Was reading a certification program's "rules" about "ready for reuse, ready for repair", and the great white bosses who are ready to save Dark Techies from buying something they want. The ad above (from Mobile Centrix) links to a video explaining "Grade A, B, and C" of "Blemish Screens". Grade A has just some bad pixels (like you'd take your phone back to the shop you bought it from yesterday, dissatisfied, for replacement). Grade B has "bleed" discoloration at the edges. Grade C has visible chip-out black spots on the edges and corners. A Rich Person's Broken Thing (Chapter of Adam Minter's Secondhand, after an explanation from my Grandpa Clarence Fisher) is the smartest thing a poor person can buy. I've seen absolutely cake-smashed screens in everyday use in Africa.... no one is without a smart phone, but no one is paying $250 for screen repair, either. Instead, they buy these from their cousins who run the kiosk for phone repairs out of your local shopping mall.
Just republishing Emmanuel E.P. Nyalete's comment to Resource Recycling this weekend. Superbly thoughtful and interesting. He's a laptop repair guru and graduate student studying coding at Georgia Tech... and a former Good Point Recycling staffer and current WR3 associate.
I remember Agbogbloshie as one of the usual places in Accra where the guys from the northern part of the country work. They come knocking from door to door to buy alluminum and bottles and any other scrap item they could get. I remember saving coca-cola bottles that I sold to them to make some extra money for my next football. Over the years, Agbogbloshie has becomes a very compalext informal recycling site. It has grown from the recycling of bottles, glass and alluminun to heavy metalls from tractors and any form of motor vehicle. One of my friends who worked there told me that they prefer motor vehicles because they contained the larger quantity of metals and electrical wires. As Ghana's consumption of electronics grew so has the informal recycling of househould equipments grew.
For over two decades, I have never considered this site to be the largest e-waste dump site in the world until I read the artiles and saw the videos in the mainstream media in Europe and the USA. I was surprised for a few reasons:
1. There are very few electronic items in Agbogbloshie to even consider it as Ghana's locally generated e-waste dump site.
2. The surface area of Agbogbloshie cannot contain the "world's e-waaste" considering the many junk auto parts that are already at the site.
3. The young men who work there use very simple tools and most of the time push carts to haul scrap. From my experience working in a recycling plant, there is no way these young men could haul "millions of tons" of e-waste and process them using hammers and chissels.
However, I acknowledge the fact that there is a problem, but its not about young men taking things apart with primitive tools. Neither is it an import issue. Ghana imports almost everything we use. The problem however is fire-burning wires for the valualble coper.
To find the right solutions for this problem we need the correct diagnosis. We cannot find the right solutions if we keep exagerating the figures and the conditions on the ground. It does not help my country in any way if wrong statistics are published. A few projects have already failed at Agbogbloshie because they based their projects on false data. Incriminating African business men and women for crimes they have not commited will only lead to poverty and hence an increase in the fire pits at Agbogbloshie. Our country depends on these business men and women to provide technology at affordable prices to students and small businesses and hard working families. I am an example of how used electronics help families and young minds to aspire and dream for better tomorrow.
Lets put in a liitle more effort to find the facts and then we will discover that there are so many talented technicians and inverntors in Africa who work hard and all they need is true partnership and opportunity. Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
15 Reasons to Free Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics, falsely convicted of "e-waste" crime.
REMINDER: JOE BENSON, AN AFRICAN BORN TV REPAIRMAN, REMAINS IN JAIL IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, CONVICTED OF TRUMPED UP "E-WASTE EXPORT" CHARGES.
I will repost this soon with hot links to the trial documents, hopefully by this weekend.
1)The Guardian, Murdoch's SkyNews, BBC, Economist and Independent (2012) Newspapers all reacted to public statements by Lord Chris Smith's environmental agency that exports of televisions and computers for repair was "against international law".
2)The international law in question, the Basel Convention, specifically describes this as legal activity and does not ban reuse or repair, only dumping. (LCS may be referring to a proposed amendment to the Basel Convention which has not been passed or ratified. Violating a proposed rule is not a crime!)
3) The allegation made in court against the expat trader to Africa ("Hurricane" Benson) relied on "statistics" about the likelihood of dumping, provided by Greenpeace and the NGO Basel Action Network. Both of these organizations have been quoted by LCS and by the press, stating that "up to 80%" of what the African traders ship to Africa is destined for primitive recycling. NOW THEY DENY SAYING IT! That's right - nothing was found "dumped", but based on BAN.org claims, Benson's prosecutor said it was "LIKELY" dumped, and he was put in prison based on "likelihood", given BAN's statistics.
4) The photos these organizations (press and NGOs) use to make the case are taken at the city dumps of huge cities (Lagos, Accra). According to the World Bank, these countries have had millions of televisions in use for decades. The number ofNigerians with personal computers? 12 Million. The UK and "Project Eden" depict Africa as if from Disney's "Lion King", while Africans are dealing with their own growing piles of e-Scrap, cell phone towers, and massive traffic jams.
5) Photographs of junk Toyotas in London or Lagos do not prove Japanese guilty of wastecrime, and photos of junk TVs at Ghana landfills do not prove the Trader violated any laws or shipped any junk. Africa has been "rapidly developing" for decades.
6) During the widespread reporting that exports of used electronics to Africa were mostly junk, the Basel Secretariat and UNEP participated in a two year scientific analysis to research containerloads shipped from London, including many by the accused Nigerian expatriot in prison. Examination of hundreds of Sea Containers found 91% of product was useful - better than brand new product sold in Africa! MIT, Memorial University, Arizona State, USITC, and other studies all confirm the "ewaste" import statistic (80%) was a hoax.
7) Evidence presented in the UK court trial included no such test for repairability, or even tested the equipment in the containers, relying on "widespread knowledge" disseminated by Basel Action Network (repeated by Lord Chris Smith). (LINKS COMING THIS WEEKEND)
9)"Hurricane" Benson is in jail, despite no evidence of a crime, a trophy on the wall for #wastecrime enforcement. Benson's guilty plea was admitted at the end of a long appeal, when the judge had admonished him, and he was offered a commuted sentence (16 months rather than 60) only if he accepted a guilty plea.
10) The cost of shipping 500 televisions from London to Lagos or Accra is higher than the cost of recycling them in the UK... The entire "waste export" (for avoided recycling cost) theory was never tested and is mathematically impossible... it can be disproved with a simple review of Benson's receipts and costs of shipping.
11) Pages and pages of individual brands and models listed in the African traders containers in Benson's court records show relatively new units, hand selected. Who writes down the model number of a TV before they burn it??
12) The World Bank statistics on households with TV in use in Africa (e.g. 6.9 million households in Nigeria as of 2006) cannot be explained via new unit sales, and offer proof that past imports were not "mostly waste". There were not enough "new" TVs imported to explain World Bank's households-with-TV statistic.
13) The argument that "even working televisions will one day become waste" is true of brand new computers, cell phones, and TVs, and reflects a colonialist regulation. We do not restrict ourselves from importing new devices made in Asia until we have a recycling system for them in the USA.
14) Planned obsolescence and non-tariff barriers applied to the secondary market is an old trick. Recent investigations by the US International Trade Commission found absolutely no evidence of the 80% waste export claims, and no evidence that "waste" shipments to Africa were common.
15) The NGOs which raise money on the photos of children posed with E-Waste do not share a dime of the donation with the children. Rather, they seek to put the kids parents in jail.
Quantitative studies supporting Benson: 15. Evidence of Wrongdoing?: 0
Lord Chris Smith is probably not a bad person. Jim Puckett isn't a bad person. They are just wickedly late admitting they were WRONG about the "e-waste" hoax, and at this point there is an innocent man in JAIL and all I get from Basel Action Network is a statement about "collateral damage". E-Stewards have to demand this be fixed, Chris Smith needs to look at the references to his quotes in Benson's sentencing and make some calls to get Benson out of there.
Blacksmith Institute has, in 2015, abandoned it's "ranking" of "top most polluted sites", but only after offering legitimacy to the BAN fake and disavowed statistics about Agbogbloshie. The year Blacksmith listed Agbogbloshie at the top of their Top Ten List is the year Joe Benson was locked in a United Kingdom prison cell. #SHAME ON MY ENVIRONMENTALIST TRIBE.
Africans and other "geeks of color" see this as just one of many racist, colonialist, poverty porn, planned obsolescence driven acts by Europeans and do-gooders. It's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Thanks to all for the polite applause and pats on the back as I profile the arrest and imprisonment of an African used goods trader from the safety of my Vermont office.
Many people have told me how "brave" I am to risk offending the Senator Joe McCarthy of E-Waste.
"Never has BAN ever stated that 80% of US e-waste is exported." From NPR.org / fair use.
One year ago, "Hurricane" Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics was involved in our efforts to get Puckett to actively withdraw his accusations against African techs. I travelled to Interpol, met Benson in London, and engaged with Puckett (via BloombergView) over Basel Action Network's silence about it's "80%" statistic being discredited in major UN funded studies in Nigeria. Jim Puckett tried to spin the story, claiming credit for what he called the vast improvement in standards of imports to Nigeria.
Outrageous. The study was the same containers seized from Benson's arrest! Puckett was acknowledging the quality of the studies funded by Basel Convention Secretariat, but implying the quality of the loads was a result of the goods seizure. Rarely does an expert get caught so bloody red handed.
Unfortunately for Joe Benson, trade of used goods in Africa has already been tried and convicted in the press, based on BAN and Greenpeace's accidental racial profiling of allegedly "primitive" electronics repairers.
Portions of the Hurricane Joe Benson blog, with quotes from Puckett and from the 2011 report on the findings of Benson and others sea containers are reposted below the lyrics of Bob Dylan's song Hurricane. It includes a link to an academic article reportedly submitted in Benson's trial, from University of Northampton UK, which quotes Puckett estimating only 25% of exports to Nigeria are actually reused...
Bottom line: Africa has enough REAL problems, needing real solutions. They don't need us to manufacture scandals for them. (See another old blog chestnut, "The finite world", riffing on Economist Paul Krugman).
"Hurricane" Rubin Carter, memorialized in Bob Dylan's song, passed away two months ago, April 20, by the way.
My point is that I told Jim Puckett, to his face at E-Scrap in the fall, that his stats about Africa were resulting in an Innocent Man's arrest and imprisonment. Jim Puckett said to me that Joe Benson was "collateral damage". That's the best he could do. And now Benson is in prison.
Rubin Carter was falsely tried The crime was murder 'one' guess who testified Bello and Bradley and they both baldly lied And the newspapers they all went along for the ride How can the life of such a man Be in the palm of some fool's hand ? To see him obviously framed Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land Where justice is a game.
The 5 year old hypothesis that African technicians and entrepreneurs are illegally importing "e-waste" to save money for USA and European Recyclers is still full of @#$*.
Global Circular Economy of Strategic Metals – the Best-of-two-Worlds Approach (Bo2W) Oeko-Institut Authors Andreas Manhart , Tobias Schleicher, Stefanie Degreif
Last summer I got to meet and interview Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics in London (Bullyboys Blogs). He was the Nigerian TV repairman who was ridden out on a rail by UK Journalists, citing Basel Action Network "statistics", accusing Benson and others of "#wastecrime".
I just got word from a reliable source that Benson's appeal is successful, and the case will be sent back for retrial. Benson has spent far more on attorney and court fees than he would have by paying off the fine. While I don't have first hand knowledge of the case or UK law and have never traded with Benson nor exported TVs to Africa, he is putting his money where his mouth is, and that counts for something.
There is a lot of buzz about Africa and how the recycling can be "reformed". I am still somewhat disgusted by environmentalists who jump on the "reform" bandwagon without first apologizing for racial profiling and exaggerating in the first place.
This blog tried to make a lot of noise over our research showing that Nigerian cities had 6.9 million households with television in 2007. That's a dozen Vermonts. Nigerian cities have dumps where old TVs go, just like New England had in the 1990s when I was tasked with establishing a recycling infrastructure with EPA and Massachusetts DEP.
See the television on the young man's head in Waste & Recycling News above?
It looks a lot more like musician Prince Nico Mbarga's 1977 television than it looks like anything filmed in Joe Benson's containers.
This racial profiling under the banner of "Environmental Justice" does tell a story of exploitation, but the exploitation is begin done by the NGOs. They are raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in "E-Steward" licensing on the backs of men like Joe Benson, whose only crime is trying to build an infrastructure for mass-communication with used cell phones, used tvs, and used computers for internet. The Africans aren't doing anything that people in poor neighborhoods in the USA wouldn't do - or don't do - when they cannot afford a $2000 television. If you are shopping for a used one, you go to a wealthier neighborhood.
What Greenpeace saw. Hotel TVs from London hotel upgrades? Or "scary black people"?
Environmentalists, take heed, this is a powderkeg. I have been writing a philosophical piece about "ManBearPig", the label people snicker at from South Park Studios classic throwup of environmental sanctimony. I'm an environmentalist, I challenge anyone to compare the way they planned their lives to reduce impact on the world ecosystem. I'm sensitive to the dangers of cynicism against green.
But all the more reason to nip our own mistakes in the bud. The study of environmental health has to be a lot more like the study of human health, with fewer manbearpig bandwagons and more primum non nocere (do no harm, the Hippocratic Oath).
Back in 2010, before the blog's "Bullyboys" Series, before the "Firehose" Series, and before "Environmental Malpractice", or the E-Stork blogs, The UN released a report. It said that if all the rich nations completely stop all (hypothetical, mythological, or actual) #ewaste exports from the OECD to developing nations - stopped 100% - tomorrow - you'd do nothing to stop the posterchild photos.
UNICEF photographers share the $$
India has never been a significant destination for E-Waste, its ports are very tightly controlled. The images of Techdogs and Nerddogs (to differentiate from "slumdogs", for those of you who don't yet get it) fixing stuff in Dharvi and Mumbai slums has nothing, nothing to do with Basel Convention or Basel Ban Amendment or CAER's export ban.
In fact, if you erased every international border crossing tomorrow, poor people would still be trying to get stuff from rich people in their own countries, from people on the other side of the tracks. Rich people buy new stuff and poor people fix good-enough-for-them stuff. It's like that in the USA used car and thrift shop market... jeez its so obvious I want to shoot myself for writing it again.
But at the E-Scrap Conference in Orlando, I still met lots and lots of people who think the Green-Thompson E-Waste Bill is a solution to primitive wire burning. Big Shred will save the brown children. And Lagos, with 6.9M households with television as of 2007, will... um... uh.
Yeah. About that. Here's the press release from 2010, the year that the Bullyboy Crackdown started, the year Greenpeace told UK journalists BAN's story about how the dumps in Africa were filled with material from the UK. The year Joe Benson was targeted, a year before the Ghana E-Waste Assessment, and two years before the Nigerian E-Waste assessment studies found Benson and similar exporters sent 91% reuse - better than brand new product.
Urgent Need to Prepare Developing Countries for Surge in E-Wastes Rocketing sales of cell phones, gadgets, appliances in China, India, elsewhere forecastProper e-waste collection, recycling key to recovering valuable materials, protecting health, building new green economyBali, 22 February 2010 - Sales of electronic products in countries like China and India and across continents such as Africa and Latin America are set to rise sharply in the next 10 years. And, unless action is stepped up to properly collect and recycle materials, many developing countries face the spectre of hazardous e-waste mountains with serious consequences for the environment and public health, according to UN experts in a landmark report released today by UNEP. Issued at a meeting of Basel Convention and other world chemical authorities prior to UNEP's Governing Council meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the report, "Recycling - from E-Waste to Resources," used data from 11 representative developing countries to estimate current and future e-waste generation - which includes old and dilapidated desk and laptop computers, printers, mobile phones, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions. In South Africa and China for example, the report predicts that by 2020 e-waste from old computers will have jumped by 200 to 400 percent from 2007 levels, and by 500% in India By that same year in China, e-waste from discarded mobile phones will be about 7 times higher than 2007 levels and, in India, 18 times higher. By 2020, e-waste from televisions will be 1.5 to 2 times higher in China and India while in India e-waste from discarded refrigerators will double or triple. (continued)
From today's NYT... An Opinion piece in support of the type of "export police" I've been writing about this month, in the Firehose Series.
"In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals — copper wires, gold and silver threads — inside, which they sell to recycling merchants for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside. Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network and others have posted YouTube videos of young children inhaling the smoke that rises from burned phone casings as they identify and separate different kinds of plastics for recyclers. It is hard to imagine that good health is a by-product of their unregulated industry." Smashing batteries to recover cadmium? Descriptions of the same Youtube videos which have been discredited? There is no new information in the column at all. A lot of imagery of harsh conditions, poverty, victimization. Who wrote the article?
Leyla Acaroglu is a sustainability strategist based in Melbourne, Australia.
Here are pictures of the people who buy and recycle cell phones. Some of these pictures will look familiar. Most will not. I got these from a rare blog kept by David Kousemaker (dkousemaker),TechTravels Blog, a mostly photo blog (much less wordy) about used technology. But unlike BAN and Greenpeace's photography, it's not political, and he isn't soliciting your "charitable donation".
I've put a handful of these photos in small scale below (fair use, and Kouserman actually allows non commercial commons use, see bottom).
Leyla, if you want to talk about sustainability in development, give me a ring. I chose repair and refurbishing because the "Network of Tinkerers" is a model for development which offers an alternative from the curse of natural resources (and foreign aid, which appears to have the same effect as oil and diamonds, creating a Darwinistic government class that provides the greatest rewards to the sharpest elbows). Tinkerers, networkers, technicians, fixers, repairers, geeks... those are the people who turn discarded tech into affordable access. We called it "Yankee Ingenuity" in the Northeast. There is no better way for a smart kid without connections to make $300 per day than by fixing and salvaging. Read the other blogs here, Leyla, and you'll find that BAN and Greenpeace are filming the city dumps at major cities, and the used imports are mostly not the same stuff people throw away here after using it for 20 years. Five reports show 9%, 10%, 13%, 15% of the imports are waste, which is actually less than new "affordable" product imported into places like Africa or sold in shops in China. The free market is not as bad as you've described. And no one can afford to pay for scrap to be shipped across the ocean just to dump it, something of value must be there for the ride (and it isn't batteries smashed for cadmium... who told you that?). In May, 2011, I channeled a book from 1960. No, not Vance Packard's "The Waste Makers", about planned obsolescence. No, not Rachael Louise Carlson's "Silent Spring", about the invisible toxics from our heavy industry, and their heavy poisonous toll.
In "E-Waste Bloggers Play Atticus Finch", I referenced Harper Lee's dramatic novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird". Ms. Lee, who has recently been in the news over copyright and author control, told the simple story of her native Monroeville, Alabama.
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I've been completely unsuccessful in keeping this story alive on Slashdot. We need to go Reddit or StumbledUpon. Deleted from Slashdot Submissions:
retroworks writes "They came to our African city dumps and photographed children burning scrap — scrap that was thrown away after decades of use. Then they said our African businessmen and women had imported the junk recently, and dumped 80-90% of it. Our entrepreneurs have been arrested, and our internet cafes and hospitals denied IT equipment, and our citizens told to buy brand new devices which they cannot afford, or which — when made cheaply — fail at a higher rate than the quality used equipment. And the Environmentalist who use our children's images keep the money, and don't share a dime with Africa."
At the FTR Summit,Field Studies and Surveys from US International Trade Commission, Basel Convention Secretariat, IDC, MIT, Memorial University, ASU, etc. presented at the Summit consistently predicted that 85-90% of used electronics purchased by Africans will be reused for years before reaching the dump. African representatives claimed that USA and European reused equipment is less prone to returns than affordable (Chinese) new equipment." This damning quote from Jean Frederic Fahiri Somda of Burkina Faso, who opened the Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit, was not the first to defend Africans accused of creating "e-waste" dumps in European and USA media — an allegation that has recently resulted in the arrest of40 African export businesses in Europe, and allegations by EPA that Egyptian businesses who purchased CRT monitorsin the USA for $21 each intended to crudely recycle them. At the FTR Summit,Field Studies and Surveys from US International Trade Commission, Basel Convention Secretariat, IDC, MIT, Memorial University, ASU, etc. presented at the Summit consistently predicted that 85-90% of used electronics purchased by Africans will be reused for years before reaching the dump. African representatives claimed that USA and European reused equipment is less prone to returns than affordable (Chinese) new equipment."
None of the links goes anywhere unvetted or controversial, or to a self-blog. The key link is to live recordings of professional researchers. They all agree with Mr. Somda. The arrests of African used goods importers is a perverse outcome, a type of environmental malpractice, a defamation, an unintended consequence, or even an example of racial profiling gone absolutely wrong.
MORE PROOF YOU SHOULDN’T BLINDLY TRUST YOUR E-WASTE RECYCLER
is correct in its emphasis on the word "blindly"... don't blindly do anything. But Elizabeth Chamberlin also provides evidence that you shouldn't blindly trust EU Law, or Greenpeace and E-Stewards, either.
If you watch the Greenpeace slide show, you might think I'm saying you shouldn't trust your own eyes... ( I covered this 2009 Greenpeace "science with photos" with the post "WRONG, WRONG, WRONG..." )
Chamberlin trusts her eyes and is doing what she should be doing - looking at all sides of the ewaste-to-Africa debate. Now I'm gonna go Ozark Atticus Finch on her. Where is Greenpeace's interview of the accused? They have the African Tech there on camera, and say he told them it was not a working TV but they bought it anyway. What exactly does their methodology prove, and why didn't they ask the African they spoke to what the percentage of reuse was, and what his losses were on the bad units?
