Poison Apples 4: BAN Report on Canadian Export - 9% Export Despite Rigged Sampling!

Nine Percent!?!?

Nine Percent is a nine-member Chinese boy group formed by the survival show Idol Producer by iQiyi in 2018.

Nine percent is also the result of BAN's E-Stewards new report  on a rigged process to show illegal ewaste export is still a thing to pay them money about.

Rigged as in 14% of all the devices BAN tracked were sent to one company (which BAN has engaged in a lawsuit against). And BAN didn't track things they knew would not likely be exported.

Basel Action Network, the owner of the "E-Stewards" authority program, is still using GPS trackers to try to ramp up business.  In a new report distributed by email, BAN has given a subject headline that "Canada still Exporting e-Waste to Developing Countries"... Using a clever but well trod journalism trick, "still" is meant to imply something significant is contained in the report.

Let's boil the information down from page 1.

1) Zero CRT televisions tracked, despite being 60% of Canada's e-waste stream.  That's a major sampling bias if your claim is about "Canadian e-Waste".

2) The devices "chosen" for export tracking - LCD monitors, CRT desktop monitors, and printers - were identified in BAN's 2016 report as the most likely items purchased by export markets.

3) BAN "Poisons the Apples" again, claiming to have secretly "rendered the devices economically unrepairable".  Like the 2016 report, the sabotage is not visible, it's hidden (and not competently done - in 2016 several devices were found repaired and in use anyway). Why do that, other than defeat screening and quality control procedures by the accused Canadian exporter?

4) BAN again conflates the Basel Convention - which explicitly allows reuse and repair and even recycling exports to developing countries - with their proposed AMENDMENT, which they admit has not been passed or ratified by either the Convention or Canada. So their claims of "illegal" activity by Canadians are clearly false and defamatory.

Despite all this spin, the result of the GPS study is   9 %

And if CRT TVs had been tracked, it would have been less than 3 percent!!!  This report shows an NGO flailing its fingers on the keyboard!!!

How to Categorize Part 2: Derivatives of Martin Luther King Jr

Yesteday's post wasn't well edited (I added some clarifiers this morning from my room in Salzburg, Austria).  But I was happy writing it, because I felt something was coming together somehow, it felt like something crystallized.  Sometimes those are the worst submissions, sometimes the best.  But in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday in the USA, I hope that it channels Reverend King's letter written from Birgmingham prison, with pen and paper.  No backspaces, no click and delete.

Someone I met and admire here in Europe stayed up with me last night (we arrived on the same flight), arguing and pontificating about Trump's election, e-Waste policy, economics, and family.  It was a broad enough discussion, lasted well past midnight.  He and I don't always agree, though he's reasonable enough that I hope he'll be able to look back and see the fallacies in the EU position in hindsight (or I will - I had to come back to my room and research some stuff when we left).

The next day, it all seemed to fit in 140 characters.  Second, below the first 'pinned' tweet below.

Criticism of method or regulation isn't "attacking" the regulator.  It is defending the innocent from unjust prosecution.  And a regulator or prosecutor who persists in using methods or enforcement proven to be constructed on false premises is liable for environmental malpractice.

< That's boiled down to 140 characters at left.

Shouldn't we try to get along?  Or is the false consensus built upon white privilege, and we need to represent the Geeks of Color, whose comments were ignored in PACE Initiative?

The discussion came in response to Jim Puckett's constant claim that this is an "attack blog" and that I am "insulting" or "attacking" his poor non-profit organization.  This has been Jim's go-to response for several years now, since I wrote a guest editorial "We Shouldn't Have to Make That Choice" in Resource Recycling in 2009.  It was one of the first blogs turned editorial, and it was cited by Grahm Pickren in his 2014 thesis, Political Ecologies of Electronic Waste: Uncertainty and Legitimacy in the Governance of E-Waste Geographies.

The editors of Resource Recycling liked it, thought it was nuanced.  But Jim Puckett, in emails to me personally and to the editors (demanding a right to response, which they gave him) called it an "attack" which he could not let stand.  In that email, he threatened to go after me personally, and my business and employees, if I did not refrain from criticizing his policy.

E-Stork 4: It's the Journalism, Stupid.

From "precautionary principle", regulators defined export as an action with "suspected risk".  While a case can be made that the risk has been exaggerated, it's too bad that case is being made by me, a self-interested, partisan, biased exporter - one who has no editor and little time to proof-read (cutting too long posts into 4 parts didn't work in college very often, either).

I believe in dialectic, and the "marketplace of ideas", to bring the truth.  But I wish more professional writers would take interest in repair, reuse, knockoff, and tinkering - the true opposite of the "resource curse" in poorer but emerging markets.

The "suspected risk" comes from the same source that cleaned up the Blackstone River.  No, not the Saturday Evening Post.   But journalists.   Ethical journalism provides us a shortcut for proper due diligence, a reason to "suspect" risk.   Until or unless a river has been traced upstream to a repair and refurbishing factory, the journalist can "follow the money trail" and interview people telling both sides of the story.   They have the power to invoke or water down the "populist cognitive bias" against, say, interracial marriage.  Journalists may not be able to tell where our soul comes from, or where it burns when we die, but they have the power to interview people who CLAIM they know.

It's ok that we still believe in heaven and hell as a matter of faith.   As Chaucer said, a thousand times I've heard men tell of joy in heaven and pain in hell... but none of them has been to either place and lived to tell about it.   Faith and crusades are fine for spiritual upstreams and downstreams.   For rivers and environmental policy, we need science.  Journalists accepting statements like "80% of e-waste is exported", without a single fact or figure to go by in ten years, need to wake the heck up.

To Kill an Indonesian Mockingbird

"Republik Indonesia" is the third largest democracy, and the largest population of muslims (India is second, with more Muslims than Pakistan).  The country shares stewardship of the tropical islands of Papua New Guinea and Borneo.  It's the 4th most populated nation, stretching over island and archipelago... about three times the size of Texas.   It has some of the most densely populated cities, and some of the most sparsely populated forests.

Indonesia could go either way.

It could succumb to the "resource curse".  The same volcanic history that brought the tidal wave tsunami disaster of 2004 has also left copper, gold, and rare earth metals.  The rain forests are being systematically cut down, like the Amazon, to plant commercial crops - like timber and palm oil plantations.

Indonesia could also follow the path of the "Network of Tinkerers".   Like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, Indonesia's economy is building on the "geeks of color", the repair and refurbish and shanzhai knock-off economies.  Contract manufacturing has a leg in the economy.