Showing posts with label Joe Benson. Show all posts

Recycling Vocabulary: Environmental Fetishism vs. Informal Markets

Recycling Vocabulary: Environmental #fetishism is a term to describe a structural bias of high-liability laws in OECD nations. Our well-off sensitivity has a perverse effect. Rich nations demand to KNOW FOR CERTAIN a surplus iphone was shredded rather than accept a probable - but undocumented - reuse fate in emerging marketplaces. Tech Sector in Africa and Asia is obviously buying for so-called "informal" (not recorded) reuse.

Environmental laws are enforced to protect real estate value. This was observed as "environmental injustice" three decades ago - but that term has been misapplied to denigrate scrap reuse and recycling (which moves to poor neighborhoods with lower labor costs and higher repair skills) in urban areas, at the expense of virgin mining and extraction in even lower-land-value forests and deserts.

The legal liability created by RCRA is all downstream, no upstream. You can buy packaging made of baby seal pelts, but cannot export highly recyclable PETE plastic to some overseas markets.

It made no sense that Joseph "Hurricane" Benson would pay for hotel CRTs during a flat panel display upgrade, and rather than dispose of bad ones for free in the UK EPR marketplace, pay an additional $10,000 to export them to Ghana and Nigeria, to be busted apart for $2,000 worth of copper. No matter how lax the environmental laws, there is no incentive, which is why academics discovered that it never happened. Raphael Rowe of BBC Panorama served a decade in prison for the same false accusation as he made against Joe Benson.... All that is now exposed. But the EU Charitable-Industrial Complex has now moved the goalposts.

Some never even bothered to show a single piece of e-waste in their "expose"

It's not that Benson's market was dumping 80% of anything. It is the fact it was unknown, "informal", undocumented, which creates a sense of wealthy liability.

What is the purpose of "informal market" vocabulary?

The Righteousness Trap: Do Ewaste Exports Pollute, or Empower, Africa?

The Righteousness Trap.

A problem recognized years ago comes into comically dramatic form in the Netflix Series "Tiger King". When megalomaniacs think their opinion is righteous, their followers and staff - and Big Cats and Export Markets - become collateral damage.

By Chris McAndrew - https://api.parliament.uk/Live/photo/bxXGHuLA.jpeg?crop=MCU_3:4&quality=80&download=trueGallery: https://beta.parliament.uk/media/bxXGHuLA, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67598764 Righteousness Trap

Lord Chris Smith [LCS] (Christopher Robert Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, PC, to be exact) inspired INTERPOL's Project Eden. He wanted to show he meant it, and demanded the prosecution of Joseph Benson. Over the course of Project Eden's 5 year mission, LCS ignored multiple studies that disproved his claim of "80%" waste dumping. He is not a bad human. He just got trapped.

He strives to be a righteous human. So righteous, in fact, that he gloried in others following him...

Into the Righteousness Trap.

The initial assumption - that Africans were coming to Europe to BUY Europe's worthless e-waste - paying thousands per container to prepare, ship, and clear it through customs - and then dumping 80% of it into a city landfill - was preposterous. There is no way that Lord Chris Smith or his team interviewed a single person in Africa's Tech Sector. They had zero physical evidence of their public contention that 80% of these exports were for scrap. They wallpapered announcements with photos of African children, and described African metal recycling community with words like "pawed at" and "primitive". To an experienced exporter and former Peace Corps volunteer like yours truly, Project Eden was fundamentally bigoted at the outset.

Righteous environmentalists - like priests and ayatollahs - can become blinded by praise and pride. Unconscious of their institutional racism, they never checked whether junk in Agbogbloshie is decades older than what is being imported to Africa today. They never even took the most basic step - available in seconds via online World Bank data, to see how many millions of Ghana households had at least one TV set 15 years earlier, or to compute how many TVs would be "normally" in the junkyard. They went directly to rewrite the rules to criminalize Joe Benson's business, and then spent five years making his life miserable and flagrantly declaring his guilt in the press.

Exports of functional and repairable electronics empowered Africans with the critical mass of users profoundly necessary since 1960 to support the infrastructure of electric grids, radio and TV broadcasts, internet cable, dedicated satellites, and mobile phone towers. If not but FOR #freejoebenson, Africa would not have been "EDEN", your holiness, any more than Joe Exotic was preserving tiger habitat. The control of the trade by one party is control of empowerment.

Do ewaste Exporters pollute Africa, or empower Africans?

A handful of experts who knew next to nothing about Africa's Tech Sector, electric grid, mass communications, consumer demand, or scrap metal recycling sector were holding meetings and conferences with each other to write the rules for Africa. They decided their answer.

Certification and Racketeering: Part 2 The Guardian Deceit

Definition: RACKETEERS OFFER A DECEITFUL SERVICE TO FIX A PROBLEM THAT OTHERWISE WOULDN'T EXIST.

"We don't want to have to go after you." - JP to yours truly during California Compromise negotiations in 2010.

"I'm not hiding anything, and don't think much of your threats" - My response.

Basel Action Network "goes after" people through the press. This week, The Guardian's environmental desk proves just how easy that is. Sandra Laville's headline "UK worst offender in Europe for electronic waste exports - report" diligently puts out the hit, failing to interview a single African or Asian technician or importer.

Free Joe "Hurricane" Benson, much?

Mistaking Africa's Tech Sector (importers) for Africa's Scrap Sector (city wheelbarrow scrap collectors) is like mistaking a surgeon for a janitor because he's black. The only proof BAN provides is a photo of a janitor.

There are several other really really simple things to find on the internet which should have given The Guardian's editors pause. I'll tick them off briefly, but stick to the point. BAN has created a problem that wouldn't otherwise exist (false reporting, sabotaged equipment, fake statistics) for the purpose of generating millions of dollars from BAN E-Stewards. BAN not only threatens companies that don't pay them, but makes examples out of those of us who defend the Geeks of Color. It is the valedictorians in the Tech Sector who suffer the worst consequences of BAN's sabotage.

BAN doesn't just sabotage their equipment. It sabotages their reputation, and the reputation of anyone with the courage to trade with them, rather than boycott them. (In Part III, we'll look at who finances this sabotage).

Last week, E-Scrap News and Recycling Today ran an Op-Ed Letter and story about the upcoming sentencing of two electronics recycling company owners from Seattle, Washington.

Craig Lorch and Jeff Zirkle's letter starts with their background as young freon recovery do-gooders, who got into fluorescent lamp recycling, and then into "E-Waste", becoming the largest TV, computer, and electronics scrap recycling company in the NW USA.

Open Letter: Learn from Total Reclaim’s mistakes

Got a call from Craig a few days before the letter, and we had a pretty long talk about the situation. Had a shorter exchange with Jeff just afterwards. Around New Years, I had talked to Charles Brennick, another Seattle area electronics guy spiked by the GPS tracking scandal in Washington. And I've been in regular contact with Bojan Paduh, founder of Canada's ERA, who is in a defamation lawsuit against Basel Action Network for their report describing GPS device trackers they put into electronics dropped off at his site in Canada. I was a paid expert witness for a fraud case on e-waste recycling in Chicago last summer. So I have a lot of perspective to share.

It is an ugly business to grandstand, or use a friend's painful prison sentence news story as a soapbox to pontificate on environmental policy. But in some of these cases, I've been given a green light.

Let's start by acknowledging that fraud is bad.

Let's finish by talking about Total Reclaim's biggest mistake.

Systems Founded in Byproduct Management: Ingenuity 101

Lucid Energy, Stormwater X, Toilet 3.0, and Africa's Tech Sector and Scrap Sector might solve 4 problems with byproduct management.

If you are an agent of conscience, and choose to either be perfect, or become someone guided by perfect intent, you need maintenance. Like a regular teeth-cleaning or oil change, you need to regularly evaluate your interior motives, your pridefulness, your righteous indignation, and cognitive biases. Preemium primum non nocere.

Like a machine that has been well maintained, you will, through the cumulative exposure and effort towards the improvements you've devoted yourselves to, be in the right place when the right time for an insight, inspiration, or opportunity occurs. If, for example, you care about people living in slums in emerging markets, you might spend years doing Mother Theresa one-on-several assistance, and begin to be inured to the scale of the problem. Keep your ego in check, and your eyes open, because someone else may have a good idea and never have your insight into an application that would "save the world", or your piece of it.

Where is this going? Downhill to the problem, whose byproduct is opportunity

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".

Circular Economy PowderFinger

Hey, I've written a whole lot of words about images.

Here's some sound. Neil Young's "Powderfinger", performed by Cowboy Junkies, seemed to describe red state hillbilly moonshiners. But the words and expressions hauntingly tell the story of Africa's Tech Sector, accused of "e-waste crimes" by NGOs, shredding companies, regulators, some manufacturers, and many European journalists.

With the help of Ghana Tech Wahab Odoi, and the miracles of the internet, I have managed to put together a lot of the pieces behind the strange alt-coinish entry by the band Placebo. Their MTV video's use of Agbogbloshie as a backdrop for "Life is What You Make It" debuted during the middle of this blog's series on Euro Agbo Porno Photo Journos.

As far as making friends with people you run into in strange places - well, chalk this chicken fight up to unfortunate timing.

I was in the middle of a "photo journo flog" series. And Sasha Rainbow was thrilled with what seems her studio's most prestigious work to date. And the band and Placebo fans were unprepared to play a part in an environmental lesson plan. What does work for photography often does not work as journalism?... um no it's about the music dude.

Artists look for simplicity - a simple, powerful photo can tell a thousand words. But those words may be false, and quite easily proffer mere racial profiling. I brought their video into the "Free Joe Hurricane Benson" debate, and they seem angry and perturbed. Easier to describe me as a trollish brute than to entertain the possibility that their depiction of poverty was bleeding with collateral damage, and wrapped in #ewaste activist folly.

How did we meet in this place? All of us? How does Awal, Yahroo or Razak wind up with a Whatsapp treasuretrove of white contacts from UK, USA, Spain, etc? Since just the last month, I've been sent photos and been handed by phone to speak directly to five "freelance documentary makers". It's a land rush... but they don't know what kind.

2002 Article In Recycling Today Foreshadows WR3A, IFixIT, E-Stewards

While looking to upload some papers in Academia.edu, I ran across an article published by Recycling Today magazine in 2002 - by yours truly. "Setting a Higher Standard" explained that boycotting the export market would be a "war on drugs" approach, forcing legit oversees reuse and recycling operations to meet demand via "back alleys".

Here are 3 conclusions about e-waste export policy at the end of the article (edited by Brian Taylor).

Looks sound.

1) Send Quality. Meet the customers and find out what they want. Just export that. Don't throw a piece of junk on the container that you don't know what to do with. This would become the foundation of WR3A.org and Fair Trade Recycling.

2) Support Reuse and Repair. This forshadowed Ifixit.org, was influenced by repairfaq.org's Silicon Sam. I'd used Sam's repair instructions while reviewing Chinese purchase orders, and found the Chinese buyers were giving instructions that would eliminate non-repairable units. This led to the realization that China was not buying ANY CRT Televisions, only specific 15" and 17" CRTs, which meant the trade was not driven by cost externalization. California SB20 went off a cliff that year.

3) Support Reputable USA companies. This forshadowed R2 and E-Stewards.

Basel Action Network attacked me for writing the article, personally, and that is how I met Jim Puckett. He blasted a response to the article via "Microsoft Outlook" and cc'd dozens of people whom I'd never met, but with whom I'd become acquainted over the years.

The article was sent to some folks at US EPA, who later hired me as a consultant for the 2006 Federal Register CRT Rule, which funded my second trip to Asia - this time bringing Craig Lorch of Total Reclaim and Lin King of UC Davis, to visit some of the "Big Secret Factories" that BAN was racially profiling as "primitive rice paddies". (If you are researching MIT Senseable City Lab and BAN's Monitour project, there's a chestnut about this at the bottom of this blog).

E-Waste Tolstoy Syndrome: Best Answered by Africa Tweet?

Like the time limits in High School Debate tournaments, Twitter forces us to present a central thesis in a concise way.

This blog has been criticized for being "wordy" or "nerdy" and has certainly often been repetitive. My "spaghetti on the wall" approach did work, however. We only needed a small number of the posts to be read by an influential and respected group of journalists, academics, and regulators.

While Basel Action Network is still in the business of demonstrating its "Ayatollah of E-Waste" powers in the state of Washington, bringing its might to bear against Total Reclaim, the "export virgin" it heralded as a model for a decade, they have been completely ineffective at intimidating me. That's because I'm using scientific method, logic, and transparency.

15 years later, let's just ask what he imports

After 2 weeks back in Ghana, the #1 Finding of our research still stands. E-Waste NGOs made up fictitious numbers about the percentage of imports to Africa that are "waste" and the percentage of waste in places like Agbogbloshie that come from faulty used good imports ("Exaggerations have been made" said Jim P. on our Salzburg panel). Photojournalists flew to Accra (Agbogbloshie is about 20 minutes from the airport, 9 minutes from Accra's finest hotel), and took close-up photos of Africans in exotic poses. And EU policymakers got project funding to "save" Africans from e-waste dumping.

Neither the NGOs, nor the journalists, nor the EU Policy funders checked out existing data on Accra stormwater runoff (the water quality at the Odaw Korle lagoon was hideous in the 1970s), the number of households with televisions in Accra 15 years ago, or the number of people employed in the scrap industry generally as compared to the number seen in Old Fadama slum of Accra. They didn't even find it on mapquest, which would show it's at the center of Accra, not a remote fishing village on the outskirts (as should have been suggested by the cab ride from the hotel). They would have found the phrase "Sodom and Gomorrah" appears in a 2002 AMA publication calling for razing the slum to build shopping malls and parking lots.

There was no basic secondary research. No control group. No null hypothesis.

How to Categorize Part 2: Derivatives of Martin Luther King Jr

Yesteday's post wasn't well edited (I added some clarifiers this morning from my room in Salzburg, Austria). But I was happy writing it, because I felt something was coming together somehow, it felt like something crystallized. Sometimes those are the worst submissions, sometimes the best. But in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.'s holiday in the USA, I hope that it channels Reverend King's letter written from Birgmingham prison, with pen and paper. No backspaces, no click and delete.

Someone I met and admire here in Europe stayed up with me last night (we arrived on the same flight), arguing and pontificating about Trump's election, e-Waste policy, economics, and family. It was a broad enough discussion, lasted well past midnight. He and I don't always agree, though he's reasonable enough that I hope he'll be able to look back and see the fallacies in the EU position in hindsight (or I will - I had to come back to my room and research some stuff when we left).

The next day, it all seemed to fit in 140 characters. Second, below the first 'pinned' tweet below.

Criticism of method or regulation isn't "attacking" the regulator. It is defending the innocent from unjust prosecution. And a regulator or prosecutor who persists in using methods or enforcement proven to be constructed on false premises is liable for environmental malpractice.

< That's boiled down to 140 characters at left.

Shouldn't we try to get along? Or is the false consensus built upon white privilege, and we need to represent the Geeks of Color, whose comments were ignored in PACE Initiative?

The discussion came in response to Jim Puckett's constant claim that this is an "attack blog" and that I am "insulting" or "attacking" his poor non-profit organization. This has been Jim's go-to response for several years now, since I wrote a guest editorial "We Shouldn't Have to Make That Choice" in Resource Recycling in 2009. It was one of the first blogs turned editorial, and it was cited by Grahm Pickren in his 2014 thesis, Political Ecologies of Electronic Waste: Uncertainty and Legitimacy in the Governance of E-Waste Geographies.

The editors of Resource Recycling liked it, thought it was nuanced. But Jim Puckett, in emails to me personally and to the editors (demanding a right to response, which they gave him) called it an "attack" which he could not let stand. In that email, he threatened to go after me personally, and my business and employees, if I did not refrain from criticizing his policy.

Our Political New Year's Resolution: Ebony and Ivory

It's 6AM and I'm packing the car for another annual cross country road trip from (red state) Arkansas to (blue state) Vermont. I was hired as a cross cultural trainer for new US Peace Corps volunteers arriving in Cameroon in 1987, and sometimes feel I never stopped.

Can't resist posting my note to the AirBNB host where we stayed in lovely Leslie, Arkansas. She was the child of a hippie who grew up in the Ozarks and now lives in Seattle.

Finding yourself in liberal Seattle must be like me finding myself in Vermont. Generally I'm very relieved to be away from "ignorant and proud of it" politics here in the southern midwest. But also I find myself very aware of my coastal liberal friends and our own confirmation bias and "profiling" of conservatives, and attributing to 'denial' what may be legitimate skepticism over 'solutions'. Consider yourself a Peace Corps volunteer from a red state.

ebony and ivory stripes (wikipedia chain gang)

Confirmation bias. Profiling. I'm not immune to it. None of us can be. But when you walk a mile in another man's shoes - as I've done for a long time with the WEEE export entrepreneurs in emerging markets - you can sit on their jury. The blindness of NGOs to the studies that show nuance is nothing new. It's Captain Ahab. It's Scarlet Letter. It's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It's in To Kill a Mockingbird. It's Huckleberry Finn's crime. These great works are all about people who start a mission based on justice (like environmental justice) and consider themselves jurists and agents of conscience, but are deafened by their own conclusions.

We need to keep it simple. If I'm skeptical of your trade ban on used electronics as a "solution" (to what? poverty?) that does not make me a "denier". Let's find something else to agree on, a simple message that might appeal to rural and urban and OECD and non-OECD.

BAN MIT MoniTour Teardown: Inside the Ewaste Export Controversy

The MIT MoniTour @KCTS-9 Basel Action Network "Expose on Exporting" #trackingewaste is still being reviewed by review researchers, recycling experts, and reporters. Memorial University has helped plot final landing points for devices. There are still a large number of items in places that BAN can't quite explain. [There are data points missing, which we located on Monitour but are not in the table per MUN]

- There are good places overseas (BAN now says "never said there weren't")
- People who never exported are highlighted for political reasons (BAN says it's justified)
- BAN's own math suggests 11% total exports (good or bad end points)
- BAN's conclusion (use E-Stewards) belies BAN's financial interest

As one of the people who never exported the tracked device, but whose clients were assaulted by BAN's innuendo I've got a particular axe to grind. But the main point is that I have consistently made the same argument before BAN attacked me personally. Jim Puckett has told a reporter directly what I inferred from the article - that I came up with EcoPark, etc., to cover up my shipment to Mr. Lai's Printer Farm. It's in print, and it's provably false, and I need another apology.

BAN made a very legitimate point via their GPS tracking study - that despite normal diligence, we should not assume for sure material exported to Asia won't go "sideways" to a scrap metal vendor (any more than we can assume that via E-Stewards). But Jim Puckett tries to push the point too far, and in so doing damages the names and reputations of state of the art repair geeks overseas, Boston area MIT hippy coops, Vermont ADA employees, and legitimate discussion of environmental policy.

Perhaps Jim yielded to his frustration and inability to control the story in a tidy direction, and now has injured people that shouldn't be injured. He needlessly involved innocent MIT students, Carlo Ratti, KCTS, and The Body Shop Foundation in a pissing match over environmental justice. Jim simply needs to say "I'm sorry". Again.

Watchdog Issues Apology For Personal Attacks in E-Waste Article

Jim documenting CRT glass was not exported as he claimed (AZ)

What a "Hurricane Joe Benson" load looks like

Over the past decade, the Wealthy Nation West (WNW) suffered under the heavy load of conscience-grubbing photos by Pieter Hugo combined with "fun anti-facts" by Basel Action Network and Greenpeace. The bright regulators in Europe and PACE, Interpol, StEP and Secretariat of the Basel Convention were busy at work, designing tests and enforcement procedures to protect African consumers from the wicked or accidental fallout from Africa Tech Sector Importers like Joe "Hurricane" Benson.

The tests were difficult, a thankless task for scores of customs agents who struggled to program their VCR machines in the 90s, and who probably paid for Windows 8 upgrades and have 2 smartphones and 3 flip phones in their dresser. The diagrams drawn by Europeans showed used PCs heading down a pipeline of decisions, like a stool down a chamber of drains. The generator was the "actor", a fetish of guilt and liability attached to the used electronic "waste" device.

WNW could have saved a lot of money on sewers if Africans were at all motivated to come to America and Europe and pay to ship our feces and urine to unregulated rivers. But of course, why would an African do that?

Interpol, UNEP, and others repeated ad nauseum the fake fact that TVs and monitors had lots of gold and were worth lots of money when banged apart by kids with hammers. That millions of dollars were spent, and Hurricane Joe Benson imprisoned, based on the malarky that avoided disposal cost was an ATM for Africans is shocking because anyone who spent 15 minutes taking apart a display device and weighing the copper on a bathroom scale could tell you it was nonsense.

They counted the number of TVs in Joe Benson's containers, but they never employed the math to show that the value of the copper never paid for the shipment of the container, only the reuse did. But far be it from Europe to take economics and African judgement into consideration.

The used electronics resembled waste, and anything downstream from Europe was to be mopped up.

As it turns out, "it's not about you".

The result of multiple studies by US Trade Commission, Secretariat of the Basel Convention, Memorial University, MIT, etc. is damning.

Second Hand electronics, imported to Africa, are not a "digital dump" or "reuse excuse" or "sham recycling". African Techs know more about what works in Africa than the NGOs do.

"E-Waste" filmed by photojournalists like Kevin McElvaney and BitRot did originate in Europe and the USA, but those filmed were imported by Africa's Tech Sector 20 years ago. The device being scrapped by a metal worker in a slum has lived a long and healthy second life, bringing affordable internet and teledensity to the continent for two decades. Interpol's "Project Eden" is about 6,000 years too late.

An NGO took the pics of kids at dumps and said "We must arrest the exporters".

The exporters, according to Interpol, are mostly Africans like Joe Benson.

And stupidly, Lord Chris Smith listened to fictious, made up statistics of 80% dumping, repeated by the photojournalists, a statistic with no economic reason to it and now without a source. No source. None at all.

Because the NGO source of the dumping data claims never to have said it.

"If you think I buy equipment, put in a boat and follow all the way to Africa, pay customs duties and truck it for landfill – if you find that, put put me in prisoin for 100 years. I will stay here in prison 100 years." - Joe "Hurricane" Benson (BJ Electronics)

Since there's no source for the Story of Stuff, it is time to listen to Africans, like Grace Akese, Emmanuel Eric Nyalete, Wahab Muhammed Odoi, and others in Africa's Tech Sector who explain how the old VCR being hammered for metal at Agbogbloshie was imported in the early 1990s. Most TVs sold in Africa in the 80s and 90s relied on VCRs for programming. Now there is satellite, there are 21 Ghana TV stations broadcasting, and streaming internet video carries the programming. So the VCRs are being junked.

Just like here. I've got 2 working ones here in my house that I haven't used for 5 years.

"Ewaste Crimes in Ghana": Intermission

End of Week 2 in Africa.

To catch everyone up, here are the cliff notes.

1) In 2002 three Americans were in Guangdong... Jim Puckett (BAN), Adam Minter (Shanghaiscrap.com), and yours truly. We saw different things. But the report with the least nuance (BAN's 80% dumping claim, claim that the water pollution was from e-Waste etc) got the biggest headline.

Make the biggest claim, get the biggest coverage.

Where there's smoke, there's Tires. Most of the visible smoke s from the tires.

2) In fact Guiyu China was not receiving the CRT monitors, they were going to SKD semiknockdown factories for remanufacture, and the water pollution found in "Exporting Harm" was telltale from textile dying. However, BAN ignored the nuance and created a Pledge of True Stewardship to raise more funds for their fledgling NGO.

"It was a close place. I took . . . up [the letter I’d written to Miss Watson], and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming."

- Huckleberry Finn

One of the most powerful paragraphs written in the English language. Mark Twain (like Dickens in 'Great Expectations' before him, and Harper Lee's character Scout in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' after him) uses the voice of a child to focus on a point in time when the majority of "respected" people were wrong.

2015 "Ewaste Crimes" in Ghana: Day 2

In 1985, when I lived in Cameroon, and visited a large city like Yaounde or Douala, crossing the street was not too difficult. As you stood at the corner and watched vehicles go by, it looked something like this...

Taxi. Taxi. Taxi. Truck. TaxiVan. Taxi. Taxi. Mercedes. TaxiVan. Taxi. Truck...

Here in Accra, capital of Ghana, thirty years later, things have changed.

Taxi. Toyota. Honda. Truck. Taxi. Mercedes. Infiniti. TaxiVan. Truck. Taxi. Truck. Jaguar. Truck, Hyundai, Taxi, GMC, Taxi, Taxivan, Truck, Nissan, Toyota.... and the sentence goes on and on for half a page.

We were on our way to the "scene of the crime". The place Blacksmith Institute placed at the top of their list of most toxic places on the planet. Where Frontline interviewed Jim Puckett, describing the place where "most" of the world's e-waste goes. Where Mr. Mike Anane says 500 sea containers per month arrive for primitive dumping. Where several sources describe, and I quote, "Millions of tons of e-waste per year" are dumped and burned. The site described by Joe Benson's prosecutor as "common knowledge" that 80 percent (that #$%$ stat) winds up after Benson exported it.

I will have to upload some of the photos later.

Millions of tons (I actually had to edit that claim out of Wikipedia and identify the source had misquoted a study saying that was the world's generation, and then applied 80% literally to Agbogbloshie). That's 60 to 90 million CRTs, if it's at least 2 million tons.

(I took about 150 photos, but most of my photos were of the photographers... I'll talk about why. The shots are too big to upload here from my Ghana pocket wifi Vodaphone transceiver. Some from Fair Trade Recycling e-waste reform Facebook Page).

There were about 50 people, including myself and an American and two European reporters and my friends who took us there - my Ghana Geek pal Wahab, two of his cousins (all from same tribe and locale as the teenagers at the dump) and a lawyer and import agent. About 25 of them were "on the job".

Eco-Fundamentalists 1: Joseph Benson, Tom Robinson, Willie Horton

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.