I have been trying to find a way to address last weeks UNEP Report... It's extremely frustrating because the report says next to nothing. It's full of qualifiers and half statements and CYA. So frustrating to see the headlines reporting that UN says 90% is dumped, when the actual report "says" next to nothing. It implies, it insinuates, it uses racist photographs to depict Africa's tech sector. But it says nothing.
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| Terrablight relies on Okopol's Oracle |
But here's the nutshell. It claims "e-waste" trade is worth $19 billion dollars. And the way it comes up with that number is by capturing the legal and legitimate reuse and repair trade in its "waste" numbers. It blames Africa's Tech Sector by shaming Africans who work in recycling.
So really, it is more useful to go to a
nother 100+ page report written by some of the same actors, back in 2010. A report which actually DID present numbers, and drew conclusions.
The 2010 Okopol Report.
An apparent number crunching, quantifying treatise. Which repeatedly cites
Mike Anane, the "reporter" in Ghana, and surrounds his quotes with numbers that completely contradict
Mr. Anane in every single case, leaving him without a single factually correct quote... but fails to throw the bum out.
Instead, it granted Mr. Anane a cloak of vettedness. It made him the Oracle of the E-Waste Matrix.
The year Joe Benson was accused in the Independent, Guardian, BBC, and Daily Mail of exporting waste electronics from Europe and dumping them in Nigeria and Ghana, the following study had just come out... Mr. Anane was interviewed on BBC Panorama, showing "lead dust" (aluminum phosphor) inside the broken panel of a CRT. Next Month, Interpol has invited Mike Anane (and paid his consulting fee) to address a roomful of Interpol Enforcement Staff, telling them about the E-Waste Matrix, where 75%-90% of goods Africans test and pay for are bad. Even when most random tests in Germany find that more than that is good, Anane will tell them that somehow the African businesses, like Joe Benson's, are able to sense and pick out the bad ones to export.
Here are key sections of the 2010 Report which
A) Grant Credibility to Mike Anane, and
B) Prove His Claims to be Completely False.
| TEXTE | 22/2010
ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH OF THE
FEDERAL MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT,
NATURE CONSERVATION AND NUCLEAR SAFETY
Project No. (FKZ) 3708 93 300
Report No. (UBA-FB) 001331/E
Transboundary shipment of wasteelectrical and electronic equipment /electronic scrap – Optimization ofmaterial flows and control
by
Knut Sander
Stephanie Schilling
Ökopol GmbH, Hamburg
On behalf of the Federal Environment Agency (Germany)
"(Abstract) In the countries of destination, the equipment encounters recovery and disposal structures,
which are not suitable to ensure the protection of human health and the environment as well as the extensive recovery of resources."
This chestnut of a research paper tried to explain the "e-waste crime" and incentives of African "waste tourists" to export loads of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment). In the Abstract, the authors don't even feel a need to cite the percentage of used electronics which are "bad", it's apparently taken for granted.
Africa's Tech Sector has been described in halloweenish, dystopian, horrific terms by agents of the Charitable Industrial Complex, Big Shred, and Planned Obsolescence. Take the blue pill, and you find a bunch of intelligent, happy, funny people living in a normal world of value added, growing standards of living, and healthy teledensity.
