FIREHOSE: Environmental "E-Waste" Sustainability: Peter Sellers "Being There"

Following the blog policy to keep video to a minimum (it consumes a lot of bandwidth for readers in "good enough" internet bandwidth markets, even if their CRTs actually display better video quality than LCDs...) I will not embed the trailer to Peter Sellers' 1979 Film, but encourage you to follow the link.

BEING THERE.  (link to trailer on youtube, plot summary from wikipedia below fold)

Ewaste advocates think they walk on water

The analogy/allusion?

We meet someone who gets all his information from TV... cannot read or write.  Someone else, involved in something really important (economic policy) bestows their faith to the someone who just repeats things he saw on TV.   They become "insiders", powerful people with lots of influence.

Someone (Jim Puckett) took a picture of mixed electronics in the USA, then took a picture of sorted/single unit electronics unloaded from a sea container in Africa, then took a picture of (decades old) junk TVs generated in Africa at dumps.  He announced that the Africans are buying the unsorted junk from the USA and burning it in fires in Africa.

Some of us who really were "being there" in Africa decades ago know that the technicians who import the goods are the best darn hopes their nations have, the Ben Franklins of their emerging democracies, used computer displays filling the role of the used  printing equipment Franklin brought to Philadelphia.

BAN and Greenpeace's story... It's mathematically and economically impossible, its disproven by looking closely at the second photo (sorted, stretch-wrapped black hotel-upgrade quality TVs).  There's no interview with the Africa buyer.  Then, when the gobs and loads and piles of shredded TV glass appear here in the USA, our friend Jim shows up with a camera, saying "Tsk, Tsk" to the New York Times.

CBS 60 Minutes, NPR Fresh Air, PBS Frontline... the list of media consuming the images and reporting the "conclusion" makes Sellers movie seem more than possible/plausible in the Sustainability community.  How will college PIRG "E-Stewards" activists look international students in the eye when the simple hoax becomes apparent?  It's a hatchet job on the reuse market, planned obsolescence and big shred, playing us for fools.

Env Malpractice 6.1: Joseph Benson, BJ Electronics, Contends Innocence, Temporarily Settles Plea

Profiling 3.0, Green edition

Revised based on contact from Benson's associate, following the Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit 2013.04.16.

Subsequent to my last post, about the arrest of "Hurricane Carter" (Joseph Benson), the UK agency @EnvAgency and newspaper reporter, Cahal Milmo (@CahalMilmo), of the Independent @Independent, released this news that Benson has just settled his plea, three years later, after unsuccessful appeals taken through the court system.

The UK Independent reporter Milmo and UK Environmental Crimes units seem to absolutely crow over the Eleven thousand British pound settlement (about $23,000), sending tweets and photos.   If Benson was interviewed, they don't use it.

Anyone in business knows that the cost of hiring a lawyer and running appeals was far, far more than the 11K plea settlement.  I have not spoken to or dealt with Mr. Benson, but my suspicion is that it's evidence he wanted to clear his intentions and good name with this long appeal.  Should I be going out on a limb for someone who has just accepted a financial settlement guilty plea ?  Benson's associate insists this is not a "guilty" plea, and that they expect the funds to return when Benson is exonerated.

Hurricane Benson was publicly accused (@Guardian as well as @Independent) in 2009 of primarily exporting TVs and electronics for primitive wire burning;  David Fedele, Pieter Hugo, and others take film of African dumps and tie it primarily to men and women like Mr. Benson.   That is thanks to one person:  Jim Puckett of Seattle Washington, who has told everyone in the world that the scrap burned in Agbogbloshie and Guiyu is a "dirty little secret", that it comes from wealthy nations recycling programs.