The "Informal Sector" knows more about your electronic devices than you do ...

Watching @Vice series 1, episode 1, of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, and it's a fascinating history of the shamans of LSD.  One of my closest friends, the late Brother Dave, followed Grateful Dead Shows selling these concoctions. But he also sold cocaine, and when he had to do time, didn't want to get shot by the coke dealers, so he turned on some of the hippy LSD psychadelic peddlars. This Vice series tells their stories.

I didn't give up the geeks of color to save my own skin. But the perspective of Casey Hardison "don't yap", keep your mouth closed, rings true. The factory film above is closed, I only share about Brother Dave because he passed away about 14 years ago. Retroworks de Mexico is closed. Net Peripheral is closed. They were the best environmental recycling facilities I've ever seen, but they weren't white people, and the so-called "formal sector" came down on reuse the way it came down on LSD. Narcs vs. Shamans. 

If you are one of the 55 people who still follow this blog, the mind experiments and meditation of my late teens is perhaps as important as my grandfather's "Rich Person's Broken Thing" chapter (of Adam Minter's "Secondhand"). The Vice story about psychedelics is very much a triggering memory for me.

Now about the electronics informal "e-waste" business... It's a story of formal sector big OEMs using dimwitted environmentalist do-gooders, like slavers using Jesuit colonialists, to crack the skulls of brainiacs.

Since the assault on the legal import permit of my partners and friends at Net Peripheral in Malaysia, I've been pretty guarded about sharing information on "big secret factories".  After Allen Liu and Su Fung Ow Young opened their doors to @AdamMinter for his 2013 Recycling International article on Fair Trade Recycling, which had also opened its doors to Kelley Keough of GreenEye Partners and Craig Lorch of Seattle's Total Reclaim, Jim Puckett contacted the Malaysia Department of Environmental Protection to protest the legal import permit. Malaysia officials verified the permit was legally issued, but cancelled it, and the factory closed. My company lost $24,000, but Allen and Su Fung and their employees lost their jobs, lost everything.

"No good deed goes unpunished". 

We remain friends, but I no longer expose the Tech Sector to Basel Action Network lynch mobs. Jim's vision is that white countries define what is waste, and the tech sector workers overseas are "rice paddy" primitive recyclers. 

Sheer Bias and Racial Profiling: H.R. 4521 Disgusting Section 30612 is Based on Old Slander

Sheer Bias and Racial Profiling: H.R. 4521 Disgusting Section 30612 is Based on Old Slander

Here is a link to the sad ending of a 13-year old women's recycling collective in Sonora, Mexico.  It was profiled, vetted, and visited by NPR (Living on Earth and Marketplace), by Adam Minter (Bloomberg), and PBS (AZ).

My opinion Op-Ed about Retroworks de Mexico ran in Resource Recycling in late 2020. The "Chicas Bravas" were cheated out of their winning bid for the City of Tucson, accused by Arizona-based recyclers of using "primitive practices" including testimony at the Tucson City Council that they were "burning the CRTs in barrels". Tucson Clean and Beautiful visited Retroworks de Mexico and fought valiantly against the slanderous claims. But they never did get the business from Arizona afterwards. Scared of "exports", Arizona instead trusted its CRTs to a domestic solution... and wound up with tens of thousands of trashed CRT piles in the city of Phoenix (the infamous "Closed Loop" site). The Chicas Bravas in Mexico, by contrast, left the floor broom clean, having recycled every ton of CRTs they managed since opening in 2007.

https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2020/09/24/in-my-opinion-how-bureaucracies-and-bias-sunk-a-crt-solution/

The House version of the America COMPETES Act is mostly full of good ideas, but the anti-"ewaste"-export Section 30612 doesn't simply ban junk going to non-OECD countries. OECD isn't mentioned. In fact, the section brands not only Mexicans, but Canadians and Europeans and Japanese and Koreans - as security threats if allowed to buy a used television or computer monitor, or toaster.

The Racial Profiling is the history of this bill since it was first introduced in 2010. CAER members have blithely portrayed the Tech Sector outside the USA as "primitive", using photos of junk TVs imported to Africa in the 1970s as perverse evidence of current export and use.

Today's blog is about photos and captions of the 13 year history of this anti-export language.

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? 

New Year's Day is Africa's Birthday

New Year's Day is "Africa's Birthday".

This is true on so many levels.   For starters, Africans not born in hospital are often undocumented until they enter primary school, and mothers often recall the birth year and state new year's as the birthday.  Many famous Africans (including my personal favorite, bass soukous guitarist legend Shaba Kahamba) celebrate their birthdays on New Years.

It's also a wonderful continent to visit in January.  It's warm.  Rainy or dry, there are plenty of sunsets and blue skies between thunderously heavy, Disney-esque downpours and showers.  In Ghana it's dry season, but not yet too dusty.

The New Year's Eve is a common holiday, Christian and Muslim and Animists feel comfortable celebrating together.

At an almost metaphysical level, Africa has a growing number of women acting in politics, and you know what that means.  Compromise.  Progress.  Diplomacy.  Splitting the difference.   And the more women who serve as either head of state (Nine African Nations) or in major positions of government, the more Africa puts its New Years Resolutions in order.