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]

Here to Help Part 2: The Words Don't Fit The Picture

Math test:

Q:  "If Ghana gets hundreds of millions of tons of e-waste per year, and e-waste is 5.76% of irony scrap (cars, white goods, appliances), and the world generates 106M tons of irony scrap, what percent of the world's e-scrap / e-waste does Ghana receive?"

 A:  If world e-Scrap exports are 5.76% of 106,000,000 metric tons*, then world e-scrap would be 6,105,600 tons per year.   To get hundreds of millions of tons, the rest of the world has to wait for 20 years - disposing of no e-waste - and then dump it all at once on Ghana at the end of two decades.

FACT:   Ghana receives somewhere between 0.000014 and 0.000439 of the world's #ewaste - between four and six /100ths of one percent.

          Calculations below.

	after 90% reuse	of 570,000,000 tons (include domestic scrap)	Of 48,900,000 tons (exported only)
215000	21500	0.00003771929825	0.0004396728016
80000	8000	0.00001403508772	0.000163599182

Non toxic copper extraction

So, it's just ludicrous.  If you want a higher percentage, you need a lower denominator.  StEP's higher estimates numerator (215k tons) includes fridges and air conditioners and washer-dryers in "e-waste", which makes for 48.9 million tons per year worldwide.  In which case, for Agbogbloshie to receive hundreds of millions of tons, it would take only 5 years of 100% of all e-waste in every country being dumped there... still ridiculous.

How would China, India, and Nigeria get their share of the "e-waste crisis" if Ghana's Agbogbloshie was being so selfish about it?

*est. based UN University 106,000,000 tons of steel exports (of 570 MT recycled... including domestic use in all nations). ratio on ISRI 76M tons irony scrap + 4.4M segregated e-scrap.

"E-Waste Crime in Ghana": Part 5: Huck Picks a Side

"It was a close place. I took . . . up [the letter I’d written to Miss Watson], and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming." 

- Huckleberry Finn

One of the most powerful paragraphs written in the English language.   Mark Twain (like Dickens in 'Great Expectations' before him, and Harper Lee's character Scout in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' after him) uses the voice of a child to focus on a point in time when the majority of "respected" people were wrong.

Blacksmith Institute Ghana Project: Environmental Injustice or Economics?

Blacksmith Institute's "top ten list" of "most toxic places" put Agbogbloshie, Ghana at the top. (Later it was clarified that it was at the top of the alphabetical list because it began with A).  The Blacksmith press release is now 16 months past.  While I've tried to call Blacksmith out in debate, both with personal calls and emails and with a little blog chiding of Dr. Jack Caravanos' use of disavowed BAN export statistics (bad data), my friends have warned me to be careful.  Blacksmith Institute isn't a Greenpeace or a Basel Action Network.   They'd be a powerful adversary.

Androcles pulling a thorn from the lion's paw

My response has pretty much been that scientific and academic approaches applaud "peer review", it's part of the Scientific Process.  If I've been wrong all this time, I believe in Socratic method, and like Plato said, would be as happy to have a wrong idea removed from my mind as I would to have a thorn removed from my skin.   If I'm making a mistake, I want the mistake to be corrected.

I trust Blacksmith would see it the same way, if they take the time.


This morning I got an email from Rafa at @RecyHub, cc'ing a subset of interested parties like Josh Lepawsky following #Ewastegate, with a link to a public update on the cleaning up of Agbogbloshie project.


It's about AMP Project, the MIT-CoLab style "appropriate technology" approach to wire burning in the Accra city dump, which has provided the update below.

More on the Blacksmith Institute, what do you think?
http://www.pureearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Ghana-Pilot-PCR-2015.pdf
Link to the project completion report for phase 1 of the pilot project. 

I was trying to figure out who to cc in my response, and decided to post it for the world below.

Eco-Fundamentalists 1: Joseph Benson, Tom Robinson, Willie Horton

If you are old enough to be surprised that Nigeria is #8 in the world in people connected to the Internet, then you are old enough to know who Tom Robinson was (the accused in To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee) and old enough to know who Willie Horton was (scary escaped inmate in anti- Democratic ads run in the south in 1988 elections).

New FBI Director James Comey gave a very honest and provoking speech last week about "racism".  Better than any of my rants.   Two basic points stick out.

1. The Police, historically, enforce the status quo.   That includes Jim Crow laws.   Cops were on the bad side of the firehose in civil rights marches.   That history brings with it some baggage which has to be addressed in the open.
2. University research of human  psychology indicates that everyone has a certain distrust of the unfamiliar, probably through evolution.   Almost everyone, of all colors, has some subconscious racial distrust.   

What is unique about "e-waste" and the jailing of #FreeHurricaneBenson is that environmental police are reacting to the same kind of panicked finger-pointing described in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Eco Fundamentalists - the proponents of radical fundamentalist Basel Convention Amendment interpretations (that anything with a circuit board is "waste", even if the circuit board is being reused or repaired or electively upgraded) so believe in themselves, that their leader actually says "Joe Benson is collateral damage".  

Sure, and Tom Robinson was "collateral damage" in the war on rape.   Rape's such a horrible crime, that a "Willie Horton" description of Robinson is accepted for the protection of society.