5. How Too Quietly Big EWaste Lies Buried: Top Five E-Waste Lies Mapped

Let's ReMap the Five Biggest E-Waste Lies (before the April Fool's Blog traditionally comes out).  In Part Five, let's look at five geographic places the bodies of the truth were buried underneath a pile of false narratives and bogus "E-waste Export" claims. If you are doing a thesis or term paper on electronics recycling this semester, take the blue pill and see how normal ordinary places were sensationalized with poverty narratives despite prima facia evidence that the story was bogus.

We can forgive reporters and news producers like Solly Granatstein (CBS 60 Minutes) at the proximate time that they report. We can roll our eyes at well-meaning do-gooders who react to false claims with alarm, out of a sense of liability. 

But I question why so few reporters do as Ira Glass did following his sharing of Mike Daisy's Foxconn exaggerations and lies. This American Life is alone in re-tracing its steps, and learning that activists and environmentalists are not immune from biased reporting, sensationalism, and creating bricks that build the House of Big Lies.

The Big Lies are about PLACES visible on Google Earth. Please, I need some unprejudiced university student help to link and map these, and I can provide the photos.

1.Guiyu.

2. Foshan

3. Basel

4. Accra

5. Hong Kong

Punjab / Faisalabad is the Sixth Man... Penang, Malaysia gets honorary mention.

Environmental Malpractice: Old Fadama (Agbogbloshie) Still Shaken by Bullyboys

First the good news:   Three great articles came out making the same points that I've been trying to make for ten years, adding a great deal of intellectual value to the discussion of the E-Waste Export controversy.

Restart Project, Representations of Waste Matter
http://therestartproject.org/repair-elsewhere/representations-of-e-waste-matter/

Lepawsky, Goldstein, Schulz:  Criminal Negligence?
http://discardstudies.com/2015/06/24/criminal-negligence/

Minter, Anatomy of a Myth
http://shanghaiscrap.com/2015/06/anatomy-of-a-myth-the-worlds-biggest-e-waste-dump-isnt/

Ghana's Parliament is now involved, and is asking the same tough questions posed by the Twittersphere through the week.   If it's about flooding, why did they start in the rainy season?  Why did the AMA start on the populated side of the river, rather than dredge from the opposite (scrapyard and landfill) side of the water?  Why start on the first day of the holy Ramadan?

The bad news is that it's too little, too late to help the dispossessed refugees of the shantytown.   My friends and acquaintances there describe homeless children now sleeping on the floors of mosques, unable to purchase mandatory school uniforms and supplies burned or bulldozed.

But the worse news is the slum will be rebuilt much faster than the reputations of environmentalists and journalists.  Too many environmentalists are ignoring our role in the propaganda campaign.

We are living up to our label as "parasites of the poor".  We are losing a generation of influence, as the scrappers of Agbogbloshie grow to dislike us and distrust us, believing that the people repeating lies about them are raking in enormous sums of wealth.

Bullyboy environmentalist, Joe Benson called us.

Sadly, in proportion, it's more true what they say about us than what we are saying about them.  I'm sorry to be the bearer of that news, but don't kid yourselves, I'm not making it up, I have these conversations recorded on film.

My role as a blogger is to remind my fellow environmentalists, including the NGOs and EU-based bureaucrats who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars (or millions, in the case of one NGO) off of the #ewastehoax, that hyperbole harms.