Pick Your Story: Anyone can PhotoJournal in Africa!

Impressed by Washington Post, Guardian, Independent, National Geographic, and NGOs documenting "Ewaste Crime"?

Don't be!  It's easy!  You can call, on the phone, today, the poster "children" (in their 20s) who adorn the pages of guilt-staining photojournalism.

Some of the photos below are from expensive documentaries.  Others - of the same people - were taken with the dudes over lunch, or sent to me by WhatsApp or Facebook.   Everyone can be like Essick, Hugo, Belini, McElvaney and other photojournalists.  Fly to Accra airport, the "Agbogobloshie" dump is just 20 minutes away.  Spend the night at the Movenpick Hotel.

What are you waiting for?  GET YOUR PULITZER!

It's incredibly easy!  You can do it, too!  And  unlike people who live there, or try to engage in trade, you get paid and don't even need to learn any names.  Take the money and run.

Or if you like, stay and interview Mohamed Saidu Rachid (top) and Awal Basit (bottom).  Stay involved and stay engaged.

"E-waste Crimes in Ghana" 10: A Convenient Lie in Agbogbloshie

Fritz Lang's Metropolis film inspired Joeseph Goebbells, Adoph Hitler's Nazi propagandist, to try to hire him for the white supremacy movement.  What "e-waste" film documentaries should learn from Lang.

So, have we all enjoyed the photos of fire and sweaty young recycling men?  Have we proven that we care?  Have we validated our recycling credentials, proven our concern, certified out downstreams, and licensed our morality?

Fritz Lang's Metropolis inspired Goebbels

Not wanting to boycott reuse technicians in Tamale does not mean we care less than you do about wire burners in Accra who are exposed to toxic soil.  Hopefully, my concern justifies my own photos.  Because that's what Agbogbloshie is.  It's a photo backdrop.  Just a nice mashup of shantytown, smoke, gadget debris and glistening muscles.  It has become a cheap movie set for #ewastehoax propaganda.

The Tamale reuse workers not only support themselves, they usually support several others in their Dagbani speaking tribe who could otherwise feel forced to move to Agbogbloshie (Accra), Ghana to burn wires.  And their scrap brothers in Agbogbloshie support not only themselves, but their own children, siblings, and parents.

This is ultimately addressed to Lord Chris Smith, because the UK has given itself a special role as "steward" of the Dagbani and the secondary market in West Africa.  He has proven his environmental credentials by circulating stories about the "largest e-waste dump on earth", the "most toxic recycling on earth", and has issued press releases crowing about Mighty Joe Benson.

Clang go the prison bars.

Yet clang, clang, clang go the Agbogbloshie scrap metal workers.  Stop all the exports, arrest every #freejoebenson... Yet the beat goes on.

Cease and Desist Campaign. Yes. We are "behind it".

To those of you forwarding the emails announcing that importers are "pushing back" on the finger-pointing watchdogs, the answer is yes.  Though the words "behind it" have many meanings.

We stand behind the importers.   The geeks of color in Africa, South America, and Asia who have been labelled "mostly primitive" in their importation of an ill-defined word "e-waste".   The technicians who know more about capacitors than we do, who are asked for "proof" and "evidence" that they are not burning the computers they carefully spec'd out, flew to the EU, Canada and USA, and paid good money for.

"Refurbishing of EEE and the sales of used EEE is an important economic sector (e.g. Alaba market in Lagos). It is a well-organized and  a dynamic  sector that holds the potential for further industrial development. Indirectly, the sector has another important economic role, as it supplies low and middle income households with affordable ICT equipment and other EEE. In the view of the sector’s positive socio-economic performance, all policy measures aiming to improve e-waste management in Nigeria should refrain from undifferentiated banning of  second-hand imports and refurbishing activities and strive for a co-operative approach by including the market and sector associations."  - UNEP Study 2012

"I am very satisfied with the quality of the UNEP studies. I know well the authors and have worked with them and discussed findings with them."  - Jim Puckett, Executive Director, BAN.org  

We have focused on the source of the presumption of guilt, that dirty little secret circulated by Basel Action Network.    Repeated by SVTC and ETBC and Greenpeace.   No doubt believed by many who trust their eyes when Jim Puckett shows them photographs, rather than their heads.

Caught black-handed

With the admission last month that the UNEP studied the containers BAN accused, and found them to be predominantly the reuse equipment the importers claimed it is, BAN has backed away from the Interpol "Project Eden" campaign.  But BAN is completely behind the false information provided to Emile Lundemiller in the Interpol "Organized Crime" E-waste report.

When a city like Lagos has six million households with televisions, it has many environmental problems.  Disposing of its own "ewaste" is one of those problems.   Fair Trade Recycling is an attempt to finance solutions by empowering the technicians who import used equipment with the tools to take back tomorrow's junk, and the methods to recycle it responsibly.

Sign a letter, or sign a petition.   Tell BAN, ETBC, and Greenpeace to "Cease and Desist".

Replacement: Powderfinger lyrics and Barn Burning

Last night I wrote something as I was feeling it.  This morning I took it down.

If you read it the Post (Revelation:  Vermont Won't Back Down Recycling Racism), what follows is an apology and a long explanation.   As I hit the "enter key" to post it, I was listening to this song, by Neil Young, called PowderFinger.


Cover me with the thought that pulled the trigger...