"E-waste Crimes in Ghana" 10: A Convenient Lie in Agbogbloshie

Fritz Lang's Metropolis film inspired Joeseph Goebbells, Adoph Hitler's Nazi propagandist, to try to hire him for the white supremacy movement.  What "e-waste" film documentaries should learn from Lang.

So, have we all enjoyed the photos of fire and sweaty young recycling men?  Have we proven that we care?  Have we validated our recycling credentials, proven our concern, certified out downstreams, and licensed our morality?

Fritz Lang's Metropolis inspired Goebbels

Not wanting to boycott reuse technicians in Tamale does not mean we care less than you do about wire burners in Accra who are exposed to toxic soil.  Hopefully, my concern justifies my own photos.  Because that's what Agbogbloshie is.  It's a photo backdrop.  Just a nice mashup of shantytown, smoke, gadget debris and glistening muscles.  It has become a cheap movie set for #ewastehoax propaganda.

The Tamale reuse workers not only support themselves, they usually support several others in their Dagbani speaking tribe who could otherwise feel forced to move to Agbogbloshie (Accra), Ghana to burn wires.  And their scrap brothers in Agbogbloshie support not only themselves, but their own children, siblings, and parents.

This is ultimately addressed to Lord Chris Smith, because the UK has given itself a special role as "steward" of the Dagbani and the secondary market in West Africa.  He has proven his environmental credentials by circulating stories about the "largest e-waste dump on earth", the "most toxic recycling on earth", and has issued press releases crowing about Mighty Joe Benson.

Clang go the prison bars.

Yet clang, clang, clang go the Agbogbloshie scrap metal workers.  Stop all the exports, arrest every #freejoebenson... Yet the beat goes on.

More Insider Dope on Electronics Export Transactions: Giovana Vitola

Leyla Acaroglu tweeted us about a documentary, aired in Australia, as proof that electronics exports are bad.  The reporter is a Brazilian woman, who is now in Singapore.   I have an address for her to visit.

Giovana Vitola's documentary "E-Waste Hell"  (shown on Australia's DateLine) follows the Basel Action Network recipe.

1.  Fly to a big city in an exotic location.

2.  Find bored kids burning TV devices (and refrigerators) at a city dump.  Take film.

3.  Interview an African (Mike Anane) who reads and believes BAN's fake 80-90% export statistics.

4.  Go to the sea container yard and take pictures of televisions being unloaded (from Australia)

5.  Interview the importer with a hidden camera.

Before you assume this is "same old same old", watch the documentary all the way through.  I noticed a few things worth talking about.

First, the standard freeze frame screen shots show, once again, that the devices filmed in the landfill shot look nothing like the flat CRT (2003ish TV year, which would have been made a the Samsung Corning flat CRT furnace in Klang, Malaysia, which made the compact CRTs until 2011).  She films one with broken plastic, but it's clearly shipping damage, and it's cosmetic, it doesn't mean it won't work.

No, I don't think so.  Talk to StEP much?

Second, the undercover film shows what Interpol recognized in its 2009 "organized crime" report.  The sea container is being received by the family business... the importer says his brother lives in Australia, and bought the televisions.  Another "Hurricane Benson" being associated with the dump, kilometers away.

Interpol:  Brothers + buying = organization = mafia