Executed Recycling: Colorado Conviction

Claimed Chinks and Gooks were bad

While I'm still on the topic of Environmental Malpractice, let me make the comment that I've never defended the Colorado firm, Executive Recycling, which was nailed by CBS 60 Minutes.

It's called a "straw man" fallacy.  BAN accuses me of supporting a liar, in order to discredit my defense of the truthful person.  I never defended Richter, I did the opposite.  But I defended people buying the monitors that he didn't send, the ones BAN circled in Hong Kong.

What Brandon Richter of CBS Wasteland did was to claim that Chinese were filthy bad recyclers and that people who used his company would know that he didn't export their stuff to China.  He was on the BAN WAGON.  He advertised that he didn't export to China, and represented China as a primitive place.  He was found guilty of FRAUD.

4 Key E-Waste Tactics: Inference, Allegation, Indictment, Guilt?

Why should exports of used electronics be outlawed?  Let's look at the case Basel Action Network makes in its campaign to stop the used electronics trade.

The "watchdog" campaign to end USA's used electronics exports relies on inferences, allegations, indictments, and even proven guilt.  Which is which, and how concerned should environmentalists be?

1) Inference:  Poor children are found amid piles of e-scrap, and pollution is found amid piles of e-scrap.  The inference is that the e-scrap was imported, and that the pollution, the poverty, and associated risk to children will be reduced through prohibition.

- First, the water pollution in Guiyu comes largely from the textile mills in the area.  But some of the burning of copper and boards is certainly going to add to the pollution in the short term.  Did the material come directly off of a boat laden with imports?

Or was it material imported years ago?  Or was it recently imported, but a percentage of residue (e.g. 15%) of otherwise clean scrap or reuse product?  Or.. just perhaps.. does the fact China generates more "e-waste" than the USA have something to do with it?

And are the children helped more by prohibition or by investing in safer processes?  Is the problem manual disassembly, or fire?  I say fire is the problem and e-scrap can be recycled without fire, just as cotton can be picked without slaves.

BAN is good, really good, at inference.

ARSTechnica Reprints Discredited EWaste Propaganda?

ARSTechnica is a good blog for Geeks.  It was therefore a shock to see them feature a rehashed "E-Waste Export" diatribe, written by James Holloway of the Open University.

In his article, Toxic trade: why junk electronics should be big business, Holloway correctly identifies the importance of the rare earth metals, including gold, which are lost when used electronics are disposed of in the landfill.  Back in the 1990s, when I was Recycling Director for the Massachusetts DEP, I made much the same case.   The pollution, toxics, energy, and rain forest loss from mining reddish metals, from places like the OK Tedi Copper Mine on the isle of Papua New Guinea, represent a much deeper environmental priority than recycling green wine bottles and old packaging.


He quotes our friends at StEP in Europe (where I'm now typing) about the enormous waste represented by lost circuit boards, with the gold (and tantalum, and silver, and copper... I would add) if a computer is tossed into a burning pile of waste.

At current rates of production, $16 billion (or 320 tons) in gold and $5 billion (7500 tons) in silver are put into media tablets, smartphones, computers, and other devices annually. With growth in demand for smartphones and media tablets showing little sign of diminishing in the next few years, the flow of gold and silver from deposit to waste facilities is only likely to accelerate.

So far, a good chestnut on the importance of recycling and preserving rare earth metals.  But Mr. Halloway then twists the very study he highlights - a study I linked to here when WR3A / Fair Trade Recycling representatives were with StEP at the Pan-African Conference on E-Waste in Nairobi in March.


STEP and UNEP and WR3A all presented papers concluding that hand-disassembly was good.  Amazingly, most of the people at the conference in Africa agreed that geeks and recyclers prefer loads of used electronics from rich people to loads of used electronics collected from poor people.


The jobs represented by labor in Africa and China can be good jobs.  And hand-disassembly is a good process, according to the actual articles Mr. Halloway pretends to have read.  Rare earth metals (e.g. hard drive magnets) which are lost in European and USA shredders can find new lives in new hard drives when the drive is dismantled.  And the UNEP study showed that the reuse and repair jobs from used electronics imports into countries like Ghana represent 100-fold more jobs and employment than the "scrap boys" who dismantle used computers at Agbogloshie or Lagos dumps.


The negatives about waste shown by anti-export groups at those dumps, in study after study, is found to primarily originate from users in Africa... just as the "e-waste" in China mostly comes from Chinese consumers.   85% of the imported electronics, UNEP found, were reused and repaired in Ghana and Nigeria.  This put the 2009 "study" (rather an opinion piece) by Interpol in a new light.  The Interpol report, which Halloway cites, assumed that 80-90% of the used electronics purchased by Africans were burned in primitive conditions (accepting the Basel Action Network propaganda), and that primitive Africans stupidly burn CRT monitors rather than test them for reuse for, say, internet revolutions in African countries like Libya, Tunisia and Egypt.  


Halloway does the same thing as the Interpol author - using passive voice and a completely eroneous and discredited statistic - to build his case around.

" ..it has been widely reported that 90 percent of the USA's e-waste ends up in either China or Nigeria—a figure that appears to originate from an estimate made by Jim Puckett, Director of the Basel Action Network. "

The Interpol report found that Africans were the ones stationed in Europe, buying the used electronics.  And allow me to applaud with a hearty "DUH!"  Geeks of Color like Wahab in Ghana, Hamdy in Egypt, Souleymane in Senegal, and Miguel in Angola can't afford to pay thousands of dollars in shipping and customs duties to import computers for burning.  They either "fly and buy" (inspecting and hand-picking goods prior to export) or rely on Africans studying abroad to test the goods before they are shipped.  The Interpol report stunningly labelled these Africans as "organized crime".  The report stalled at Interpol and was not translated, it's now considered a TinTin era "white man's burden" paper, completely discredited by UNEP and other people who sat down and talked to the "geeks of color"... people Halloway didn't have time to meet before writing his rehash of covertly racist propaganda on ARsTechnica.

Happy Loving Day 2012: Right to Share Lives

This is a terrific website, set up to celebrate the outcome of the Loving Case of 1967.  I wrote about the Loving case on Valentine's day.

Don't have time to write much more about it today.   Mr. and Ms. Loving were a real couple who fought for their right to marry regardless of race.

This pertains to Fair Trade Recycling very simply.  The case made in defense of the Virginia law banning their marriage was based on statistics and fear.   They tried to justify the ban on interracial marriage with horrible anecdotes about all the things that can go wrong.

That is how the backers of HR2284 describe my trade with Las Chicas Bravas, refurbishers in southeast Asia, and geeks in Africa.   Because it might go wrong, I should be banned from doing business there.

So we ban Peace Corps volunteers from starting small businesses aimed at proper recycling, repair and refurbishment in the countries they lived in.  Perfect thinking.  It helps you to imagine the attitudes of the people, long passed away, who argued against women's suffrage, argued against voting by non-land-owners, who argued against popular democracy.

We are lucky to be arguing about fair trade recycling, at least from our side of the ocean.  The people being accused of being primitive idiots and having their containers of computers seized by dictators in Africa - not so much.  A ban on the export of used computers, as "e-waste", is based on what someone else is accused of doing, not what we are doing, and not even what most exporters are doing.  The right to share my life with people who repair and recycle computers in countries which need it is not something EPA or Congress or Vermont ANR should attempt to infringe on based on photos of black children taken at landfills.

HR 2284: Banning A-Waste and E-waste

Missing children, typical used car sale

It's a modest New Year's proposal.

The most toxic product Americans own in their lifetime is the automobile.

Filled with toxics, flammables, carcinogens, ewaste, inhalants and pollutants, and capable of violent safety violations, the cars have an agency, the Department of Motor Vehicles, to ensure proper stewardship, from cradle to grave.

Unfortunately, our government has let us down!

Stop the feeding of used antifreeze to poor kids

Automobiles don't last forever.  Americans like buying new automobiles.  Especially middle class and wealthy Americans.  We spend billions getting the latest new wheels.  But what happens with the old cars we discard?

Sadly, wealthy neighborhoods have a dirty little secret.  The used car dealerships and junk car lots are never found on Fifth Avenue.  Old, used cars are passed along to poor people, with all their toxics along for the ride.  Whenever you buy replace your old car, you are complicit in exploitation and environmental crime.

Watchdog groups indicate that eighty percent of used car sales go to people with less money than the people who bought new cars.  All the problems and headaches of the old car inevitably flow to people with less means to deal with the toxic tons of deadly waste.

Wait 15 Seconds, Walk 5 Meters

If you don't like the recycling you see in the non-OECD nations (about 6 billion people), look elsewhere.  "Elsewhere" within the non-OECD is an incredibly sophisticated, layered, textured market.  Wait fifteen seconds, walk five meters, and you will see something or someone completely different.

Cameroon has changed since I lived there in the 80s.   Douala (the port city and economic capital) has just been "wired" by high speed optic, as of December 12... Cameroun's first "smart city".

Aya Heroines Rising

Meanwhile, the level of suspicion raised by anti-export groups has risen to comic book proportions.  There is a huge campaign, backed by nanny-NGOs, planned obsolescence, and heavy shredding investors, dedicated to preserving decade old images of children in puddles of filth.  They want us all to believe there is no convergence, that 6 billion people are moving backward, away from the OECD.

If you actually work with the geeks and the techs, you see that the world is developing in positive ways, faster than believed  possible.  Yes, there are child soldiers, there are terrorists, there are Somali pirates, there is disease, and there is poverty.  But the tide is rising, not falling.  And the seed is the same as in Singapore and Japan - Geeks and Tinkerers, Fixers, and Techs.