(please help)
Our group Fair Trade Recycling has given everything we can to stop the systematic, colonialist, racist laws which benefit the raw material hungry smelters at the expense of the savvy technicians in the emerging markets. Personally, I've taken a lot of flack for naming names (like "80%" J.P."fishing as a boy" M.A., and P.L. - after talking to them). I researched and exposed how GPS tracking device "studies" were rigged in 2015... trying to prove the false claim of 80%, the NGO and MIT Sustainable City Lab avoided tracking a single CRT television, which represented over 50% of the e-waste at the time.
I don't have time to edit this, and fewer than 50 people will have time to read it. But the Big Ewaste Lie has not been buried, and is beginning to stink, and threatens a pandemic of bad law based on flawed, uneducated, systemically racist environmental policy. The students researching environmental studies today will report the history of waste colonialism in future theses, reports, and podcasts.
The trade press helped a bit to cover and correct the story, but is still largely unwilling to correct a false headline that put people like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson in jail. Just this week, Resource Recycling reprinted false claims - which they certainly knew to be false - because they were repeated at a European conference.
In the same EScrap News which repeated the false claims - described to me by head editor Dan Lief as one of some "different opinions" rather than as disproven falsehoods - there is a story by Colin Staub about the consequences. I like the teams at Resource Recycling, Recycling Today, Recycling International, Scrap Magazine, WasteDive, Waste360, etc. I go way back with recycling intellectual titans like Chaz Miller, Jim O'Keefe, Jerry Powell, Manfred Beck, DeAnne Toto, Rachel H. Pollak, Brian Taylor, and even folks who left the scene (e.g. Waste Age's Amanda Smith-Teutsch). We certainly don't want to bite the hands that feed our press releases.
But there's a crime occurring, and it keeps happening. There is a lot of money around #blackwashing.
#Greenwashing is well defined, when a polluting industry (e.g. extraction) launches a "pilot project" or "campaign" or far-off "goals". What #blackwashing refers to is the subtle inference that people paying more for something that industry wants are suspect, have a higher hurdle, or must prove a negative. Joseph "Hurricane" Benson was asked to disprove what the UK prosecutor referred to as "common knowledge" that the majority of what he purchased would go to African landfills.
