Showing posts with label #freejoebenson. Show all posts

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.

2023 To Kill A Reuse Mockingbird: The Canary Islands E-Waste Black Man's Burden - of Proof

The "Hurricane" Joe Benson Saga continues in Sequel.The press announcements this week were short, but provided a few details... UPDATE: EUROPOL press release with actual photos discloses 750,000 kg - not 3M - were used electronics.

Here's a link to one of the articles on LinkedIn, which I posted. It has an argument ongoing in the comment and replies section which includes SWEEEP Kuusakoski referencing the BBC Reggie Yates documentary about Agbogbloshie... Kuusakowski's representative ends his scolding reply with the words "I have been to Ghana."

Sir? Hold. My. Coffee.

It was a sin to kill a mockingbird - in Harper Lee's 1960 novel, or in a 2011 blog about Indonesia... and it's a sin to kill a Canary in 2023. In case after case, it has been about the burden of proof imposed upon an African tech sector and their family diaspora networks.

Their burden (like the accused Tom Robinson) is the white man's presumption of guilt. Ironically, this is not the usual meaning of "White Man's Burden", but the imposition of INTERPOL and Spanish Police to "save Africans from waste" is mind bending. What "proof of reuse" (the defense Canary Island diaspora must present against "presumed waste" communicates about the scales of justice is communicated in the headline - that the Spanish arrested "criminals" rather than "accused" them.

Fair Trade Recycling Offsets in West Africa - Phase 1

Less Blogging. Less Tweeting. Less Opining. More Doing.

World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association - dba "Fair Trade Recycling" doesn't do much fundraising. But I'm extremely proud of our contributions.

We have launched the next phase of the Fair Trade Recycling "Offset". My company has exported approximately 100 sea containers of working and repairable electronics to Africa since 2001. At approximately 15 tons per containerload, that leaves 1,500 tons of waste generated in African cities like Douala, Limbe, Accra, Lagos, Dakar, Kinshasa, Nairobi to now fund with the profits that both Africa's Tech Sector and OECD Reuse companies made through trade.

The Tech Sector in Africa is not "primitive", and I've long bristled at the fake claims that 80% of what they buy was not reused, but dumped. The photos NGOs used to promote that belief CLEARLY show electronic imported 30 years earlier, collected by the scrap sector from African consumers after decades of repair and maintenance.

That said, Africa has a problem with LITTER COLLECTION. WR3A has funded this study to see how many tons of ocean-bound plastic can be diverted from gutters before rainy season comes. Very proud of our collaboration with Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud - who was 4 years old when I said goodbye to him in Ngaoundal, Cameroon, in 1986.

Reviewing the report this weekend. Thanks Maia Nilsson and Sean Plasse and Laura Dubester for contributing to last year's GoFundMe campaign - and thanks to American Retroworks Inc and other WR3A members for raising the balance.

In phase 2, we'll pit Dr. Q's team of researchers against city scrappers in a contest of who can divert the most litter from city gutters and canals, before the monsoons come. My hope is that Plastic Manufacturing companies will then pitch in, and help "Offset" the packaging Africans rely on for food and drink in Emerging Markets.

#circulareconomy #fairtraderecycling

If Recyclers like my company commit to helping valedictorians lead efforts to collect and offset one ton of litter for every ton we have exported for reuse, we can establish a model for the Petrochemical and Plastics Trade Associations to follow.

"Might as well be me."

Thanks to the three or four people who contributed to our GoFundMe campaign. I matched the gifts 30 fold, personally, because I believe we have to do something. I'm not a good fundraiser. But I have this unique perspective that Africa City Dumps aren't full of just coconut shells and banana peels, and that the Techs of Color who created the #criticalmassofusers that led to Mass Communications (my Dad was professor of that at U of Arkansas and Fresno State, a graduate of University of Missouri Journalism school).

Let's want to offset 1500 tons in 5 years.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Less blogging. Less tweeting. More doing.<br><br>Fair Trade Recycling Offset entering phase 2. Impressive report by Doctor Q - Asi Quiggle Atud of University of Cameroon.<br><br>I'm committed to offsetting 1,500 tons of waste from African cities.<a href="https://t.co/RBE7kjd5p2">https://t.co/RBE7kjd5p2</a> <a href="https://t.co/EW4u01BMwN">pic.twitter.com/EW4u01BMwN</a></p>— Robin I (@WR3A) <a href="https://twitter.com/WR3A/status/1444319882837995520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 2, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

#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?

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)

Shame Blowback: Jim Puckett's 2015 Claim to be an Authority on Agbogbloshie

"The #TechSector in #EmergingMarkets honestly believes in the #CircularEconomy. But like Copernicus and Galileo, they do not believe it revolves around you." - Robin Freeland Ingenthron

That's my favorite self-quote from the past 10 years. I got to deliver it to a European Conference on E-Waste, seated side by side with Basel Action Network's executive director, Jim Puckett.

"Shame Blowback" sometimes takes years. But Karma Occurs.

After the laughter subsided, I told the audience that it is a bit absurd that they are relying on the advice of two white American men to explain the situation with used electronics in Africa's Tech Sector. Adam Minter later told me that #OwnVoices was a hashtag which framed that dynamic. The following year, Emmanuel Nyaletey was invited to present to the same conference audience.

2007 Film Falsely Claimed these were illegally dumped. Lie,

Quickie documentary videos of Africa-bound sea containers shocked Europeans into twisting the Basel Convention - which explicitly identifies intent to dump, not intent to recycle or repair, as illegal - to a snare for African and Asian and Latin Americans in the reuse sector. Joe Benson was entrapped in that snare, which was baited by Jim Puckett with false claims, delivered in less than flowering Halloweenish descriptions of African Cities ("A Place Called Away"), that 80% of the trade Africans engage in is a "sham". "Millions of tons" "pawed through" by "orphans" in "the largest e-waste dump in the world".

Many Blog Posts are Emails To Academics: Urbanization Politics of Agbogbloshie

This is an email I just sent to a European graduate student, who is attempting to do a major research (thesis?) paper on Agbogbloshie.

I always have taken time to encourage researchers. It is part of my "fishing for swordfish, surrounded by perch" philosophy of blogging. The blogs are ignored by most people, because most people don't have the bandwidth to really focus on them, or to do a deep dive, or review ground already covered.

But these emails and blogs reach people who are truly concerned, and who ultimately discover that there is an almost sinister systemic manipulation of "do-gooders" empathy to accomplish monetary gains. I usually talk about the Western (and now Asian) lobbies - Big Shred, Planned Obsolescence, and Charity Industrial Complex. But in this morning's email to the Swiss based graduate researcher, I like to remind us that Africans have Agency, even if some of their agency is systemically marginalized by the desire for shiny white consciences.

In Accra, Ghana, it's the land value stupid. Agbogbloshie, for decades (IMF and World Bank papers go back to the 1960s) has been an urban scrapyard next to the Old Fadama slum. If you want to know what is ultimately going to happen, read about the Kowloon slum in Hong Kong. All the "recycling" story is just using BAN propaganda to leverage demolition and expulsion of some of the most valuable real estate in one of the richest African urban centers.

It's not about you, or your old computer.

Basel Action Network Continues Campaign of Racial Prejudice, Systemic Vocabulary Abuse, GPS Sabotage

Every BAN press release is a lesson in vocabulary manipulation, not science.

NGO sanctimonious vocabulary demands a rebuttal

For example, an enormous predictor that Jim is exaggerating are the words "waste" and "likely". Jim of all people knows that "used goods" and "waste" are defined separately in international law, and that the key to guilt is intent. Otherwise, every brand new item that landed overseas - if it failed under warranty, or was damaged in shipping - would be a violation of international law.

BAN has, for two decades, tried to erase the fact that the most knowledgeable actors, the ones most in control of the trade, the purchasers least likely to waste money, are the oveseas buyers. They do not pay to ship "waste" with the intent to avoid costs they would certainly not incur, in the rich nations where they purchase surplus goods. The Action Network was exposed for fabricating a high percentage of waste (80%) (GPI blog, 2013) They did so in order to cause journalists and environmentalists to skip the side of the story from Joseph "Hurricane" Benson, and the overseas Tech Sector he came to represent. BAN issued macabre photos of dumps, where the junk being processed is mostly automotive and mostly was imported to those countries when Joe Benson would have been an apprentice TV repair tech in Nigeria... decades earlier.

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.

Was reading a certification program's "rules" about "ready for reuse, ready for repair", and the great white bosses who are ready to save Dark Techies from buying something they want.

The ad above (from Mobile Centrix) links to a video explaining "Grade A, B, and C" of "Blemish Screens". Grade A has just some bad pixels (like you'd take your phone back to the shop you bought it from yesterday, dissatisfied, for replacement). Grade B has "bleed" discoloration at the edges. Grade C has visible chip-out black spots on the edges and corners.

A Rich Person's Broken Thing (Chapter of Adam Minter's Secondhand, after an explanation from my Grandpa Clarence Fisher) is the smartest thing a poor person can buy. I've seen absolutely cake-smashed screens in everyday use in Africa.... no one is without a smart phone, but no one is paying $250 for screen repair, either. Instead, they buy these from their cousins who run the kiosk for phone repairs out of your local shopping mall.

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.

Open Letter to WR3A / Fair Trade Recycling Interns 2007-2019

Hello summer 2019 team, and past WR3A interns

Thought you'd appreciate this coverage of Adam Minter's new book, Secondhand. He has already been interviewed by NPR OnPoint and Marketplace, and will be on Fresh Air on Cyber Monday. The concluding chapters of his book focus on our work, at Good Point, and in Ghana, on Fair Trade Recycling.

This has been a long and steady slog. Adam's research was enormously supported by interns from 2007 thru 2019. Adam was inspired to write this book at the 2013 Middlebury College Fair Trade Recycling Summit, and the research by interns at Memorial University, Univesidad Pontifica Catholica (Peru), USC, MIT, Middlebury, U of Amsterdam, U de Paul Cezanne, Univ Monterrey de Guadalajara, developed a tome of documentation and research (much of which was consolidated in the excellent 2018 MIT Press publication Reassembling Rubbish by Dr. Josh Lepawsky).

On Adam Minter's second trip to Ghana, he followed up on the fate of the laptop "Junkyard Planet" was written on

Jaleel of Chendiba Enterprises identified a bad video chip,

A Short, Short 3 Minute explanation of Ghana's Agbogbloshie Scrapyard

Intern Nanja Horning and Liotolio Gahd whipped up this brief and entertaining short video to explain to people what Agbogbloshie is, and isn't, about.

Dinky funky funny rap on whitesaviorcomplex and the geeksofcolor who pay the price for sensationalism.

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....

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.

Cross Cultural Training in Ewaste #2: IRS FORM 13909

Two NGOs take opposing positions on trade w/ "Third world" aka "emerging markets". What's Tech? What's Scrap? Who decides? Which is a "watchdog"? Which is registered as a "charity"? Who beats up other non-profits?

Ten years ago, the mission of WR3A.org dba Fair Trade Recycling was to vet exporters. And by that we meant to identify USA companies it was safe to export FROM, and not foreign companies it was safe to export TO.

To me, it's an amazingly simple explanation, but it takes weeks sometimes to get it through to journalists and documentary makers.

If you begin with the assumption that the Tech Sector in an emerging market enlists the very best and brightest, the valedictorians, and assume they are flying to purchase something from the Scrap Sector in the wealthy nation - as I did - then the purpose of a civil contract between the two parties is to increase efficient and fair trade.

Earlier this decade [post WR3A California Compromise] we realized that before we could broker loads, we had to first serve the Tech Sector by advocating on their behalf against a very strongly funded defamation campaign. To complicate matters, that campaign was being promoted by "the Left", people who were quite self-certain that they didn't have a single racist idea in their minds. People who championed "environmental justice" were in fact committing "environmental malpractice", but that was a hard message to deliver.

If I can't fundraise to pay the WR3A credit card bills, maybe we can do the next best thing and "level the playing field". Basel Action Network is registered as a 501-c(3) charity - an organization that attests it does not advocate for legislation, does not perform work to benefit any private business or organization, and provides charitable services. If reporters are looking for a story, we got another one for you....

Cross Cultural Training Program for Ewaste Shockumentary Makers 1

This week I spent another several hours in a pre-interview for a German documentary crew from ZDF. They had seen Blame Game or seen the blog, and said that they were reaching out to see if we can get them interviews with Africans in the Tech Sector --- "At Agbogbloshie".

spend more time at the beach guys

They are attending something called the Digital Conference Republica [technovagh blog by
Joseph-Albert Kuuire], a German conference established 2013 on the subject using online information to solve global problems, to be held in Accra for the first time.

Obviously these dudes mean well. But finding a repair tech "At Agbogbloshie" is a bit like finding a mechanic at your local scrap metal yard. They are associating the original stubborn idea that imports arrive directly at Agbogbloshie (thanks to Jim Puckett and Mike Anane) with the message that Africans import what they can repair.

So in my next blog, I'm going to share some of the training and background information which we tried to impart to Alexander Glodsinksi of SDF, in a crash course via Whatsapp, with Emmanuel Nyalete, Evans Quaye, Wahab Odoi, and Olu Orga. After the "text training", Evans suggested we put it up on a website devoted to Africa's Tech Sector. Let's start here.

We know BAN is not placing GPS trackers into any devices that don't LOOK ready to reuse. Not a single CRT or projection TV (over 50% of ewaste) was tracked by BAN, ever.
We know BAN claims to be "cutting wires" to sabotage the devices, which likely get repaired anyway.
We know that BAN controls distribution of who gets what type of device... 14% of all GPS trackers BAN released in Canada went to one guy who had a lawsuit vs. BAN.
We know BAN has a financial interest in the outcome (through E-Stewards) worth millions of dollars.
We know that BAN's press releases interchange their proposed "Ban Amendment", which has not passed, for Basel Convention international law, which allows export for legitimate recycling and repair.
We know that BAN mysteriously "obfuscated" several end points in Asia, when devices arrived at legitimate reuse and legal recycling centers.
We know that BAN picks specific people to accuse, even in cases when that person exported nothing.
We know that BAN profiles the overseas tech sector and reuse technicians as "primitive" and "informal".
We know that the "developing nations" BAN describes as "primitive" had cities with TV stations and millions of households using electricity a half century ago, and produce most of the "ewaste" at their own dumps.
We know that the first instance of GPS tracking, of TVs sold to Nigerian born TV-repairman Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics, led to false testimony ("80% not reused") by the UK prosecutor, and environmental injustice (imprisonment of Benson).

What I can't figure out is why the press gives this organization any ink.

Follow the money.

This is the To Kill a Mockingbird moment for the environmental community. You either sat by while this NGO made this happen, or you spoke up to #freejoebenson