Elective Upgrades Supply Good Enough Markets

Elective Upgrades Supply Good Enough Markets

Is imitation the sincerest form of apology?

There is a guilt dilemma in "First World" aka "Wealthy" aka OECD consumer markets.  While there are repair and delayed gratification reuse trends (my company sells about $25k per month worth of TV parts to USA repair shops), there is also a lot of guilt about "elective upgrade", which remains the driver of most new sales.

Organizations like Basel Action Network and Greenpeace made a false assumption about 2 decades ago that "e-waste" was a product of equipment failure and inability to repair. That Americans, Japanese, South Koreans, Germans, Brits and Italians patiently wait for their CRT televisions, flip phones, and Pentium 4s to become hopelessly unrepairable before buying a plasma TV, smartphone, or i-Series laptop. 

The fact that it is patently obvious to nearly everybody that it was not the case, in hindsight, has been a point of reflection of this blog since I started it in 2006. 

Unnecessary elective upgrades, if indeed they are discarded as "waste" (or sentenced to a desk drawer, attic, or file cabinet) are indeed a wasteful use of mined, refined, extracted raw materials. But if they are reused, they create access for poor people to establish a "critical mass of users" to justify investments in TV broadcast, internet cable, and the estimated 170,000 mobile phone towers today that connect the continent of Africa... all financed by secondhand flip phone sim cards, replaced by black technicians on streets like Lagos, Accra, and Kinshasa.

It's a story older than this bad head gasket... sold to a Cummins motor geek in Florida, who re-exports trucks to rapidly emerging markets. Roads were paved in Appalachia and Ozarks by hillbillies like my grandparents, who could only afford vehicles they were smart enough to buy and fix.

Connecting Traffic in Los Angeles, EWaste in Agbogbloshie

There are two really good things about Twitter.  The First One is the "search" box on the top right.  It allows you to research an obscure topic (like "Why is Taney County Missouri named after the Dred Scott Case Supreme Court justice Roger B. Taney, and why are they pronounced differently?") and meet someone across the globe who is also tweeting about the subject.  You might have found the same article through a Google search, but it is very hard for a recent article to move up Google's ranking, and virtually impossible to pass Wikipedia etc.  But enter "Roger Taney County Missouri" in Twitter search, and you'll get some very recent and current insight and thinking on the matter.

The second good thing about Twitter is it forces you to be brief.  It rewards "pithy"

(Blogger does not, evidently).

So most of the "facts" about African e-waste and Agbogbloshie that you find on Twitter are just retweeted BS.  But add some other key words, like "Dagbani", and you can meet someone through the smoke and fog who also sees what you know about the place.

Most of the photos on the web of traffic in Los Angeles are actors in colorful wardrobe, dancing on the tops of their cars in @LaLaLand.

How to Use Twitter in E-Waste Research (Fatty Fatty Boom Boom style)

I was a huge skeptic of Twitter when microblogging first came out.  Reading page after page of what people I was "following" were "doing" at that minute?  Writing back what I'm "doing"?   Seemed like a South Park episode waiting to happen (and it was).

Within about 6 months, however, I found out how to use Twitter.   Simple.

Twitter is about its SEARCH BOX.

In the search box, you use keywords, and it greatly multiplies the number of experts and opinions and views that you are exposed to.  And increasingly, you can find the words of African TEchs talking about their own view of the "E-Waste Poster Child From Disney" debates.

Just this week alone:   "The Gaze On Agbogbloshie, Misrepresentation At Ghana's E-Waste Dumpsite" by Heather Agyepong.   Heather is also covered here at Carbon Creative Arts.

“My initial intention was to understand how waste could still be illegally dumped in Ghana and understand the conditions about how people felt. However when I arrived it was nothing of what I had read about the place. It was just super organised and not as dystopic as I thought. From the month I spent with the boys who live and work in Agbogbloshie, I wanted the images to represent that distortion. The images have that cross process look which leaves the images looking apocalyptic. I wanted this to exemplify how the western gaze effects our understanding, not just in Africa but how we can see other issues.”

Through Twitter, you find what Interpol is doing ("Project Eden" seems de-emphasized in this months Interpol Africa newsletter, in favor of wildlife crime... a welcome turn if it's sustained).   More emphasis on putting Elephant Poachers in jail, rather than Nigerian TV repairmen.

Snapshot of Lagos Nigeria. Not your daddy's "Third World" country

When Basel Action Network shows a junk television at an African dump, and then accuses African traders of doing mysterious favors to avoid UK or USA's recycling costs, it hits a chord... with people who have never lived in Africa.

If you've spent time in Africa, you know the real problems in Africa are things like TRAFFIC JAMS.



Multiple reports show that most of Africa's e-waste is generated by Africans.  Cities like Lagos (over 15M inhabitants) have televisions and computers and cell phones, have had them for decades.  

And it's a good thing.  People are much more likely to get their electronics from repair and reuse, which creates sustainable African jobs, for geek entrepreneurs, than from new tantalum mining in the Congo or tin mining of Indonesian coral islands.

And it's fundamentally good.  That's why it's so criminal for UK's Environmental Agency to put the Geeks of Color, like Joe Benson, in jail.

From 2010 to 2014, Africa's Internet usage increased by...

5,219.6 %

Here's a link to da stats http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

From the Front Lines: African Technicians Jailed in England

On my way to Lyon, France, home of Interpol.   Lots of blogging in the draft folders.  But let's keep things simple.  Joe Benson of BJ Electronics was a technician of color accused by BBC and Skynet and Lord Chris Smith of the EA of wastecrime.   He was sentenced after years of appeals (which cost him more than paying the fine, I'm told).   And now he's in jail.   White environmentalists can sleep easier, knowing the black geeks aren't burning their iPhones in "witches brews" of e-waste toxics stirred by children.

What does Africa see?

1.  Teeming cities in the emerging markets generate tens of thousands of tons of municipal solid waste.  e.g. Economist 2.2014  "Nigeria’s sprawling megacity, Lagos, with a population of 21m or so, disgorges 10,000 metric tonnes of waste a day."

2.  Cities in Africa and China have had CRT televisions and monitors for decades and decades.  World Bank 2006 statistics show Nigeria already had 6.9M households with TV.

3. The cost of shipping a containerload of used CRT televisions from England to Africa costs, per television, more than four times the value of the copper that can be recovered from the TV.   A trader to Africa loses money on every junk TV shipped.

4.  Plastic shrink wrap does not have any significant effect on the damage to CRTs shipped to Africa.  It's purely cosmetic.

5.  Independent EU and African consultants examined hundreds of the sea containers with used electronics seized in African ports and during a 2 year study funded by the UN, found 91% reuse, better than brand new product.

6.  Greenpeace and Skynet had to pay 20 times scrap value to get their television with the tracking device back out of the African market.

7.  Arrest and imprisonment of THEIR Michael Dell, Simon Lin, Terry Gou... the same tinkerer-refurbishing economy that built Singapore, Shenzhen, Taiwan and Inchion is "forbidden fruit" to Africa under "Project Eden".

I have the documentation used to convict and sentence Hurricane Joe Benson to 16 months is prison.  They did NOT test his TVs, did NOT allow repair to be considered.

My thesis is that there is no evidence to justify Benson's experience except the following.

A.  Basel Action Network made up a hoax statistic that 80% of the electronics exported were scrapped by "primitive" Africans.
B.  Interpol in 2009 accepted BAN's statistic, reprinted it as an official guidance document despite 0 evidence of the statistic.
C.  Interpol did discover (expressing surprise) that the shipments were not paid for by EU waste companies to avoid disposal costs, but that the electronics were purchased by Africans ("waste tourists") for far more than the value of the scrap, that the Africans refused to buy most of the electronics they could have purchased, and that after purchasing the electronics for more than scrap value, the Africans paid shipping and customs duties on each piece.  Interpol's Emile Lindemulder described the trade as "organized" and (see A) therefore "organized crime".

BAN's Jim Puckett vs. "Hurricane" Joe Benson

Imprisoned based on fake statistic

Thanks to all for the polite applause and pats on the back as I profile the arrest and imprisonment of an African used goods trader from the safety of my Vermont office.

Many people have told me how "brave" I am to risk offending the Senator Joe McCarthy of E-Waste.

" Never has BAN ever stated that 80% of US e-waste is exported." From NPR.org / fair use.   

One year ago, "Hurricane" Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics was involved in our efforts to get Puckett to actively withdraw his accusations against African techs.  I travelled to Interpol, met Benson in London, and engaged with Puckett (via BloombergView) over Basel Action Network's silence about it's "80%" statistic being discredited in major UN funded studies in Nigeria. Jim Puckett tried to spin the story, claiming credit for what he called the vast improvement in standards of imports to Nigeria.

Outrageous.  The study was the same containers seized from Benson's arrest!  Puckett was acknowledging the quality of the studies funded by Basel Convention Secretariat, but implying the quality of the loads was a result of the goods seizure.  Rarely does an expert get caught so bloody red handed.

Unfortunately for Joe Benson, trade of used goods in Africa has already been tried and convicted in the press, based on BAN and Greenpeace's accidental racial profiling of allegedly "primitive" electronics repairers.

Portions of the Hurricane Joe Benson blog, with quotes from Puckett and from the 2011 report on the findings of Benson and others sea containers are reposted below the lyrics of Bob Dylan's song Hurricane.  It includes a link to an academic article reportedly submitted in Benson's trial, from University of Northampton UK, which quotes Puckett estimating only 25% of exports to Nigeria are actually reused...

Recall also, a year ago, that Puckett and BAN refused to come clean about their "statistics" on e-waste.  "Never has BAN ever said..." etc.  Recall as well that Puckett used articles mentioning Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics by name in his powerpoint presentations, taking credit for the crackdown.

Bottom line:  Africa has enough REAL problems, needing real solutions.  They don't need us to manufacture scandals for them.  (See another old blog chestnut, "The finite world", riffing on Economist Paul Krugman).

"Hurricane" Rubin Carter, memorialized in Bob Dylan's song, passed away two months ago, April 20, by the way.

My point is that I told Jim Puckett, to his face at E-Scrap in the fall, that his stats about Africa were resulting in an Innocent Man's arrest and imprisonment.  Jim Puckett said to me that Joe Benson was "collateral damage".  That's the best he could do.   And now Benson is in prison.

Rubin Carter was falsely tried
The crime was murder 'one' guess who testified
Bello and Bradley and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers they all went along for the ride
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool's hand ? 
To see him obviously framed
Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land 
Where justice is a game.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets #6: Nneka Egbuna

Last week, between snow shovelling, I posted a little blog with a video of an interesting cover of Outcast's Hey Ya, by Obidiah Parker.   While shuffling around youtube for the link, I happened upon some African pop videos, and got arrested by Nneka Lucia Egbuna.  According to her Wikipedia biography, Nneka was raised in Warri, a petroleum ("resource curse") pothole turned "cosmopolitan city" of 312,000 in the delta of Southern Nigeria.

Nneka grew up in Nigeria, but went to university in Hamburg at 18... a big cultural gulf.  In the theme of gangstagrass / cultural melting pots and urban music, I listened to several of the songs on her "Soul is Heavy" album last night and this morning.



I'm posting more about Nneka for two reasons.  First, I like a couple of her songs a lot, especially the title track of Soul is Heavy (which I posted below the Outcast cover).   It was only when I listened/watched the video a second time that I realized the background of the chorus "teach me lies" is adorned with old African television sets.

I don't pretend to know Nneka's position on the Interpol crackdown vs. the "geeks of color" whose cause I've embraced, but in a second video, "My Home", she poses as two things - a conflict metal gold mining worker (the place Western mercury from recycling programs gets sold, for alleuvial gold mining) and then a city trash worker (I presume in Lagos, wearing .A.W.M.A- LAGOS STATE WASTE MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY, on an orange PPE - personal protective equipment uniform).  Damn.  Must watch.

Below... at least watch through the coltan mining and public solid waste worker shots.

That's a pretty good snapshot of what's going on in Africa.  Junk televisions rank about as high on Africa's priority list as they did in the USA and Europe in 1990.  The "e-waste export crisis" makes as much sense as the Radiator-Aid humorous videos.  Recycling stereotype after stereotype.

(*Much more to come, in a future blog, about the RustyRadiator.com project).  RustyRadiator project is another northern-Europe / African collaboration, like Nneka, whose moniker reminds me of the #1 hit 30 years ago, when I boarded the flight to Africa to start my Peace Corps career (give up?  Nena - of Germany - 99 Luftballoons but that is a "punctuation level digression", or "third level digression" sorry... I've lost a lot of readers on those turns.... end digression*).

Lines On Maps: Where the OECD was Hatched

Simple, Jim P. of BAN told me.   Follow international law.   He said he agreed with 95% of what Oscar A. Orta's presentation on "Fair Trade Recycling" said.  He applauds the Chicas Bravas.   But he said the Basel Convention Ban Amendment is simple.

That's a mouthful.   The Declaration of Independence Declaration of Independence Amendment (proposed, not passed) is what to follow.   Not the actual Basel Convention, Annex IX, B1110, which allows export for metal recycling and export for repair and reuse, which says nothing about "functional".

Definition of 'Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development - OECD'

A group of 30 member countries that discuss and develop economic and social policy. OECD countries are democratic countries that support free market economies. [Investopedia.com]

See the video at the bottom for the 1000 years history in Europe that culminated in the OECD.

Bullyboy 7: The Great Cabbage Farm vs. TV Repair Controversy

If you do an image search for "cabbage worker" on Bing or Google, you can find a lot of very interesting, very different photos, spanning a great deal of time.  Cabbage is eaten in almost every part of the world.

Well, it's interesting to me.  Let me explain why it's related to "E-Waste" exports in general, and Joseph Benson in particular.

You can search "African cabbage farm", or "Guatemala Cabbage", or "Chinese cabbage harvest", or "Russian cabbage".

Want to guess where the cabbage photo to the left was taken?  Florida.

There are some Australian aborigines cabbage worker photos from a century ago, and there is an ocean of cabbage photos on alibaba.com.  Dried cabbage, chopped cabbage.  

There are workers clinging to the sides of a moving cabbage truck in Guatemala.  There are workers dressed in white smocks and moon suits in the Czech Republic.

I was searching "cabbage" on alibaba, and searching images for cabbage, because I wanted to find something as boring and non-controversial as... television repairman.

Africans, Chinese, and Latino workers who head to the Bright Lights, Big City places like Lima, Cairo, and Joseph Benson's Lagos, are usually making a choice not to do something.  They don't necessarily know what jobs they'll find in Accra, Kinshasa, or Dakar.  But they don't expect to grow cabbage, or tubers, or sugarcane, or cotton.

"Ag Flight".   It's basically exactly the same reason the USA cabbage farms import migrant labor from other countries.  

I've got rural, subsistence farming roots.   Three out of four of my grandparents lived on subsistence Ozark farms, and remained in farming until the 1960s (fourth grew up in journalism, and as a child of someone in the Indian Service).  Agriculture's an honorable profession.

I was told the easiest thing to grow, if I chose to be a farmer, was probably cabbage. Cabbage is pretty virulent, cabbage crops can survive temperature disruptions.  You won't make a lot of money on cabbage, but barring an Oklahoma dustbowl storm, you are unlikely to utterly fail.  As I looked down at my grandpa Fisher's cabbage row, I thought it was the dullest, most boring thing in the universe.

Had Joseph Benson been a cabbage farmer, he would not have been the center of a sting by Greenpeace, Basel Action Network, Cahal Milmo (Independent), or BBC Panorama.  Unfortunately for Benson, he invested in a different job abandoned by white people - one exoticized to titillate environmentalists.

Television repair.

Bullyboy 5: Urban Waste is a "Story of People"

Human Waste is Generated by Humans (Silent Spring)
Human Consumption is consumed by Humans (The Waste Makers)
Human Racism is Human-on-Human Crime (To Kill a Mockingbird)

URBAN SHARE OF POPULATION

This is not the "Story of Stuff", it's a "Story of People".   Fair Trade Recycling is an effort to see other humans for what they can do, not for what they cannot do, and to make the exchange of goods and services, driven largely by urbanization, as constructive as possible.  Call it Alter-Globalization if you will, call it "reform".   It's not about exploitation and victimization or waste externalization when the African cities and Chinese cities are paying for the goods and transport... it's economics of urban geography.

China has been buying scrap.  Egypt has been buying used computers. Nigeria has been buying used TVs.   All three are "non-OECD", but they buy different things.   Look at urbanization, and you will see that industrialization correlates with smelters, internet cable correlates to computers, and electricity correlates with TVs.  China, Egypt, and Nigeria have cities, and cities are full of people.


The Urbanization Trap - Short article in the Economist (2013)
Economic Development, Industrialization, and Urbanization, Australia Treasury Economic Roundup (2012 Report on Global demand)

Research E-Waste, Free the Hurricane Tinkerers in Africa

That Exotic Africa, the "Back to Eden" goal, the backwards Heart of Darkness, in need of the Great Green White Father to rescue them from their primitive E-Waste "e-waste hell".  Ok, this is not just another insult blog.  This contains some really terrific leads for academic researchers who want to publish something new about "e-waste" exports.  I have some very new and interesting leads below.

I'm fooling around with some background research, looking at the growth in number of households in Nigeria which have televisions in use (World Bank), the number BAN and ITC and UNEP say are imported, the percentage of sales which UNEP says are used/secondary to new.

Guess what?  Yet another data point.   I don't have time to really polish the argument below, but it adds up to about 85-90% reuse.

The growth in the number and percentage of Nigerian households who own TVs correlates to two things:

1. the number of units entrepreneurs like Joseph Benson shipped there (BAN, UNEP, USITC)
2. the growth in use of internet and TV use in Nigerian households (World Bank)
3. the percentage of e-waste from Nigeria's own cities (UNEP)

There's nothing exotic going on here.  The "Great White Father", Jim Puckett, acts like some kind of a "no dancing dad", an Environmental Fundamentalist from Footloose II, a back-to-Eden, anti-growth, anti-globalization preacher, who has a right to point fingers at free market traders who obey the Basel Convention - which permits export for repair, something Jim voted against and lost.   BAN adorns its NGO website with fire and brimstone photos of poor kids at dumps, and says those photos trump the data.

J.Lepawsky photo, Accra (property of ... African)

But all the data is adding up to the same thing.   African cities are getting electricity.   Africans are moving closer to the city, where the electricity is.  Africans growth of internet and television use is exponential, much greater than the growth in OECD.   The growth is high where per capita income is $3000 per year, a market which cannot afford brand new equipment.  The brand new equipment sales in Africa are rife with ESD (electrostatic discharge) failure rates, as faulty equipment in new packages finds its way to countries with lesser warranty law enforcement.  And the per capita generation of "e-waste" grows in these countries, along with the growth of the internet.

Hardly a case for the arrests of Hurricane Joe Benson, Hurricane Hamdy, or Hurricane Chiu.

Link to Cahil Milmo and BAN, months before the sting by Milmo on Benson.  Follow up by Milmo, crowing over Benson's conviction of exporting TVs for dumping and burning.

UNEP found containers like Benson's, analyzed during his trial, were 91% reused... a higer reuse rate than brand new product.  The rest of this blog shows how World Bank data could have exonerated Mr. Benson, and disproven BAN's "Digital Dump" allegations, without even the benefit of the UNEP sampling.

The eight men, whose firm’s operated across the country, were found to have been at the heart of a lucrative trade which sends tonnes of waste computers and other consumer durables to west Africa and Asia every year to be stripped of valuable metals in grim conditions, often by children. 

One of the company owners, Joseph Benson, whose BJ Electronics toured civic waste sites picking up electronic goods to be sent illegally to Nigeria from east London, was convicted following an investigation by The Independent,Sky News and Greenpeace.

Except the premise "to be stripped of valuable metals in grim conditions, by children" is completely false.  That allegation was presented to the UK Independent by Basel Action Network (first link).   It was disproven by UNEP.  Like a modern day Mockingbird Robinson, Joe Benson has given up on the trial process.   Below, I provide hard evidence that BAN's "statistic" was false to begin with, and allege that our society would never have taken the accusation seriously in the first place if the trade in used TVs was between two white men.

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.

Challenge: IFIXIT Recycles 2009 GreenPeace Vid

I like IFIXIT.  With that said... Their weekend's "ewaste" blog titled

MORE PROOF YOU SHOULDN’T BLINDLY TRUST YOUR E-WASTE RECYCLER

is correct in its emphasis on the word "blindly"... don't blindly do anything.  But Elizabeth Chamberlin also provides evidence that you shouldn't blindly trust EU Law, or Greenpeace and E-Stewards, either.

If you watch the Greenpeace slide show, you might think I'm saying you shouldn't trust your own eyes...   ( I covered this 2009 Greenpeace "science with photos" with the post "WRONG, WRONG, WRONG..." )

Chamberlin trusts her eyes and is doing what she should be doing - looking at all sides of the ewaste-to-Africa debate.   Now I'm gonna go Ozark Atticus Finch on her.  Where is Greenpeace's interview of the accused?  They have the African Tech there on camera, and say he told them it was not a working TV but they bought it anyway.  What exactly does their methodology prove, and why didn't they ask the African they spoke to what the percentage of reuse was, and what his losses were on the bad units?