Will Basel Convention Secretariat Be Saving Soles in the Textile Marketplace?

As a the drop-out kid from 3 generations of Journalist (great grandparent and grandparent newpaper publishers of Taney County Republican, White River Leader, and Branson Beacon) and Journalism Ph.D father (Missou J-School), I learned that the author of the story never writes the headline... The Editor writes the headline.  And "Betteridge's law of headlines" is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

Not Yet a Rag or Textile Waste:  "I'm Not Dead Yet" Shirt

Fifteen years ago, in 2011, I posted here the "Red Shoe Blog" which tried to explain what I thought about finding an abandoned red high heeled shoe in the mud in an Emerging Market.  I was still somewhat in the used textile business then, collecting municipal bales and sending them to graders in Ontario and Texas.  That was a while ago, but back then I already knew what I did not and could not know, and wrote with caution about Basel Action Network (like many "Action Networks" inspired by Saul Alinksy''s "Rules for Radicals")  claims about 80% of imported electronics not being reused, but being immediately dumped as waste.  Four hundred out of Five hundred sea containers per month to Ghana alone were, BAN.org claimed "a dirty little secret", dumped in Agbogbloshie or Guiyu.

It took another five years for BAN to not only abandon that "statistic", but shockingly to claim never, "ever" to have claimed it. But it was too late - Jim Puckett had made the claim in public (I was in the audience) at an Interpol conference, launching "Project Eden"... which he would later say he had nothing to do with as Joe "Hurricane" Benson and other (Jim's description) "Collateral Damage" cases surfaced.  Basel Convention Secretariat's Executive Director, Katharina Kummer, came here to Middlebury for the Fair Trade Recycling Summit to describe how Basel Secretariat was vulnerable to wild percentage claims, and advocated for listening more carefully to importers and exporters like Benson BEFORE launching efforts to "save the victims" of dumping... who would appear to be the actors, making purchases, paying shipping and customs, and rejecting many loads while still buying 80% waste for the purpose of dumping it upon themselves.  Those silly black Africans, buying single red high heeled shoes (but not ski boots) that no one wants to buy? Basel Convention was there to Save their Shoes Soles from an understated "Hell".

Blowing The Whistle A Minute After The Goal Is Scored

My environmental philosophy was shaped by Lester R. Brown and the State of the World reports published by the Worldwatch Institute. Brown argued that the defining environmental challenge is not waste itself, but humanity's accelerating extraction of natural capital. Recycling matters not because it manages garbage, but because every kilogram recovered from the human economy is a kilogram that does not have to be extracted from forests, coral reefs, rivers, mountains, farmland, or indigenous lands. In almost every meaningful life-cycle comparison, a kilogram of copper recovered from discarded products has a smaller environmental footprint than a kilogram mined from virgin ore, transported, concentrated, smelted, and refined. Better still is a kilogram of copper that never needs to be recycled because the product containing it is repaired, refurbished, or reused for another decade. Extending the useful life of products preserves not only the metal itself but also the enormous investments of energy, labor, and environmental disturbance already embodied in their manufacture.

This is fundamentally a question of thermodynamics and material flows, not ideology. 

Recycling Is Not a "LIE": Part 3. Alexander Clapp says I'm an Expert?

 

Waste Wars: A Journey Through the World of Globalized Trash

Forthcoming from Little, Brown & Company

Try out this logic.  

"Health Care Is a LIE, because everyone receiving health care will eventually die".

So I just found out that Alexander Clapp, author of the NYTimes Opinion editorial saying that Recycling Is a Lie, quotes me personally as an expert. Page 135. 

Yet, he does not respond to my direct messages, offers to dialogue, or follows (Linkedin, BlueSky, XTwitter)... So I'm following his posts and will buy a used copy of his book when it is available, but this "Health Care Is a Lie" logic is patently false.  

The 2006 NIH Report by Charles Schmidt, where the misleading quote is pulled from, was based on a trip I made to Asia 20 years ago with Total Reclaim of Seattle president Craig Lorch, and native (2nd generation) Mandarin speaker Lin King of WR3A.org and University of California (recycling program manager).  I had not been to Africa since 1987, and was trying to explain to Mr. Schmidt that the HUGE CONTRACT MANUFACTURERS IN ASIA - SUBCONTRACTORS FOR DELL, HP, ETC. were certainly not importing 80% waste. When he asked about Africa importers, I knew that they were not running 50+ huge factories with up to 1500 employees, 3 shifts a day, seven days per week.  And during that interview, I was also trying to remain friends with Mr. Jim Puckett who was making the (false) claim that 80% of used electronics trade violated the Basel Convention.

AFTER this interview with NIH Schmidt, the following occured.

1. I went to visit our buyers in Africa - with my whole family - and learned that they were Tech Sector professionals who knew WAY more about the electronics they were purchasing than USA recyclers did.

2. I sent multiple emails to the 2006 study author between 2006 (when I complained about the coverage even then) leading right up to 2013, when I invited him to attend the Middlebury Fair Trade Recycling Summit. See email to the author at bottom, with the list of speakers and experts meeting to discuss the "e-waste hoax" BAN had by that time created.  

3. 2013 was the year Jim Puckett of BAN disavowed his own claims in the 2006 Charles Schmidt NIH study - actually claiming he had never ever made the 80% illegal export claims.

In a sample email to Schmidt copied above, I was imploring him to update the 2006 study I'm quoted from, and he submitted my offer to his editor at NIH, who in 2011 turned it down.  Instead, Adam Minter that year visited multiple importers (and domestic Chinese e-waste buyers) for his book, Junkyard Planet.  Which like his second book, Secondhand, interviewed me and our WR3A members directly and on multiple occasions visited them.  

Can Anyone Explain the Basel Convention?? Part 3

For years, Basel Convention advocates have been saying it is based on waste externalization - Industrialized nations should not externalize their environmental management to non-industrialized nations.

So true, then.

Today, the Basel Convention Amendment isn't about waste externalization. It is about Industrialized nations internalizing mined raw materials, and parts... keeping strategic materials in country... and preventing Emerging Markets from the "white box computer" path to manufacturing.

Metals internalization money is bigger than waste externalization $.

In Part One, we recognized that no recycling facility or activity, anywhere, is in any way banned by the Basel Convention.  Every facility, every worker, everything continues.  But we segregate the path of trade.  Ibrahim in Niger can burn as many wires as he wants to, so long as those wires are from China, or Africa, or other non-OECD. But he cannot burn USA and EU wires. That is a solution to something psychological, not physical world.

Whether Hong Kong's e-waste facility is the high tech, state of the art, certified, insured and managed $550M EcoPark (above), or the misconstrued "Mr. Lai's Farm" (where Hong Kong EPA ruled that printers were not hazardous waste listed and allowed it to operate... no secrets), Basel Convention is silent.  

It does not say what a recycler can DO... all of Malaysia's permitted plastic recycling facilities operate purely under direction of Malaysia law, not international law.  Basel Convention only distinguishes the nationality (and some say identity) country those companies choose to buy FROM. 

Two countries can agree that a particular recycling trade (plastics or electronics parts harvesting) is legal or not considered "waste"... but Basel Convention says that if one is OECD (Mexico) and the other is non-OECD (e.g. Singapore) that the trade is violating the Convention.  Whether the consumer plastic is perfectly recycled in a plastic molder in Klang Malaysia, or fed to kittens in Switzerland, Basel Convention leaves that up to local authorities. But it has to be OECD plastic being fed to kittens in Switzerland, and only non-OECD plastic can be recycled at the plastic molding plant in Klang, Malaysia. 

It is purely about segregating buyers and sellers, not about defining proper standards!

In Part Two, we looked at how crazy "OECD" is, today, as a measure of a person's capacity to repair or recycle. It was iffy when Basel Convention was adapted, and today is a completely random indication of industrialized economies (what it was intended to represent). Singapore, the second most advanced economy in the world, refuses to become OECD - perhaps because they want to trade with 75% of the world's recycled materials supply rather than 25%.  The chart shows how much of the world's "industrialized" economy is now consuming raw materials in "third world" and "first world" economies (the chart is in dollars - in tonnage of raw materials, the lines have already completely crossed).

The Basel Convention is being abused by non-environmentalist actors simply to restrain trade. The more the "Industrialized" Nations become non-or-in-OECD, the more arbitrary the trade restrictions over those industrialized nations is.

It is broken. Jim Puckett won't let go, but I hope Daniel looks at this chart. China can dump on Africa, Africa can't sell properly manually dismantled e-scrap to Umicore, Africans can only buy third-hand electronics for repair, not secondhand nicer PCs they want to buy from rich places???

For me, Basel Convention should not be a religion. It was great in 1990, but there is nothing good happening for the future in these amendments.  Old stupid white men are screwing it up, and some even want to put repair trade into "Annex Bad".

ITAN: Intellectually Toxic Anecdotal Nonsense Problems

There is a disturbing pattern, not just in the Environmental Movement, but probably across all social communication, propped up by ever weaker journalism editorial systems.

Someone publishes an article, or a paper. Take the 2002 Basel Action Network's "Exporting Harm" paper on the river samples of Guiyu, China. 

1. Basel Action Network publishes the paper with a photo of a child sitting on circuit board scrap (posed upon, film major Jim Puckett admitted to me personally, though Jim seems to forget everything he admits over the years).

2. The White Paper makes an assertion that "80%" of used electronics and scrap is exported to places like Guiyu.

3. The White Paper makes an assertion that "80%" (of the 80% above? unclear) is managed improperly in so-called "primitive" conditions.

Basel Action Network's Relentless Racism Against Africa's Tech Sector May Succeed

For years, Basel Action Network has insisted on fake statistics about e-waste "loopholes" in the Basel Convention.  The original Basel Convention, in Annex IX, explicitly exempts reuse and repair of electronics from "waste" definitions (list B1110).

BAN's Jim Puckett was a film major, and when he advised someone I was taking with me to see reuse factories in China, Jim told him to "take pictures of children on the scrap".  His other tactic was to make up statistics that were so alarming that they made people accept that it must be terrible. If 80% of X results in something bad, there must be something wrong with X.

- homosexuality, atheism, swimming.... if 80% of it is bad, make it illegal?

https://resource.co/article/basel-convention-require-informed-consent-e-waste-exports

Depressingly, Ghana (which never signed or ratified the Bamako Convention, and consequently benefited by massive mass communications investments, leapfrogging Mali) has its name on a Ghana-Swiss proposal to finally change the Basel Convention to make import of used electronics de facto defined as "waste".  See my comments to Resource Magazine, (Amelia Kelly) which made the mistake of interviewing Basel Action Netwwork but not the Tech Sector importers who are capable of speaking on their own behalf.

"There are 170,000+ mobile phone towers on the African continent today, thanks to the "critical mass of users" of flip phones which BAN tried to stop the export of a decade ago. The privileged wealthy white guy gets to define what is "waste", and the African tech sector experts who made the mobile phone tower investments possible are profiled as "Primitives" or at best "Informal Sector" (as if not knowing how smart they are is a reason to prosecute them). Free Hurricane Joe Benson." - Robin Ingenthron

 This guy loses his job, and the displays get ground up for raw materials... and doesn't get to reply to Jim Puckett's quote (below the fold)

Recent E-Waste News Predicted by Good Point Ideas Blog

News headlines travel faster these days through my @WR3A Twitter account and LinkedIn. As compared to the blog, those social media venues compete better for shorter attention spans (including yours truly).

The beat goes on.

That said, it's worth it to link today's news to the paradigms long established in the blog.

For example, former E-Stewards Executive Director has retired rather fitfully, and gone on record that both the R2 and E-Stewards Certifications are flawed... flawed in a way that this blog described a decade ago as follows - They don't know what they are talking about and are making it up as they go along.

Akers told me he was somewhat censored by Resource Recycling editors who are trained to flinch by angry outbursts from Jim "A Place Called Away" Puckett. He filled some gems in by email, but the Op-Ed itself is damning enough.

In My Opinion: Does today’s industry need e-Stewards or R2?

I’ve looked at the IRS 990 filings for both Basel Action Network (BAN), the owner of the e-Stewards standard, and Sustainable Electronics Recycling International (SERI), the owner of R2. The most recent filings publicly available online for both organizations cover 2019.

BAN’s filing shows gross revenue of $838,358 with total expenses of $817,088 for a net gain of $21,270 (the year prior, BAN had a net loss of $77,785). The organization reported only $83,351 in grant revenue, meaning the bulk of the revenue is from e-Stewards. The executive director was paid $133,741. Spending on travel totaled $39,234 and spending for advertising was $7,514. Another $314,701 was spent on other salaries.

The SERI filing shows gross revenue at $1,746,118, salaries of $508,775 and a net revenue of $742,097. The executive director was paid $159,650. Certification fees brought in $1,689,774 in revenue.

Both filings raise some questions. For BAN: Is this program sustainable? What happens to my e-Stewards certification if BAN folds? BAN is mostly a one-man show. What happens if that individual retires or becomes ill? Is there a business-continuation plan to protect my investment in an e-Stewards certification? Was any money spent on advertising to help drive business to e-Stewards or just to recruit more companies into the certification pipeline?

For SERI, the main question is: Is any of its revenue spent to help drive business to R2 recyclers?...

The main question really is: How much of those membership fees are being spent to aid the certified recyclers in the marketplace?

From looking at the 990 filings, the answer is not much.

Pouty Puckett has yet to respond in public to Akers cards on the table, though SERI's Corey Dehmey tried to direct us away from the man behind the curtain, and back to the Wizard of Obfuscation with his response last week.

Help Us Define "Waste Colonialism": Talking Secondhand

Looking for University Research to Help Us Define "Waste Colonialism"...

Robin I

@WR3A

·

2m

Actively seeking university researchers interested in "waste colonialism", or the use of apparently environmentally minded rules to serve planned obsolescence and protectionism. #wastecolonialism #freejoebenson #fairtraderecycling

"Waste Colonialism" comes up in the final chapters of Adam Minter's new bestseller "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale".  Adam kicked off his book tour at the University of Vermont, in part to thank my company and our global partners for "dropping our drawers" and giving him access to secrets of the trade.

In fact, the next to last chapter is titled "A Rich Person's Broken Thing". That is drawn directly from conversations I had with my Ozarks grandparents, both on the farm as a child, and in long talks with them after I returned from the Peace Corps in Cameroon, Africa (June 1984-December 1986). Adam captured my grandpa Clarence Fisher's anecdotes about when automobiles first came to the Ozarks (his own father had a horse and wagon, and signed his name with an "X"). As many family members were leaving the Ozarks during the Great Depression (along the "Hillbilly Highway"), his older brother, he said, got into the used automobile business. He explained that no one they knew could afford a new car (and the unpaved roads would be heck on them anyway). Used cars were affordable... but his brother's method was to go to St. Louis, Memphis, or Chicago and listen for sounds a car was making when it had broken down or was about to. If you knew what went wrong with a car, what the sound that problem makes, and how to fix it, you could buy the "rich man's broken thing" for a lot less. They'd bring it down to Cedar Valley, fix the car, and flip it for the price of a working used car.

I explained to my grandparents how I'd seen Africans doing that exact same thing. And Adam not only put it in the book, but recounts the tale of Joseph "Hurricane" Benson of BJ Electronics in England, who was sentenced to prison for buying used hotel CRT TVs and selling them to Africa.

Adam shows the wisdom of the African traders, and accepted my challenge, which was to ask why do rich countries (and in particular white people, because Japan and South Korea don't do this) create "rules" by which Africans can buy secondhand equipment?  And when the UK House of Commons reported that the African exports needed to stop - not to "save" the Africans from pollution, but to retain "strategic minerals and metals" for European industry - why did no one from that House of Commons think it worthy to write the UK Barrister who was recommending Joe Benson be prosecuted?

Adam's answer is "waste colonialism". He doesn't use "racism" the way I have in the blog, but he certainly calls out the bigotry involved in confusing (sometimes deliberately) the secondhand (and "thirdhand") Tech Sector with the unschooled wire burners of the scrap sector.

As I said when apologized to 7 years ago, the apology from Basel Action Network should not be made to me, but to the Africans, Asians and LatinX whom the NGO has been racially profiling as "primitives".

Certification and Racketeering 5: Analysis of Seven GPS Tracking Studies

2018 GreenTrack Report found only 5% export, including export to OECD countries grntrac.com DWE

In the next blogs of this series "Certification and Racketeering", we look at a chart comparing 6 actual and 1 hypothetical use of GPS Tracking Devices to follow largely unwitting and unwilling subjects.  We compare methods of placement, tracking, and financial involvement of lead investigators. From there, we will delve into whether the study acts as "Environmental Watchdog" or merely protects the claims of being an authority when those claims are threatened. If, for example, a GPS tracking study specifically seeks to discredit or scandalize someone who has a beef with the Investigator, does that influence the mechanics of the study?

In the 7th hypothetical GPS Tracking study, I've deliberately created a clearcut "Racketeering" use (using the tracking study to offer a solution to a problem that would not otherwise exist without the financial interest of the investigator). The hypothetical would clearly be a matter for the American Civil Liberties Union, or EFF, or Interpol or Bob Mueller to decide. We then correlate the studies to see which ones have more in common with the Racketeering Hypothesis.  Then we look at quotes and behavior of the lead investigator.

Certain MIT students, when they get older, may want to come forward and disclose specific methods used to drop specific devices at specific places. I can promise anonymity and cover your costs. I can also put you in touch with MIT's own attorney, who took over correspondence after MIT Senseable City Lab excused themselves from further collaboration with BAN.org

Fair Trade Recycling Geek in Tamale, Ghana

Later, we will visit ("Take Your Pic") the use of cringy photos to jolt emotions when the actual statistical findings are not doing the trick. The art of a deal "selling" an unnecessary service, deceitful or otherwise, involves provocative / race-baiting imagery.

In the DWE tracking study, Dennis Ward    @dward_dennis gives us charts. In report by BAN, we have constant tear-jerking imagery evocative of our worst fears and perceptions of their so-called "Third World". But let's first focus on the methodology in 7 separate GPS Tracking Reports.

GPS trackers show exchange of products between two consenting parties.  There is not a single case of direct dumping of used electronics at foreign landfills. Who are we guilty of doing business with? And what makes our partnership suspicious?

Certification and Racketeering: Part 2 The Guardian Deceit

Definition:   RACKETEERS OFFER A DECEITFUL SERVICE TO FIX A PROBLEM THAT OTHERWISE WOULDN'T EXIST.

"We don't want to have to go after you." - JP to yours truly during California Compromise negotiations in 2010.

"I'm not hiding anything, and don't think much of your threats" - My response.

Basel Action Network "goes after" people through the press. This week, The Guardian's environmental desk proves just how easy that is.  Sandra Laville's headline "UK worst offender in Europe for electronic waste exports - report" diligently puts out the hit, failing to interview a single African or Asian technician or importer.

Free Joe "Hurricane" Benson, much?

Mistaking Africa's Tech Sector (importers) for Africa's Scrap Sector (city wheelbarrow scrap collectors) is like mistaking a surgeon for a janitor because he's black.  The only proof BAN provides is a photo of a janitor.  

There are several other really really simple things to find on the internet which should have given The Guardian's editors pause. I'll tick them off briefly, but stick to the point. BAN has created a problem that wouldn't otherwise exist (false reporting, sabotaged equipment, fake statistics) for the purpose of generating millions of dollars from BAN E-Stewards. BAN not only threatens companies that don't pay them, but makes examples out of those of us who defend the Geeks of Color. It is the valedictorians in the Tech Sector who suffer the worst consequences of BAN's sabotage.

BAN doesn't just sabotage their equipment. It sabotages their reputation, and the reputation of anyone with the courage to trade with them, rather than boycott them. (In Part III, we'll look at who finances this sabotage).

Bombshell Interview with Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network - leaked!

Let's start the 2019 Blog off with a BANG.

I have gotten a copy of the ~10 minute interview Jim Puckett did with a documentary filmmaker from Spain, on the subject of Agbogbloshie, Ghana. At the end of the video, Jim evidently didn't like his answers, whips off the mic, and leaves, saying he refused to authorize the use of his video.

He repeatedly used the term "biased questions". As is, is the percentage of bad material imported to Africa 15% or 80%? But my favorite "biased question" is...

"Do you know the name Joe Benson?"

No. That is a biased question....?

????

Someone asks you the name (John Smith, Mary Johnson?) and if you don't know them, is it a "biased question"?

Jim got his wish, and none of his interview made it to the documentary. But I have managed to get a very bad raw copy of it from an online upload site. The clips were uploaded in the USA (en route to Europe), and I have a copy of what the European documentary maker received (but did not use). If anyone is sued, I can testify that I obtained this directly from a third party cameraman hired from Florida, and not from the Europeans.

I will try to get some of this video out this weekend.

10 Things we Know about Basel Action Network's "Earth Eye", and 1 We Don't

1. We know BAN is not placing GPS trackers into any devices that don't LOOK ready to reuse. Not a single CRT or projection TV (over 50% of ewaste) was tracked by BAN, ever.
2. We know BAN claims to be "cutting wires" to sabotage the devices, which likely get repaired anyway.
3. We know that BAN controls distribution of who gets what type of device... 14% of all GPS trackers BAN released in Canada went to one guy who had a lawsuit vs. BAN.
4. We know BAN has a financial interest in the outcome (through E-Stewards) worth millions of dollars.
5. We know that BAN's press releases interchange their proposed "Ban Amendment", which has not passed, for Basel Convention international law, which allows export for legitimate recycling and repair.
6. We know that BAN mysteriously "obfuscated" several end points in Asia, when devices arrived at legitimate reuse and legal recycling centers.
7. We know that BAN picks specific people to accuse, even in cases when that person exported nothing.
8. We know that BAN profiles the overseas tech sector and reuse technicians as "primitive" and "informal".
9. We know that the "developing nations" BAN describes as "primitive" had cities with TV stations and millions of households using electricity a half century ago, and produce most of the "ewaste" at their own dumps.
10. We know that the first instance of GPS tracking, of TVs sold to Nigerian born TV-repairman Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics, led to false testimony ("80% not reused") by the UK prosecutor, and environmental injustice (imprisonment of Benson).

What I can't figure out is why the press gives this organization any ink.

Follow the money. 

This is the To Kill a Mockingbird moment for the environmental community. You either sat by while this NGO made this happen, or you spoke up to #freejoebenson

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!!!

UNU Gets Closer To Ewaste Truth (B-): But it is LEGAL not ILLEGAL

I T    I S   L E G A L

See video of African Reuse

The "fine print" behind in the UNEP / UNU headline.  75% of the imported used electronics work, and are preferred by African consumers because they perform better than affordable new ones. Of the 25% that require repair, Nigeria's Tech Sector is the best on earth at repairing them. 

First the Good News about United Nations University's "Person in the Port Project" (2018).  "Assessing Import of Used Electrical and Electronic Equipment Into Nigeria"...

1. The 2018 PiP report avoids the pitfall of poverty porn  photos (its 2015 report was cringeworthy)
2. The report correctly describes the use of otherwise "unused space" in automobiles (West Africa's #1 used goods import) to move laptops, computers, and other household electronics (and clothes, and jacuzzis, etc).
3. They involved 2 African authors, Olusegun Odeyingbo (UNU), and Dr. Innocent Nnorom, BCCC Africa (along with Dr. Olmar Desozer of UNU - ViE SCYCLE)

For a really excellent description of what "drives" the export trade, see section 5.8.1 Economic Relevance of UEEE Trade, Refurbishment and Recycling (complete quote at bottom, in blue).

"The high skill level of Nigeria’s refurbishing sector, with the ability to fix many technical defects in UEEE at reasonable service cost, also motivates importers to import both functioning and non-functioning electronic equipment to Nigeria." 

Well done.

The problem is in the press release, and the headline.  They claim something that is rational and environmentally sound is nevertheless illegal.  And the press release (apparently written by a freaked out white Starbucks barista) calls for law enforcement... without quoting or interviewing the black people who loaded and unloaded the containers.

Africans are in control of this whole trade.  This report does a lot to document that, reversing the narrative that unethical OECD sham recyclers are responsible.

So it doesn't get an "F".  It correctly describes the loading and unloading, and the financial transactions.  Better dressed, better facts, and with credible African co-authors.  But where is the crime?  Where is the waste dumping?

Recalling Booker T. Washington - the report reads like a compromise.  It describes the good outcomes in Africa, but still extends a sturdy olive branch to the WEEE policy hawks who constantly impugn trade with geeks of color in rapidly emerging markets like Nigeria.  A sturdy branch for the European E-Wastes lynch mob, who continue hunting down African technicians.

360 Degree Racism: The Privileged Wage Collateral Damage on Emerging "E-Waste" Markets

Do rich people have more leverage and 'unfair' advantage in a marketplace?  Absolutely.  No one denies that in a used car transaction that the wealthy owner of the car doesn't have the same need to make the sale, and the poor person - who needs an affordable car to get to work - has more to lose if the sale doesn't happen.  The wealthy have the power and privilege.

That said, the stupidest and most ignorant conclusion is that poor people should be put in a different marketplace than rich people.  That they shouldn't trade together.  Years ago, an NGO leader told me that poor people should repair poor peoples stuff, and rich people should repair rich peoples stuff... that identity should define the legality of the transactions.

It is a kind of stupid that could only occur in a marketplace contaminated by "identity politics".  Instead of talking about the transaction, and what's in the best interest of the free market participants, we are defining them as representatives of social groups.  In a market where some collective guilt or social liability has been whipped into a froth such that the rich person feels liability or exposure to the idea that they have exploited the poor person in a transaction, and therefore choose to shred the car rather than allow anyone to say they sold it in a transaction, to a poor person, in a marketplace where they held the upper hand.

#360DegreeRacism is the spawn of identity politics.

Used Chevy in Poorest Rural Mexico

Achtung Germany! Agbogbloshie (Ghana) Pollution is from AUTOMOBILE Waste Not E-Waste / WEEE

MISDIRECTED FOCUS

The 'Burning Environmental Issue' is Automobile Waste, not e-waste.

Clean up Africa's car pollution, worry about electronics later (when you understand it).

Hey, Listen..."Sending European used cell phones" to Africa is not the problem, and arresting African export-import traders won't clean the water or bring back "Eden".



For two years, I've been making the point that Agbogbloshie is not the largest e-waste dump in the world, and that geeks of color are being racially profiled and arrested.  Those things are true.  But Accra is polluted, and the grants to date are misspent and misdirected.

Before Germany spends $15M - 25M on an e-waste recycling solution, they should look at the photos in the link more carefully.

It's a tire, and a ball of automobile wire, not a cell phone.

There is a serious pollution problem in Accra and other African cities. Its cause should be obvious as you wend your way from Accra's Kotoka International Airport to the hotel, the day before you spend another hour wending your way to Agbogbloshie's slum... or stuck bumper-to-bumber in Accra (or Lagos, or Nairobi) traffic.

Cars.
Autos.
Vehicle-Waste.

Follow the trail.

[photos taken at Agbogbloshie Scrap Yard by Robin Ingenthron for WR3A - except for the screenshots from MTV music videos of Placebo and Beyonce, and DW article]

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.

Collateral Damage 2: Emerging Markets "Informal" Sector Takes sCrap from Shiny Consciences

Collateral Damage 2. Small scale (Informal) repair and recycling of home generated scrap

Several NGOs made "informal sector" a bad word.  Search "e-waste" and "informal" online, and you find that it's a polite word for a lot of pictures of brown people earning a living the way white boy scouts earn medals - by protecting the environment, adding value, and supporting a circular economy.

Infamous example?  How about the COVER photo from the 2015 UNEP Report.  What exactly do you see here?  A lot of people have been hypnotized to see something nefarious going on.  

This is what I saw happening when I visited Chinese buyers more than a decade ago.  It was informal. But it was also sustainable.  The environmental harm of producing chips from mining, refining, smelting, and manufacturing created small integrated circuits worth more than the gold they held in them.  If it was about the gold, the refiners in Japan and Belgium would have no competition here.  What I saw the Asians doing was memorizing each chip and sorting them, painstakingly, according to their reuse value.  

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If my children were born in a poor rice paddy village, and they learned to do this, creating thousands of dollars in secondary market value, I'd be proud.  It would remind me of how my Ozark family went from subsistence farming, no running water, no electricity and no paved roads, to OECD status in two generations.  And no thank you, it wasn't from big city charities.

Fixers do "git er done" in every culture, and often become the founders of the world's most successful enterprises.  They see stuff for what it can do, not for what it cannot do.  They find treasure where others saw trash.

The "informal" market in Asia, Africa and South America isn't perfect, but if you want proof of racism look at the cover photo of the UNEP article and ask how something which reduces carbon, creates wealth, and is a less toxic process than European refining gets elevated to poster child.