Back in 2010, before the blog's "Bullyboys" Series, before the "Firehose" Series, and before "Environmental Malpractice", or the E-Stork blogs, The UN released a report. It said that if all the rich nations completely stop all (hypothetical, mythological, or actual) #ewaste exports from the OECD to developing nations - stopped 100% - tomorrow - you'd do nothing to stop the posterchild photos.
India has never been a significant destination for E-Waste, its ports are very tightly controlled. The images of Techdogs and Nerddogs (to differentiate from "slumdogs", for those of you who don't yet get it) fixing stuff in Dharvi and Mumbai slums has nothing, nothing to do with Basel Convention or Basel Ban Amendment or CAER's export ban.
In fact, if you erased every international border crossing tomorrow, poor people would still be trying to get stuff from rich people in their own countries, from people on the other side of the tracks. Rich people buy new stuff and poor people fix good-enough-for-them stuff. It's like that in the USA used car and thrift shop market... jeez its so obvious I want to shoot myself for writing it again.
But at the E-Scrap Conference in Orlando, I still met lots and lots of people who think the Green-Thompson E-Waste Bill is a solution to primitive wire burning. Big Shred will save the brown children. And Lagos, with 6.9M households with television as of 2007, will... um... uh.
Yeah. About that. Here's the press release from 2010, the year that the Bullyboy Crackdown started, the year Greenpeace told UK journalists BAN's story about how the dumps in Africa were filled with material from the UK. The year Joe Benson was targeted, a year before the Ghana E-Waste Assessment, and two years before the Nigerian E-Waste assessment studies found Benson and similar exporters sent 91% reuse - better than brand new product.
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| UNICEF photographers share the $$ |
In fact, if you erased every international border crossing tomorrow, poor people would still be trying to get stuff from rich people in their own countries, from people on the other side of the tracks. Rich people buy new stuff and poor people fix good-enough-for-them stuff. It's like that in the USA used car and thrift shop market... jeez its so obvious I want to shoot myself for writing it again.
But at the E-Scrap Conference in Orlando, I still met lots and lots of people who think the Green-Thompson E-Waste Bill is a solution to primitive wire burning. Big Shred will save the brown children. And Lagos, with 6.9M households with television as of 2007, will... um... uh.
Yeah. About that. Here's the press release from 2010, the year that the Bullyboy Crackdown started, the year Greenpeace told UK journalists BAN's story about how the dumps in Africa were filled with material from the UK. The year Joe Benson was targeted, a year before the Ghana E-Waste Assessment, and two years before the Nigerian E-Waste assessment studies found Benson and similar exporters sent 91% reuse - better than brand new product.
Urgent Need to Prepare Developing Countries for Surge in E-Wastes
Rocketing sales of cell phones, gadgets, appliances in China, India, elsewhere forecastProper e-waste collection, recycling key to recovering valuable materials, protecting health, building new green economyBali, 22 February 2010 - Sales of electronic products in countries like China and India and across continents such as Africa and Latin America are set to rise sharply in the next 10 years.
And, unless action is stepped up to properly collect and recycle materials, many developing countries face the spectre of hazardous e-waste mountains with serious consequences for the environment and public health, according to UN experts in a landmark report released today by UNEP.
Issued at a meeting of Basel Convention and other world chemical authorities prior to UNEP's Governing Council meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the report, "Recycling - from E-Waste to Resources," used data from 11 representative developing countries to estimate current and future e-waste generation - which includes old and dilapidated desk and laptop computers, printers, mobile phones, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions.
In South Africa and China for example, the report predicts that by 2020 e-waste from old computers will have jumped by 200 to 400 percent from 2007 levels, and by 500% in India
By that same year in China, e-waste from discarded mobile phones will be about 7 times higher than 2007 levels and, in India, 18 times higher.
By 2020, e-waste from televisions will be 1.5 to 2 times higher in China and India while in India e-waste from discarded refrigerators will double or triple. (continued)
