own, devices imported decades ago, used productively for years.

Some individual countries, they say, have higher or lower incidents of transboundary movement which is junk... but that begs the question... if it's an individual country like Burkina Faso, they are getting used electronics from wealthy cities like Accra.  As Lepawsky and Mather already documented, there are used goods traded WITHIN the global "south".

These screenshots shows exactly what I've been telling UNU and StEP since New Orleans in 2006.  The "Stuff" in the "Story of Stuff" gets used for YEARS and is EVENTUALLY discarded and recycled.   What's the first intact piece we photographed in Agbogbloshie?  It was a scrapper's VCR device that Adam Minter and Isaaco Chiaf and Jacopo Ottaviana (#ewasterepublic) stooped to photograph.  Africans imported millions and millions of used VHS players - IN THE 1980s and 1990s!  In Joe Benson's itemized packing lists, there isn't a single VHS player.  BECAUSE AFRICANS NOW WATCH DVD and STREAMING and soon, digital TV broadcasts.  The latter will generate exactly what it did in the USA - waste analog CRTs.  But those aren't being imported anymore to places like TEMA which have already switched to digital.

Golly gee, Colonialists, the evidence is that Africa's Tech Sector knows it's STUFF.

What Joseph Benson said on camera was the truth.  What Mike Anane said on camera was a lie.  Africa's Tech Sector needs reparations.

Eight EWaste Facts For 2016

What we know about the "e-waste crisis"?  Every point below has been documented and footnoted in this blog in 2015, with photographic evidence (see photoessay in National Geographic YourShot).  Documenting it takes a lot of time, but I've done it.  In 2016, let's ask anyone who makes a living protesting "e-waste" to refute or respond to the following points.

If you are a data journalist working on the story, there is definitely one here, and it hasn't really been reported.  Most of what's been repeated about "e-waste exports" in the Western press is a hoax.

Resolve to end the Boycott of Geeks of Color ...  Eight Ewaste Facts for 2016

Sodom and Gomorrah? Fishing as a Boy? Mike Anane via PBS Frontline

"Photojournalism without data journalism jails and fails"

Immediately after our 3 week investigation of Agbogbloshie, Tema, Tamale region and Accra, I went to Vancouver to meet with Graham Pickren and Peter Klein, both professors.  Pickren was very kind to meet me for lunch.

Peter Klein initially returned my messages, but did not seem to want to meet.

Klein's at UBC Vancouver, which is responsible for the PBS Frontline episode in 2010 that labelled Agbogbloshie as "Sodom and Gomorrah."  The label was based on interviews with Mike Anane, who has been repeatedly represented as a "journalist" in Ghana.

n'importe quoi

My interviews with the scrappers at Ghana led me to believe Anane is not a journalist at all.  I can't find any record of any articles published by him, or any newspaper, radio, or television station he has worked for.  The Agbogbloshie scrappers claimed he was "in cahoots" with AMA, the Ghana developers who wanted to evict them from the increasingly valuable real estate near the center of Accra.  I've written about that before.

Here's another UN sponsored report, by African researchers, on the sources of pollution at the Odaw River lagoon of Agbogbloshie (2002).  It's incredibly well documented, and none of it jives with Frontline.

What I haven't really had the guts to do is to question Mike Anane's credibility.  I interviewed him at an Interpol meeting in 2010.  And I've promoted alternative experts such as Grace Akese of Memorial University or Emmanuel Eric P. Nyalete of Georgia Tech.  But when it comes to being an American questioning an African about his depiction of Africa, I've only attacked Anane's figures, his statistics, his 500 containerloads per month story.  And independent scholars back us up ("Criminal Negligence?")

The claims of the Agbogbloshie scrap workers do appear to hold water.  Take a look at the specific Anane representation below, still on the PBS website.

Anane makes a specific personal claim:

"I've always known Agbogbloshie as part of the country's westlands. As a kid, I used to play football here.  Some of my friends would go fishing in the lagoon.  When I went back and saw the huge amount of computers shipped in and dumped here, it mad me angry that these children had come to break them up." - Michael Anane

Now this is specifically an eyewitness claim.  Anane is personally claiming to PBS to have seen computers "shipped" to Agbogbloshie.  In the AlJazeera E-Waste Republic series and Cosima Dannoritzer's "The E-Waste Tragedy" Anane makes the same boast... this was a pristine riverside, a fishing village. 

Now how does this square with all the reports of Agbogbloshie, and the Odaw River Lagoon, since 1960?  How does it compare to eyewitness reports from any of my own interviews?  And Anane's claims to have been an editor in 1991-95 for "Triumph Newspaper" (no record of the paper in Ghana, though there's a Triumph newspaper in Kano, Nigeria).  Either Anane was in northern Nigeria, or he was editor from a remote location before the internet. But if that's the timeframe when Agbogbloshie was ruined in Accra, it's at a time when 1) Agbogbloshie was a city dump and auto scrapyard for a city of millions, and 2) there were no strict "ewaste" regulations to avoid as "drivers" per UNEP / "StoryofStuff", and 3) it's definitely not near "the outskirts", it's in the middle of the gosh darn city, visible on Google Maps.  Nothing adds up... except Anane's speaking fees.   Oh, didn't know that? Ask reporters, like those of #ewasterepublic  about the Anane speaking fees, and fees to photograph his collection of plastic with asset tags.

Nyalete, Odoi, and Akese say otherwise, and the reports like the one linked above are pretty darn thorough.  Agbogbloshie was a polluted dump before personal computers were sold in USA, let alone discarded. It's larger and more polluted to the degree Accra is larger and more polluted. There is no international dumping link, and no evidence of Eden after the Akosombo Dam of the Volta River was completed in 1965.  Electricity led to WEEE as roads led to cars.

But Anane specifically says it was "teeming with fish" in 1999.

Dan McKinney and M. Anane report that Agbogbloshie river was teeming with fish in 1999.  Bullhockey