A Modest Hypothesis: Did Guiyu and Agbogbloshie Make the River Cleaner?

A professor visiting China emailed me this morning and jokingly asked what he should look for in Guiyu or Wuhan in his spare time.

Sometimes a pithy email response makes the best blog fodder. My response:

You don't need to really go to Guiyu or Agbogbloshie if you have Google maps. Just find press coverage of Basel Action Network or Blacksmith Institute's toxic River sample. Then identify the river and find a site a few kilometers upstream and then Google search for contaminated water samples upstream.  

Based on that evidence, Guiyu and Agbogbloshie are making the river cleaner (though of course that is because the samples upstream were taken years earlier when it was even worse).

Science!!!

I'm referring of course to the Guiyu river samples from the largest textile factory hub on earth, upstream from Guiyu, whose water samples are nearly identical to the Bangladesh Lourajong River samples downstream from the Bangladesh second-largest textile manufacturing hub on earth.  Surprise, Guiyu's samples look the same as the river samples of the textile effluent samples upstream from Guiyu.  

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.

Oxpecker Bird 3: In My Opinion Continued from E-Scrap News

Continued From March

"Oxpecker" birds are the ones which eat mites and ticks off of large animals. They are a beneficial, synergistic species.

And this is what I'm comparing the "gray market" to.  These are not my own photos, but they were posted in a blog back in 2006, and they correctly show what I learned was going on in Guiyu.

The reuse of integrated component (IC) chips in Chinese toys and lower end electronics was, at the time, still referred to as grey or gray market. It's possible that some of them were mislabeled as brand new Samsung, Intel, Qualcom, or Cisco chips. But they are not "counterfeit", any more than a used auto part is "counterfeit".

The "80%" dumping estimate was wildly wrong. And I saw more downdraft tables (for protecting workers from inhaling solder) than I ever saw "acid baths".

I did previously publish these photos with permission of the blogger, over ten years ago... but I hesitate to name the blogger now out of concern Big Tech, Planned Obsolescence, Big Shred, and Charitable Industrial Complex might "go after" her/him/them, the way BAN targeted my partners and clients with MIT planted chips back in 2015. MIT still owes me an apology, but I have given up trying to communicate with Sensable City Lab.

5. How Too Quietly Big EWaste Lies Buried: Top Five E-Waste Lies Mapped

Let's ReMap the Five Biggest E-Waste Lies (before the April Fool's Blog traditionally comes out).  In Part Five, let's look at five geographic places the bodies of the truth were buried underneath a pile of false narratives and bogus "E-waste Export" claims. If you are doing a thesis or term paper on electronics recycling this semester, take the blue pill and see how normal ordinary places were sensationalized with poverty narratives despite prima facia evidence that the story was bogus.

We can forgive reporters and news producers like Solly Granatstein (CBS 60 Minutes) at the proximate time that they report. We can roll our eyes at well-meaning do-gooders who react to false claims with alarm, out of a sense of liability. 

But I question why so few reporters do as Ira Glass did following his sharing of Mike Daisy's Foxconn exaggerations and lies. This American Life is alone in re-tracing its steps, and learning that activists and environmentalists are not immune from biased reporting, sensationalism, and creating bricks that build the House of Big Lies.

The Big Lies are about PLACES visible on Google Earth. Please, I need some unprejudiced university student help to link and map these, and I can provide the photos.

1.Guiyu.

2. Foshan

3. Basel

4. Accra

5. Hong Kong

Punjab / Faisalabad is the Sixth Man... Penang, Malaysia gets honorary mention.

Free Online Slide Presentation By "Secondhand" Author Adam Minter (Courtesy Massachusetts DEP)

Massachusetts DEP held a second Reuse & Reduce Workshop online this month. Dozens of state and local and institutional recycling officials were invited to watch a 40 minute presentation by Adam Minter, author of Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale.

The 45 minute presentation is now posted online, no charge. It's one of his best, thanks in large part to Star Wars references* on repair in other galaxies. But it's special to me for his nods to Chendiba Enterprises, Good Point Recycling, and WR3A.

Adam starts out by telling the truth about Guiyu, China (predicted here in our 2008 ("Big Secret Factories"), 2009 and 2010 critique of CBS 60 Minutes "Wasteland"), and 2011 blog tipping the hat to TechTravels (which showed the chip reuse I was shown in 2005's trip to Asia with Craig Lorch).

He ends by telling the truth about Accra's slum and scrapyard, Abogbloshie, in Ghana. And the third party interviews and experts he relies on are Chinese and African. And the math adds up, it does not completely fail prima facia the way Greenpeace and BAN.org's "80%" math did.

Adam Minter's photo of technician repairing a screen in an Accra importers repair shop. #righttorepair

Racketeering and Certification 4: "Framing" the Export Market

In the first blog in this series on Racketeering and Certification, we looked at actual problems in Africa (assassination of a journalist who reported on Racketeering). We then looked at the monetization of a so-called "charity" which claims to similarly expose problems -- for cash.  Pay for #EarthEye / "EarthEye"  and they will track your competitors, Pay for E-Steward Certification and get advance information about the same trackers. We looked at the charity's practice of sabotaging used devices (creating a problem) in order to gin up sales from paying clients (including commission-based profits, normally disqualifying for 501-c(3) "charities").

In part 4, let's look closer how this tracking works.  Do Basel Action Network's services cross the line from "watchdog" and become simple extortion, or racketeering? Is the problem they purport to solve one of their own making?

Jim Puckett "Frames" Africa

If a single computer monitor from this African Tech Sector shop went to Agbogbloshie days after Jim Puckett photographed it, we will bet it is the very one that Jim sabotaged. How more cringy can this "charity" get while "framing" the story?

Reversing ER#3: J-School Background Checks on E-Waste - Benson Released, Rowe Fired?

Here's an interesting statistic on "e-waste" (like most, made up on the spot).  Four out of five journalists who contact me beforehand decide not to run the story on "e-waste" at all.

Reporters are initially attracted to the Basel Action Network's press release or photo opportunity (exotic brown child perched on familiar looking old electronics).  That BAN press release has, for 15 years, triggered interest in reporters and college researchers. An easy story to write, as BAN served "facts" up on a platter.

But Jim Puckett is no Upton Sinclair. He wrote about Agbogbloshie in chilling text - before admitting to me he had never been there at all. He had never even read a peer reviewed article.

The "ewastehoax" says junk in cities across the globe is the fault of "sham recyclers"... if only we use a USA recycling company that pays dividends to Jim Puckett, we will quickly clean these places up.

The Ewastehoax promises a moral lesson of "environmental injustice", and triggers three Steven Pinker-esque cognitive biases:

1. Nurture. We actually care about the poor child.
2. Greed. We suspect someone else's actions were driven by it.
3. Fear.  We are afraid of our own liability for our "stuff".

It's an easy recipe.  BAN isn't the only organization to use it. Annie Leonard, Blacksmith Institute, StEP, R2 (SERI), E-Stewards, CBS 60 Minutes, The Guardian, etc. all followed the trail on these instincts.

If you are a good photographer, that is all you need to put some guy like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson of BJ Electronics behind prison bars.  You can be the reporter that made him sell his house, that cost him his business and his retirement.

You are so cool.  You no doubt picked up all kinds of dates interested in your brave reporting.  Did you tell them about Joe Benson, the Nigerian TV repairman who shipped a TV with a GPS tracker to Ghana? Did you describe the satisfaction of Benson going to jail, like Raphael Rowe of BBC's Panorama did?

Oh, wait.  News flash.  Raphael Rowe got fired? (According to this article, "Pushed Out", but there's still some uncertainty as I research this, he's still on BBC 2 local).  And Interpol has pulled the plug on Project Eden.  All since Fair Trade Recycling's 2015 trip to Agbogbloshie, where we saw a city slum near a dump full of tires, cars, and junk appliances - all once owned by Africans, from a thriving city of millions of consumers.  Even the dozens (not thousands) of (adult) orphans there all carry cell phones, and can send photos of where they collected the scrap... at Accra homes and businesses, which had millions of TVs in the mid 1990s.

Benson may have the last laugh on Raphael Rowe. Though he has suffered, journalism students once attracted to "environmental justice" stories are increasingly documenting "environmental malpractice", "friendly fire", and "collateral damage" to Africa's Tech Sector.

Whether or not Raphael Rowe stays on at BBC, he's still know for having been racially profiled.  As will be Joseph "Hurricane" Benson.  As Rowe said in an interview "bitterness never leaves you".

2017 Theme: Questions From Grad and Undergrad Students

Here's an idea for 2017.  Through the FairTradeRecycling.org web address, we receive research questions and internship applications from undergraduate and grad students around the globe.  This year, I'm going to publish some of those questions, with my answers (or external experts) in the blog. I'll be the Dear Abby or Miss Manners of E-Waste.

If you have a research question about recycling or waste or export for repair, send it here.


It reminds me of my Carleton College (MN) internship at the United Nations in Geneva in 1983.  I was a long-haired activist and agent of conscience who was promoting the 1970s "Nestle Boycott" over infant formula sales [NYT 1981].  I'd circulated a petition at the college to keep Nestle brand candy bars out of Carleton vending machines, etc.  In Geneva, I had the chance to meet with the head of INFORM the Boycott NGO, with the US representative of the WHO, and the Vice President of Nestle, Geoffrey Foochs.  A lot of what I learned that summer put a permanent spin on my career.  A lot of that summer appears in this blog.

The misuse and aggressive marketing of infant formula was indeed a horrible period.  I won't go into the pictures of malnourished babies, contaminated water, "samples" which lasted long enough for a mother's breasts to dry out (leaving her bound to the bottle)... this was clearly a heroic battle in the early 1970s.  But in 1983, there was as clearly an "industry" around the "boycott" and the main product being traded was ego gratification among long haired liberal arts students.

A year later I was teaching in Adamawa Province in Cameroon and I brought in Nestle powdered milk for a lesson.  I'd drawn a nice cartoon of a mother breast feeding and asked the class which was better.

A slight majority raised their hands and said the powdered milk was better.  All boys.

Then something rare occurred - the few young women in the class were adamant.  Standing.  Raising their voices and pointing their fingers menacingly at the ceiling, as if testifying before God.

No, they cried.  Breast is best!  All of the girls knew better, and were - uncharacteristically - LOUD about it!

5 Bells: Blogger Declares "E-Waste Hoax is Dead"

Shaba Kahamba, the Artist formerly known as Prince, and the E-Waste Hoax are dead.*

The second of the list, Prince, the incredibly famous purple dancer, was found passed out in an elevator, and declared dead at age 57.  Shaba Kahamba, the Congolese Soukous bassist legend, died peacefully in retirement in the Netherlands on Tuesday... in somewhat undeserved obscurity.   And the E-Waste Hoax will be remembered only by its silence.  There is no "correction" forthcoming from BBC, Economist, NYT, NPR, etc.  But I predict no further national or international coverage of any "e-Waste" emergency this Earth Day, one year after the news "jumped the shark" in declaring a small scrap metal pile in Western Africa to be the largest E-Waste Dump on Earth.

After a decade of NGO hype, what makes me think that "ewastegate" is over?  And not with a clang, but a whimper?

There may be some residual stories about "e-waste exports" cropping about here and there, but mostly they are coming from rank amateurs like Kevin McElvaney, people in their 20s with a camera. But the source of the hoax statistics is running out of funding, and not a decade too soon.

*homage to "the Oxford Comma"... Shaba K and TAFKAP are two different people.

Breaking News! UK Sentences Nigerian-born Exporter to Prison!

After a cacophony of alarm bells in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, Basel Action Network and Greenpeace have finally achieved what they wanted.

A TV repair man is going to jail for buying something reuseable which someone else wanted, who could not otherwise afford new.

Hoax 1, Africa 0

There has been one environmental activist who has been trying to keep "illegal exports of e-waste" in the news.  They earn money by certifying Recyclers don't illegally export.  But they've rarely been able to show enforcement, and bemoan our inattention to "ewaste exports".

Yesterday they got their Big News.  OMG.  An African is finally going to UK jail for "e-waste" wastecrime.

Joseph "Joe" Benson (black) of BJ Electronics was accused by Cahal Milmo (white) of #wastecrime. Lord Chris Smith, the UK's Environmental Director, vowed to stop England's illegal dumping on the shores of Nigeria and Ghana.  And they put a TV repairman, with about 90% working product, in prison to make him an example to others willing to trade or donate used goods to Africa.

After 4 years and untold dollars, Joseph Benson said uncle.  He will start a sentence of 16 months.

Who is "Joe Benson"?  In February, this blog was the main source of information about the trial and appeals of "Hurricane" Joseph Benson of BK Electronics.   Benson, a Nigerian-born television repairman, was profiled by UK journalist Cahal Milmo as an "e-waste exporter".  In a sting set up by Greenpeace, covered The Independent's Cahal Milmo, BBC, and The Guardian newspaper, Benson's crew reportedly accepted a sabotaged CRT television in 2010.

Just learned that Benson sentence was reduced from 24 to 16 months in prison today.

So who pointed the finger at Joe Benson?   It started in 2005, with the publication by Basel Action Network of its paper, "The Digital Dump:  Exporting Reuse and Abuse to Africa".   BBC covered the paper in 2006.

In customs documents, the computers are described as being "shipped for re-use."

But Jim Puckett of environmental NGO the Basel Action Network says that in practice, dubious exporters exploit the re-use category to increases their profits and offload their environmental responsibilities. 

"Unscrupulous exporters from the North are intentionally mixing bad with good so that they are able to avoid disposal costs," he says. 

"Usually when you bring a computer to a recycler, you pay a fee. But brokers will take this fee, and instead of recycling will mix in some good equipment and trade it... exporters say it is working equipment to help the poor to bridge the digital divide, but what we've observed is not bridging the digital divide but the creation of a digital dump." 

In fact, it is several dumps, spread around the city. Lagos has no computer recycling facilities itself, and so the waste computers build up in huge piles.

On these dumps children scavenge for the contents - they can earn around US $2 a day by collecting components - but are also putting their health seriously at risk.

Bullyboys 8: Bright African Lights, Big African City

"They shouldn't have to make that choice."  This was the NGO leader's answer to CBS Reporter (now anchor) Scott Pelley in 2008, when Pelley asked whether the scrap pickers in Guiyu had another job to go to.

Johnny Be Goode Enough.

Perhaps they did have another choice.  Picking cabbage. Agriculture is an honorable job.  A dangerous job, a job with insecticides, moving blades, and risk of death.  But many of the Africans in TV repair could, if they wanted, have stayed in the rural sahel, Savannah or forests.

Just don't kid yourself, it's not "back to Eden."
MRO - Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul - if taken off the table - leaves worse choices.

This is the eighth blog about the decision to scrimmage environmental enforcement agents to arrest "e-waste #wastecrime criminals".   I've focused on Joe Benson, because his was the case Jim Puckett put on display at a conference last November, showing off news coverage by UK Independent reporter Cahil Milmo.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?

Last November, at that "E-waste Summit" in Las Vegas, I had a face to face with Jim Puckett and Mike Enberg of BAN and E-Stewards, which I wrote about in the "Environmental Malpractice" series.  That series of blogs centered around the Interpol crackdown (which we were documenting before Interpol's press release).   Jim and Mike are really nice people with good hearts, and I wanted to try to just ask them why they wouldn't be concerned about a man like Joe Benson, who Jim had just run down in his Powerpoint (without recognize the man's name... You've been reporting his arrest for years, trumpeting it in your 2009 Annual Report, pairing the news with Pieter Hugo photos... and don't know his name...)

He never ever learned to read and write so well, but he could [fix a TV] just like ringing a bell.

"Collateral Damage?"  Did Jim actually say those words?  I swear he did.  He said he felt bad for any individual caught violating international law, as a person.   But the law must be enforced.  If we can arrest a TV repairman, who can't we arrest for #wastecrime?  Metal sorters? Cabbage fertilizers?  Fair Trade Cotton farmers?  Cabbage dealers?  For most of the people in the developing and emerging markets, the bottom line is that Europe is a lot like Africa.   Badges and handcuffs and financial fines are the tools of bullyboys.  No habeus corpus, no Basel law broken, just a presumption of "primitive", based on what?

Ask Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird while Chuck Berry was in prison, convicted under the Mann Act, a border-crossing crime, like Joe Jackson (the boxer).  It has been a few years, Benson seems ripe for a cross-border crime.

FIREHOSE: New York Times Opinion Page (Leyla Acaroglu)

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".

http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-1/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-2/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-3/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-4/

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

Term Paper II: "e-Waste" Export, Geography of Environmental Justice

Yesterday's thesis about the relationship between land value, environmental enforcement, and pollution, used a map from http://scorecard.goodguide.com/env-releases/land/,  showing toxic release sites on a map of the USA, and a chart from the same website showing the relative amount of toxics generated in specific localities.  When the releases are charted as "an occurance" and each release is given a single data point, the map shows the "superfund sites" to be concentrated in urban areas.

The sites, when weighted by actual tons of pollutions, are 83.75% in the top 20 / 100 sites (suggesting the 80/20 rule or Paretto Principle may apply).  The top 10 sites are in Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Missouri (Doe Run area), and Orange Florida.  Each of these sites has a "drilldown" function for data at Scorecard.Goodguide.com  Orange County Florida, the one non-western, non-mining area on the top ten list, has a NASA, USA Department of Defense, WR Grace, Dupont, Department of Energy, Chevron industry, etc. on its list of "potentially responsible parties" for lagoon pollution.  The nine sites above it are raw material extraction industry sites, none of which, my thesis states, could function economically inside a high-property value area.

1.	NORTHWEST ARCTIC, AK	481,382,100
2.	HUMBOLDT, NV	350,591,683
3.	PINAL, AZ	248,792,746
4.	SALT LAKE, UT	138,824,328
5.	ELKO, NV	83,494,740
6.	GILA, AZ	57,220,938
7.	EUREKA, NV	43,572,135
8.	OWYHEE, ID	28,887,324
9.	REYNOLDS, MO	27,313,480
10.	ORANGE, FL	24,032,977

The enforcement and likelihood that a site is identified as a threat is proportionate to its proximity to a landholder complaining about it.  For this reason, the "superfund" target sites on the USA map above are concentrated around cities and population centers.  This "NIMBY" or "Not In My Back Yard" dynamic is part of a normal democracy.  The spotlight on "environmental justice" in the USA focused on the difference the likelihood of enforcement correlated to race of neighborhoods;  that's an overlyer, according to my thesis, for economics and property values.  As I pointed out in one of the Slums Blogs last spring, 5th Avenue in Manhattan had auto repair shops a hundred years ago... but these relocated to Queens because it's easier to do repair work on an area with lower property value.

The Diagram Below generalizes the relationship between property value, wealth, and awareness of pollution. People live in rural villages, forests, and plains, but their population density is lower, and enforcement of all types is less likely in these areas.

The difficulty or unlikelihood of an enforcement paradigm outside of a population center is why emerging market city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore are more likely to achieve OECD-like status sooner than an emerging market like Malaysia or Indonesia or Brazil... the most recent nations admitted entry into OECD have been small.   Large nations admitted to OECD tend to have gained entrance early on, because of their econmic power (like the USA).  The USA was admitted into OECD while the pollution in Orange County was occuring, but as one of the "founders" of the OECD, the USA benefitted from a simpler formula - wealthy and white.  Not even Japan was not on the first OECD list.

Term Paper on "e-Waste" Export and Geography of Environmental Justice

Thesis:   Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head... And wrote a thesis chapter in one sitting.

Regulatory burdens are primarily driven by property value.   People are mobile, but their investment in property is a non-liquid asset, and they will pay a lot to keep it from being polluted.  If it's federal land out west, or a jungle island like Borneo - not so much.    Borneo has more species and more "environment" to spoil, but the property values there make it easier to mine than a richer vein of ore on Long Island.

As wealthy neighborhoods have resources to worry about smaller and smaller cognitive risks, compliance with risk (e.g. toxics in air or wipe tests, employee safety standards) become more expensive in wealthy jurisdictions.  This provides incentives for markets to outsource, or purchase from, areas with lower property values and less regulatory oversight.

This phenomenon has been examined through a lens of "environmental justice" for two decades.  Groups of people who tend to live in less affluent neighborhoods tend to be less critical of local employers who tolerate these risks.  Whether the "disproportionate enforcement" of standards is based on race, income, or real estate value, it coincides with the opinions of neighbors.

In environmental risk, the "worst neighbors" are the industries with the highest toxics and workplace hazards. These are know to be metal mining.  Virgin ore extraction is strongly correlated with releases of mercury and lead.   The number one source of mercury in the USA is gold mining;  number two is silver mining.  The more valuable an end product, the higher the tolerance for pollution, but the farther the activity occurs from high property values.

During the past 50 years, this dynamic has led to the "most polluted places on earth" being located in the least accessible, lowest property values on earth.  Property value is known to be correlated with demand for the property, and remote property has less demand.

Kabwe Zambia has been named the most polluted place on earth (Time Magazine).

La Oroya, Peru is definitely in the running. (NY Times)

Even within the confines of the USA, the most toxic industries are found in the most remote places, usually on federally owned land (a private landowner is less likely to tolerate pollution than the public landowner).  Of the top ten most areas with the most toxic releases, the first eight are in remote areas.. and (according to Scorecard.goodguide.com TRI reports), the states with the most land covered by the General Mining Act of 1872 have the most toxic releases.

1.	NORTHWEST ARCTIC, AK	481,382,100
2.	HUMBOLDT, NV	350,591,683
3.	PINAL, AZ	248,792,746
4.	SALT LAKE, UT	138,824,328
5.	ELKO, NV	83,494,740
6.	GILA, AZ	57,220,938
7.	EUREKA, NV	43,572,135
8.	OWYHEE, ID	28,887,324
9.	REYNOLDS, MO	27,313,480
10.	ORANGE, FL	24,032,977

Calculated as a percent, the Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) appears to apply.  The top twenty sites on the list of 100 are 83.75% of the total toxics:  The top 4 sites of the top 20 represent 73% of toxics.


Total Toxics Emitted (Top 10) 1,484,112,451

All Top 100 1,991,863,954
Top 10 of 100 74.51%
Top 4 of Top 20 73.11%
Top 20 of 100 83.75%


Yet spending on "Superfund Enforcement" is not correlated with the toxics... it's correlated to property value and population.  One has to wonder how many sites on federal lands haven't even been sampled... if a pound of mercury drops in the forest, and no regulator is there to detect it, it still makes pollution.



This data is USA only, but the trend (in my thesis) is that the more environmentally damaging or toxic a process (e.g. gold or silver mining), the further the extraction will be placed from property values and populations.   Property value correlates with population up to a certain point (Manhattan Apartment) and then declines (ghettos and slums) because the more income people have, the more personal space they can afford.

Fast income growth would be associated with increasing property values.

In this thesis, the "good enough market" will be a rapidly emerging city, with electricity and potential wifi (like 1990s Guangzhou and Lima Peru, Cairo and Jakarta in the 2000s).  There is a labor force here, but the percentage of that labor force engaged in scrap wouldn't account for the fact that nothing "e-waste" is being shipped to rural areas even lower on the evolutionary scale;  for that matter, the presence of e-waste in concentrations at Guiyu or Agbogbloshie (with proximity to Shenzhen or Accra, cities growing at a faster than average pace for their continents), and the absence of a proportionally similar concentration of E-waste in even poorer cities like Mogadishu or Port-au-Prince, would be best explained by the growth and value added and not by the economics of externalization of pollution.

Haiti is closer and poorer than Accra or Kuala Lumpur, but the prices offered for e-scrap are much higher in cities (see Alibaba or Recycle.net) which are growing.

This establishes a reverse normal curve.  The demand for "used goods" and "cheap displays" like CRT monitors is very low in Manhattan, rises in middle income markets earning $3000 per year, and then drops precipitously again in very poor cities.    Mining, in comparison, grows in direct proportion to poverty, the lower the income level and property values, the greater the potential investments in raw material extraction.  You find coltan mining and gold mining investments in jungles.  A single mine like the OK Tedi Copper Mine, in a single day, dwarfs the toxics created by all the aqua regia and wire burning in all the cities of the world for a year.  If you want to find cataclysmic environmental damage, look in the opposite direction of recycling and repair.

According to my thesis, it is therefore the perception of "waste" formed by rich cities in areas with high environmental enforcement (driven by property value) which has been projected onto middle income cities which are actually buying used goods for "good enough" purposes.  It is true that the middle income cities have lower wage and environmental standards than the rich cities, but the correlation is exaggerated if you can't replicate the business in an even poorer city.  This is an example of "cognitive risk" which is marketed to by corporate interests in planned obsolescence, anti-gray markets, and competition from contract manufacturers scaling into good enough market economies.

It is the relative inexperience in rich nations with extreme forms of poverty which cause us to conflate "good enough markets" with images of suffering.   We create artificial groupings like "non-OECD" which basically mean "not as rich as us".   It's like creating a term "not forest" to describe everything that is not a forest, grouping deserts, meadows, swamps, and tundra together into a single term.

There are many types of snow.

End of Part 1.

History and Future: Reuse of Chips Without Fire

Readers may recall that a journalist confirmed one of my theses about Guiyu, China.  There had to be something else going on besides "aqua regia" (using acid to recover gold), or it would not be financially viable for Guiyu to import PCs.  Sure enough, similar to the cell phone chip reuse documented at TechTravels, there was chip harvesting and reuse going on.  That's a huge savings compared to mining.

The river in Guiyu is polluted from textile dying mills in the area, but we don't want to understate the pollution coming from circuit board residuals.   It can be pretty nasty.

You could almost make the case that Guiyu is internalizing the pollution that is being diverted from the mining communities, i.e. make the case for Chinese altruism. But can fair trade recycling find a way to incentivize Guiyu to maintain chip harvesting and reuse without shouldering the pollution of the residuals?

Circuits that come apart in water may allow the chips to be reused more safely.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), along with partners In2Tec Ltd (UK) and Gwent Electronic Materials Ltd, have developed a printed circuit board (PCB) whose components can be easily separated by immersion in hot water. The work was part of the ReUSE project, funded by the UK government's Technology Strategy Board.

Recyclable electronics: just add hot water

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), along with partners In2Tec Ltd (UK) and Gwent Electronic Materials Ltd, have developed a printed circuit board (PCB) whose components can be easily separated by immersion in hot water. The work was part of the ReUSE project, funded by the UK government's Technology Strategy Board.

Recycling this printed circuit board is as easy as
making a cup of tea - simply add hot water, and
the bonding material dissolves away leaving you
with 90% of your components to re-use as you wish

The Challenge

The electronics industry has a waste problem - currently over 100 million electronic units are discarded annually in the UK alone, making it one of the fastest growing waste streams.

It was estimated in a DTI-funded report, that around 85% of all PCB scrap board waste goes to landfill. Around 70% of this being of non-metallic content with little opportunity for recycling. This amounts to around 1 million tonnes in the UK annually equivalent to 81 x HMS Belfasts.

The Solution

The aim of the ReUSE (Reuseable, Unzippable, Sustainable Electronics) project was to increase the recyclability of electronic assemblies, in order to avoid an ever-growing volume of waste.

The project partners designed, developed and tested a series of unzippable polymeric layers which, while withstanding prolonged thermal cycling and damp heat stressing, allow the assemblies to be easily separated at end-of-life into their constituent parts, after immersion in hot water.

Does the Sun Orbit Our Compassion?

Guiyu, China is a polluted place.  Part of it is polluted by the textile industry.  But these burn-houses for circuit boards are real, and no one is saying they are good.  Not much "e-waste" recycling is done by the river, there is no CRT business in Guiyu, and the sophistication of the chip sorting and reuse business really deserves more credit.   But there is pollution there, enough pollution for children to have high levels of lead in their blood samples.  Without question, we can see it.  Guiyu deserves our help.

My fair trade recycling campaign is not about making excuses for the sale of circuit boards to places like Guiyu.  What we propose is that trade can be used as a lever to incentivize reforms.   Just as we lowered the price of SKD monitors sold to Malaysia in return for ISO14001 certification and glass-to-glass recycling of residuals, we believe that Guiyu's economics can be used to negotiate improvements to the standards for children.  This is a math problem.

My African Neighbors, 1985

Agbogbloshie, Ghana is really the same story.   There's no denying that its sad to see a kid busting a CRT tube with a rock.  I'm not sure why someone does that... there's not much inside a CRT tube but a metal shadow mask.  But I've seen it on film, and even if the TV was  used in Ghana for years, I'm not heartless.  Lead in children's blood bothers me a lot.

My fair trade recycling campaign is not intended to make excuses to send "toxics along for the ride" to Ghana or Nigeria.   It's intended to reform the trade, so that people keep their jobs, their repair jobs, their reuse jobs - even their recycling jobs, if we eliminate the burning. But most of all, it's about observing the constellation of the recycling trade more closely, listening, doing Q-sort, and not selling the conclusion that the sun orbits the earth.

Debate, Dialectic, Diablog: IPhone #ewaste Graphic Misleads

Diablogs and Wiki-Greeks

A couple of weeks ago, I was sent a new set of graphics, in the spirit of "Story of Stuff", by umm... students? activists? artists?... seeking to raise awareness about the IPhone.   A woman named J.Rhee sent me an advance copy and asked for my comments.   I sent her some, in the spirit of cooperation, but did not hear back.  

Elizabeth Chamberlin of IFIXIT (soon to take away the crown for the "Best Scrap Blogger in the World"*) has written about the Apple-criticism piece, and does a good job of examining the case against Apple without taking it hook, line and sinker.

The Anti-IPhone-graphic-activists display a lot of talent, sincere passion, and make some very valid points.  They asked my opinion rather nicely, and I'm always looking for mature, grown-up conversations with environmentalists.  But I'm disappointed not to have heard back from the authors of the piece.  Below is a snippet of the dialogue, followed by my response and comments.

Hi Robin,Thanks for getting back to me. The graphic I was referring to lives here: http://www.mbaonline.com/cost-of-iphone/  Let me know what you think. I’d love to get your thoughts, and feel free to use it as you’d like!Thanks again, Jen

Hi Jen,

I really like the lifecycle focus on mining, coltan, etc.   I lived in Africa and was in Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo for awhile.   The natural resources harvesting business has been a curse. The Worlds Most Polluted Places (TIME) are metal mines, not recycling yards.

With that said, I think your graphic is pretty unfair to Terry Gou and Foxconn (Han Hoi Precision)...  The Taiwanese "Geeks of Color" like Gou and Simon Lin (Wistron) and Rowell Yang (Proview) have been "racially profiled" by the left in the USA, I think.  All three of those guys began as a "tinkerer" importing and repairing used electronics, then became a contract manufacturer (like Foxconn is for ... um... everyone not just Apple).  They have done a pretty good job of learning 100 years of industrial revolution lessons in a decade.

Foxconn is owned by the Taiwanese, managed by Hong Kong, employs labor from Cantonese Guangdong, and is regulated by Mandarin Beijing.   It's pretty remarkable.  The suicide rate is below that of similar scale operations (yes including the USA), when you have 1.1 million employees living in campuses the size of cities, you see rapes, robberies, and suicides at the same rate as you'd see in Detroit. 

Finally, the piece about Guiyu is completely inaccurate.   There are no Iphones in Guiyu.  Guiyu is almost all scrap generated in China.  Shenzhen, Guanzhou and Hong Kong have basically grown into one metropolis which has the population of JAPAN, and Guiyu is the scrapyard.

If you want to know what happens to Iphones which wind up in China, check out this blog.  http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-1/  Visit all 4 pages on the cell phone recycling in China.

I'm a socially conscious environmentalist.  In my opinion, we don't do ourselves any favors with racist depictions of the Geeks of Color.  It is a major embarrassment to the environmental community to have launched this "green scare" campaign against geeks and techs overseas.  I urge you to imagine how you would feel if you were Mowgli... when sex worker, coltan mining, child soldiering is 30% of your job market, and you learn to fix a cell phone, creating affordable connections for people in your emerging market,  or putting CRTs into internet cafes that become the center of Revolution 2.0, when you are recycling rather than mining, and green Americans portray you as some kind of a primitive, polluting, sorry, toxic victim.

Again, bravo on the first half of your piece.  But if I post it on the blog as is, I'm going to make some of the points I made above.  If you are interested in really conveying the truth, I'll spend as much time with you as you want.

If you want to see the piece we are both commenting on, find it via Elizabeth's blog... I don't really want to raise its pagerank if they are sending it out "looking for comments" but don't respond to the comments.  An MBA is supposed to be a masters degree program, and work is supposed to be subject to peer review, response and debate...