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]

For Our New German Blog Readers: See You in Salzburg

The number of blog visits is up in 2016, compared to 2015.  Hopefully that is a sign that I've been engaged more relevant topics. Views from Europe, India and Africa grew in number and duration.

"Why We Should Ship Our Electronic 'Waste' To China and Africa" ran in Motherboard Vice five years ago.  Klaus N. read it in Germany and decided to do a piece on it for 3Sat (German language equivalent of PBS, I'm told, which broadcasts in several countries).  That led to a pretty steady dozen or so readers in West Europe.  This year, the number is close to 100.

Some of the attention is probably "reflected from the mud".  Kevin McElvaney published the arm-flailing Mike Anane's absurd claims about Agbogbloshie ("the biggest e-waste dump on earth") Sodom and Gomorrah? Fishing as a Boy?..."), which led to interviews in all kinds of German news, and led to a flurry of follow up visits to Ghana by other aspiring documentarians.  A textbook case of photojournalism running off the reservation without a hint of datajournalism to support it.  The posts here which provide links to World Bank and other data seem attractive to the photographically inspired.

In any case, Fair Trade Recycling is now a curiosity, if not a known quantity, in Europe.   I'm preparing my presentation for ICM, 16th International Electronics Recycling Congress IERC 2017 in Salzburg, Austria, where I will sit side by side with Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network on a panel in front of hundreds of European regulators and researchers.

Landscape shot of the small small site at Agbogbloshie where close ups of kids perched on monitor casings takes place

I offered to do a presentation on how incredibly small and insignificant our topic is.  How bland, how navel gazing our concerns are from the perspective of the slum dwellers we wring hands and handkerchiefs about.  The background of the landscape photo I took shows the Old Fadama slum in central Accra.  The dump is across the lagoon.  And the most photographed, if not the largest, ewaste dump on earth is there in the center, on this side of the lagoon.

No kidding, folks. This is it for wire burning. I got photos of photographers on that tiny, barren spot, posing young slum ruffians on top of some of the few dozen devices found scattered on the lagoon bank.   See the "close up" of the same site at bottom... same tent in the background.

Above is another (landscape) view of this exact site and the 25 people burning wires there. Note tent behind girl

Monkey Zoo Matrix Math: 2010 Okopol Study Crowned Oracle of E-waste

I have been trying to find a way to address last weeks UNEP Report... It's extremely frustrating because the report says next to nothing.   It's full of qualifiers and half statements and CYA.  So frustrating to see the headlines reporting that UN says 90% is dumped, when the actual report "says" next to nothing.  It implies, it insinuates, it uses racist photographs to depict Africa's tech sector.  But it says nothing.

Terrablight relies on Okopol's Oracle

But here's the nutshell.  It claims "e-waste" trade is worth $19 billion dollars.  And the way it comes up with that number is by capturing the legal and legitimate reuse and repair trade in its "waste" numbers.   It blames Africa's Tech Sector by shaming Africans who work in recycling.

So really, it is more useful to go to another 100+ page report written by some of the same actors, back in 2010.  A report which actually DID present numbers, and drew conclusions.

The 2010 Okopol Report.  
An apparent number crunching, quantifying treatise.   Which repeatedly cites Mike Anane, the "reporter" in Ghana, and surrounds his quotes with numbers that completely contradict Mr. Anane in every single case, leaving him without a single factually correct quote... but fails to throw the bum out.  Instead, it granted Mr. Anane a cloak of vettedness.   It made him the Oracle of the E-Waste Matrix.

The year Joe Benson was accused in the Independent, Guardian, BBC, and Daily Mail of exporting waste electronics from Europe and dumping them in Nigeria and Ghana, the following study had just come out... Mr. Anane was interviewed on BBC Panorama, showing "lead dust" (aluminum phosphor) inside the broken panel of a CRT.  Next Month, Interpol has invited Mike Anane (and paid his consulting fee) to address a roomful of Interpol Enforcement Staff, telling them about the E-Waste Matrix, where 75%-90% of goods Africans test and pay for are bad.  Even when most random tests in Germany find that more than that is good, Anane will tell them that somehow the African businesses, like Joe Benson's, are able to sense and pick out the bad ones to export.

Here are key sections of the 2010 Report which
A) Grant Credibility to Mike Anane, and
B) Prove His Claims to be Completely False.

| TEXTE | 22/2010 ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH OF THE FEDERAL MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT, NATURE CONSERVATION AND NUCLEAR SAFETY Project No. (FKZ) 3708 93 300 Report No. (UBA-FB) 001331/E Transboundary shipment of wasteelectrical and electronic equipment /electronic scrap – Optimization ofmaterial flows and control by Knut Sander Stephanie Schilling Ökopol GmbH, Hamburg On behalf of the Federal Environment Agency (Germany)

"(Abstract)  In the countries of destination, the equipment encounters recovery and disposal structures, which are not suitable to ensure the protection of human health and the environment as well as the extensive recovery of resources."

This chestnut of a research paper tried to explain the "e-waste crime" and incentives of African "waste tourists" to export loads of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment).  In the Abstract, the authors don't even feel a need to cite the percentage of used electronics which are "bad", it's apparently taken for granted.

Rommel, Africa's Desert Fox, Nazi General

From the Wikipedia:

Erwin Rommel

In the course of the war, during parliamentary debate following the fall of Tobruk, Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke of Rommel as a "daring and skillful opponent... a great General", comments for which the British Parliament considered a censure vote against Churchill. Writing about him years later, Churchill offered the following:

"His ardour, and daring, inflicted grievous disasters upon us. But he deserves the salute which I made him, in the House of Commons, in January 1942. He also deserves our respect, because although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and tyrant. For this he paid the forfeit of his life. In the sombre wars of modern democracy, there is little place for chivalry.^[190]"

Rommel is regarded as having been a humane and professional officer.^[4] His Afrika Korps was never accused of war crimes, and soldiers captured during his Africa campaign were reported to have been treated humanely.^[5] Orders to kill Jewish soldiers, civilians and captured commandos were ignored.^[6] Late in the war, Rommel was linked to the conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Because Rommel was a national hero, Hitler desired to eliminate him quietly. He forced Rommel to commit suicide with a cyanide pill, in return for assurances that Rommel's family would not be persecuted following his death. He was given a state funeral, and it was announced that Rommel had succumbed to his injuries from an earlier strafing of his staff car in Normandy...