Bad Statistics: The Jumping Off Point for E-Waste

Well, since EPA and Basel Secretariat won't defend themselves from the bully in Seattle, it seems to fall on me to defend sanity.   Should poor people be allowed to accept donations from, and do business, with well meaning rich people?   My answer is yes.   HR2284 says no, and makes that opinion law.

Using Halloway (post yesterday) as a jumping off point, let's look at all the assumptions for the case banning trade in used electronics between rich nations and poor.

They keep saying 80-90% of electronics exported are burned in horrific condtions.

" ..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. "

It has been widely reported, indeed.   The figure "appears to originate" from Basel Action Network.  Basel Action Network credits the statistic from a 2002 interview they did with my buddy Mike at DMC.   My buddy Mike says, via this blog, that he was including ALL exports - clean baled steel, demanufactured copper, aluminum, plastic - everything that comes out of electronics.  And he meant exports to Europe (printed circuit boards) as well.

The actual studies with actual data show an imperfect but rational marketplace.  85% of used electronics imported into Africa are working or repaired.  The other statistic is that MOST Africans can only afford a used device - for now.  China has a plan to change that.


African business people can't afford to pay $10 to ship an item worth $3.52 in scrap.   BAN says that a good unit would pay for the transport of the bad units... but that's only if the African Geek is willing to donate his share of the profits to disposing YOUR junk.  Meaning he would have to charge you, or lose his money.  The more rational step is for the African to be very careful about picking and choosing items he can repair and reuse.


- The goods from the USA are mostly good.
- The bads at the dump are mostly generated over there (after decades of reuse).
- The mostly good were mostly purchased at thrift and second hand shops in the USA/EU
- China and other rapidly-ermerging nations are a new source of cheap and "gently used" goods


The question for China and USA is, how do we make money selling into this market?  Do we resell our used cars and electronics for their best value, giving us an incentive to take care of them?  Or do we just withdraw, to keep our consciences shiny and our Goodwills and Salvation Armies beyond the reproach of export markets?  Because THAT's where the Africans (and Haitians, and South Americans) buy from, the used goods marketplaces in USA and Europe.  And the number of "rich" people (used goods owners) doubles each year - and they are cropping up everywhere.


Salvation Army and Goodwill have competition.  Not just from for-profits like Savers and eBay.  The used goods market is growing as the world economy grows.   New consumers are created as wifi and electric cable wrangles its way into the slums, and as slumdogs become middle class, they generate their own used display devices, laptops, and cell phones.  The cup of used goods runneth over.  But the solution is not to ban the poorest from getting the leftovers.

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.