Environmental Malpractice, Part III: Facing Collateral Damages

Born in:   Mexico, Mexico, USA, Palestine, USA, Taiwan, USA, Malaysia

This is the third part of a blog I wrote after a very busy week.  We gave the opening tour of the Fair Trade Recycling Research Grant at Retworks de Mexico (see our FTR Facebook Group), presented at ICRS, met with students from Net Impact, and I flew to present at the E-Waste Summit in Vegas -- where I came face to face with Jim Puckett and Mike Enberg of BAN/E-Stewards.

When I met with BAN... Kissinger-China?  Not really.  I used to work very closely with Jim and Sarah at BAN.  In Vegas, Jim made polite and peaceful references during his presentation, alluding to my help bringing them to showcase the worst practices in Africa.

HR2284 View of the World

When Basel Action Network talks about the "worst practices" in Africa, they aren't talking about the Kabwe lead mine (perhaps the most polluted place on earth).   When they describe horrible environmental practices in Indonesia, they aren't talking about the tin mining in the coral islands (focus of today's Guardian newspaper).

BAN did refer to cases covered by the Guardian newspaper in 2009... the arrest of Joseph Benson.  Benson was exporting used televisions to Nigeria for reuse or repair.  Someone at Greenpeace told Benson a TV was working, but rigged it to fail, and then did a bit of "waste tourism" to follow the TV to Lagos.  

British investigators have arrested 12 people this year in swoops on suspected illegal exporters after inquiries by The Independent found that waste electronic and electrical equipment (Weee), much of which is deposited by householders at municipal dumps, was being bought by middlemen and sent abroad rather than being safely recycled in the UK.

The problem is, that when Basel Convention (the real international body, not the small Seattle NGO) investigated the exports to Nigeria and Ghana, they found 85% of the goods were reused, and most of the "e-waste" filmed at the dumps was generated by Africans, in use for years, and traded in for newer used equipment.  The twelve people arrested were innocent.  But Puckett was still waving the 2009 article in his presentation, and referencing the infamous Interpol report which called African used electronics dealers "organized crime".

I spoke to Jim after his presentation about his use of Joseph Benson (and I do mean "used" him), the PT Imtech refurbishing factory in Indonesia (another scam, false report sent to Indonesia officials saying their imported CRTs were "hazardous waste" when they were for refurbishing at contract manufacturer), and the seizure of "e-waste computers" in Cairo in 2008 - which were all fully functional, tested working, Pentium 4s.

His description:  collateral damage.

I'm offering Jim a chance to make good on what he calls "collateral damage" in the war on e-waste exports.  These are three cases of high skilled techical repair teams, who buy stuff from rich people because it's nicer than buying stuff from poor people.  That isn't "exploitation", it's the most basic simple principle in the secondary market.  Goodwill and Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul stores don't collect from poor people to give to other poor people.   Jim's response to me in Vegas, "let the technicians repair the stuff from their own countries", was utterly and completely clueless about the emerging world.  He's in his own little Truman Show, where segregation of rich and poor makes the poor healthy and wealthy.

Astounding.

Forget the defamation of Intercon Solutions, or me personally.  When is BAN going to get around to apologizing to Benson, PT Imtech, or Medicom?  Professional technicians were described as "primitive" operations by BAN and Greenpeace, and the UK Independent believed them ... why?

In the zeal to remedy problems the Anti-globalists fear, they are willing to kill the successes.

Halloween Images Of E-Waste (Scary Black People)

Sweet Mother, I no go forget you... 

This was what I remember dancing to at my farewell party in Ngaoundal, Cameroon, in 1986.   Prince Nico Mbarga's small tabletop TV would have been at least 9 years old by then, probably older.  Prince Nico Mbarga was born in 1950 of a Cameroonian father and Nigerian mother,  he died in 1997.  He was considered a bit of a "one hit wonder" for his iconic tune "sweet mother", sung in pidgin English, which has become the "happy birthday" of mothers day music in my family (embedded towards the bottom of this post).

I'm a white man, with a little black used television.  Here is a black man, with a little white used television... How does poetic language make us afraid to trade with one another?

While I think that a Prince Nico Mbarga outfit would be a fantastic Halloween costume, I cannot say that I find it scary.  But his little white television set has been labelled a big, big, e-waste problem, worthy of laws to keep the next Prince Nico Mbarga from ever buying another used RCA.   Today I want to look closely at the TV in the 1977 photo, and ask how poetic language can make something seem more ghoulish, more noble, more scary, or more heroic.

The United Nations Environmental Program has definitively shown that 85% of used electronics imported to Nigeria are reused (70%) or repaired (15%), and the remaining 15% is a figure very close to the 11% of new-in-box returns at Wal-Mart.  The trade in used electronics, like the trade in used cars here in the USA, was found to be... um... dull.

But the legislation HR2284 finds the trade in used electronics to be anything but dull.... It declares them harmful and dangerous.  HR2284 would put a stop to this.  Why are we sooooo afraid of Prince Nico Mbarga's little white television?

It's Sunday, and sometimes my blogs go off on a tangent on Sunday.  As I listen to Prince Nico Mbarga, and I recall the pidgin English of my years in Cameroon, I'm struck by the similarities in emotions I feel to the first poem I ever learned by heart.  H.W. Longfellow, The Village Blacksmith, was about hard work done by hand.

David Fedele E-Wasteland My-alogue.

David Fedele, like Jim of Seattle and Allen of New York, has now "been there".  He, himself, has witnessed "e-waste" on the ground in Agbogbloshie, Ghana.   He has made a film, E-Wasteland.

"Every year, around 200.000 tonnes of second-hand and condemned electronic goods arrive in Ghana, West Africa."

"Goods are mainly received from the "developed" world"

"Salvaged metals are commonly exported out of Africa by multinational companies..."

The sole statistic is real (apart from the "mainly" and "commonly").   About the 200,000 tons of second-hand electronic goods that arrive in Ghana, West Africa, we now have hard statistics.   A 2011 UNEP study, co-sponsored by the Basel Secretariat, examined the goods imported.  179 containerloads were hand-sorted in Lagos alone.

They found that 70% work from the get-go, and another 15% are repaired.  That left 15% which will be recycled, perhaps from damage in shipping.  We can do better.

The "wasteland" filmed by David Fedele in "E-Wasteland" was also researched.  Between 80-90% of the goods being burned there, the UNEP/Basel studies found, was used for a long time by Africans and "generated" in Africa.   Since less than a third of electronics that Africans use are brand new (they cannot afford to have Egyptian revolutions on IPads, so CRT monitors had to suffice), many of those at the dump may have been imported at some time.  But the sea containers do not go to Agbogbloshie... they go to the reuse shops.  The reuse shops have a percentage damaged in shipping (11% of brand new Wal-Mart sales in the USA are store returns) and a percentage they take back from African consumers as trade ins for a slightly newer used electronic device.

If you apply the actual statistics to David Fedele's quotes, which he stands behind (quite forcefully in an email I'd like to share but modesty forbids), you'd find that 200,000 tons of used electronics are imported, and 170,000 tons of those 200,000 tons are reused and repaired.  [POSTSCRIPT:  In Mr. Fedele's defense, he did reach back and reopened the dialogue by email, despite my lashing in my third email to him..  He's got a conscience and means well, and probably didn't know what a ferocious, passionate, pro-recycling, pro-export bastard he was dealing with]

But all 20 minutes of the film is poor black faces burning wire in fires.  They also burn refrigerators, tires, other items which millions of Africans own and eventually throw away at the dump.

David explained to me when I contacted him by email that he wasn't comfortable using statistics, and he thought that the silent imagery, without commentary, conveyed the truth.

Much like the truth conveyed if you film cadavers - and nothing, nothing but cadavers - in discussing a hospital.   Piles and piles of burning cadavers, in a film about a hospital which saves 85% of its patients.  Who would ever be caught donating to such a hospital?

I get frustrated, and I wrote too much to Mr. Fedele, trying to explain the damage done by depicting Africans solely as lonely wire burning beasts at landfills. I was wanting to find a way to tell something about the Fixers (ifixit.org film) or WR3A's crude videos on Viddler.com of geeks of color making the best jobs they can find making good enough product for  their nations growing internet.  My experience vs. My experience.   Like a "fly and buy" trip from an African or Chinese buyer, we wear our experience like a shirt, making our respective fashion statements amongst the untravelled masses.

David says,

"Then you go on with your own self-absorbed rambling. "

Guilty as charged.  That's just the problem, exactly.  I'm a long winded, self-absorbed, pedantic, businessman protecting my life choice (trading with people in a continent I lived in and loved).   I'm probably the worst advocate these poor sots in Accra and Angola and Cameroun and Lagos and Cairo could wind up with.   I'm an awful filmmaker and not a very good writer, my friends plead with me to hire an editor.   I go on and on, diarrhea of the keyboard.

The problem is that these African friends of mine, Wahab, Hamdy, Souleymane, Miguel, and their compatriots Jinex and Fung in South America and Asia, have so little choices of people to do business with.  The E-Stewards don't return their calls.  And Film makers like David Fedele make it very simple and powerful not to do so... just like Pieter Hugo's savage portrayal of exotic wire burning.

It's not a dialogue, it's a my-alogue.  David's film, Robin's blog.     The sun orbits our compassion.