Showing posts with label Raphael Rowe. 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?

REASON.COM Sees Joseph "Hurricane" Benson as a Legit Operator, Racially Profiled by Do-Gooders

And FairTradeRecycling.net makes another plea to BBC's Raphael Rowe...

Justice delayed is justice denied.

But it provides hope that this reviewer, Editor @brianmdoherty, focused on one of the crucial lessons from Adam Minter's book, Secondhand. Affluent people should not be writing rules for what less affluent people are allowed to reuse and repair. If they do so insist, don't kid yourself, Richie, that you do so for Africa's environment. "Project Eden" was not just a cringeworthy named project, it was total collateral damage to the reputations of Africa's best and brightest.

#OwnVoices 1: Ten Years of Video of Firsthand Accounts of Secondhand Trade

For over Ten Years, WR3A has been collecting video interviews, showing firsthand accounts by both the Second-hand tech sector and recycling (scrap) sector in places like Ghana, Senegal, China, Cameroon, Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, etc etc. There is a new hashtag for this.

#OWNVOICES. It's about marginalized people telling their own story, especially when it differs from - or opposes - "their" story as told by big money and charity industrial complex "saviors".

It is Overdue. Marginalized reuse techs - labelled "collateral damage" (2013) by Jim Puckett of BAN.org - have to to take the mic.

One huge takeaway from author Adam Minter's visit (his 3rd) to Middlebury last week was his ability to transition the story of Secondhand to "OWN VOICES". Google search top result for definition is a good start:

10 Years Of Good Point Recycling Blogs: What's Been Learned?

Ten years ago, most of the mainstream press in Europe and the USA had accepted the cartoon thesis that if electronic waste is expensive to recycle, that shipments of used electronics to Asia, Africa and South America were to avoid those expenses. At least, 80% of the time.

We took that on here, before anyone else would touch the controversy with a 10 meter pole. Here's a retrospective on what was, and still is, relevant in the Good Point Recycling Blog.

When poor people are paying for something (including transportation), it is not "because" the rich are willing to ship it.

We demonstrated that with the "Big Secret Factories" and 60 Wasted Minutes blogs. The sea containers of CRT monitors headed for Asia were never, ever full of large CRT televisions, even though large CRT TVs had more copper and costed more to recycle. In fact, the purchase orders did even accept Sony Trinitron 17" desktop monitors or screen-burned desktop CRTs or pre-VGA. When someone is paying you $10 each for something specific, and refusing to accept other similar CRTs even if you pay them, it probably has nothing to do with (ahem) "rice paddies".

Brad Collis [CC BY 2.0]

Nuance Delivery 3: Eyewitnesses To Hell - Oluu Orga

The Agbogbloshie waste site has really become a crucible for examination of the charitable industrial complex. The richer the African city, the more consumer electronic waste it generates. When I go to Agbogbloshie, I don't see anything I didn't see in Mobile, Alabama.

But once, I thought did. When Westerners go to unfamiliar places, something happens. We photograph something that seems exotic, and the more shocking and unfamiliar, the more valuable the photo. It's interesting to contrast our Western photos of Agbogbloshie to those taken by an African who lived and worked at the place. Western photojournalists (e.g. Kevin McElvaney) earn a better living selling their photos if there's a nice Biblical Halloween Titled Hyperbole around them.

In Nuance 1 and 2, we focused again on Awal Muhammed of Savelugu, Ghana, the guy in his mid-20s who figured out that adding more gasoline - literally - to the ewaste (and tires, mostly) burning fire was a recipe for handouts. On my first visit to Agbo in 2015, he certainly stood out. (And he video calls me too often ever since, see last night).

Today, let's focus on an authority, Oluu Orga, who is everything Awal is not. He also came to Agbogbloshie from the North, he also pushed a cart around the city, but he didn't ever learn to perform fire tricks for the Photojournalist convention (which started in earnest a year after Oluu left).

Oluu Orga didn't have much to spend on film, but he took pictures of his friends doing different jobs.

In the mid 1980s, I returned from 30 months in Africa with 7 undeveloped rolls of film. When they were all developed at once, I could see where my priorities had been. Excited to be in remote Africa, the place I had heard about as primitive and natural and exotic.. many photos apparently were intended to "validate" my time there. More shots of grass roofs than corrugated steel, no pictures of paved roads. When I went through Oluu's photos of his time there, Agbogbloshie finally got real.

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".

NGO Plants Needle in Haystack, Part 1: New Outrageous Claims in #EwasteGate

The news breaking today is that a Seattle NGO, Basel Action Network, is releasing a documentary with PBS about their "watchdog" effort to sabotage LCDs (making them non-repairable) and then track them overseas with GPS transponders. The first company they have "outed" is Total Reclaim, an E-Steward certified company in their own home of Seattle Washington.

Article at E-Scrap News

Does this sound familiar? You take electronics which someone wants to reuse, cut wires, and turn it in for reuse and repair. Someone buys it for repair, and then you accuse them of having shipped it for "primitive" recycling.

#FREEJOEBENSON

BBC Reporter RAPHAEL ROWE cut a wire (thinking export for repair is illegal - should have read Basel Convention Annex IX, B1110 on export for repair of CRT monitors and TVs).

Context: The Seattle Recycler received about 28.5M lbs of TVs, printers, computers, cell phones - as well as car seats, x-ray machines, and UPS. The NGO doesn't say that the mass balance is off. Of the 28.5M lbs, about 28M lbs of garbage-in came back out as baled steel, plastic, non-ferrous metal, and CRT cullet. What the NGO's methodology is to find a device NOT in demand in the USA (CRTs in 2012 Benson case, smaller flat LCDs this year) but in high demand with overseas repair. They take one that looks nice, open it and sabotage a wire, then place a tracking device. When the Recycler has a staff person do sort-for-repair, the GPS is tracked, and the NGO implies that 28 million pounds are in question.

Had the NGO put its GPS tracking device in a random printer or CRT television or Pentium 2 computer, no one has ANYdoubt that Total Reclaim would have long recycled it. This test is designed to disguise the GPS device in the biggest cherry, the patients who we believe could be saved from the recycling creamatorium. Then, the NGO uses racist language to describe the "primitive" repair people who make a living by cherry picking luxury clients "waste" for the "good enough" market.

If BAN had put the tracker in a Pentium 2, a printer, a CRT television, virtually anything (aka random sample), they know perfectly well the Recycler would have scrapped it. They chose the device they did because it has high demand and repair markets overseas, and they tracked it to a place a few miles from where the device was probably originally made... a place with more expertise in the device than anywhere in the world.

Remember, the reason NGO BAN told everyone to be very concerned about the export for repair market is that they told the press 80% was not repaired, but was dumped, in "Digital Dump" or "reuse excuse" language. But it turned out they were making that up. And their website still has the same garbage.

African "E-waste" Witch Hunt Continues: Part 2

I have the account of Mark Daniels. I have the account of Joe Benson. I'm looking for Ezenwa Ogbonnaya and M2 Ventures Limited ... That will make 3 UK electronics recycling companies who were tried in the press.

Daniels Recycling prosecuted for African WEEE export

In Part 1, as well as the "Sodom and Gomorrah" blog, we traced the outrage and arrests back to two men, Jim Puckett and Mike Anane.

That Agbogbloshie was a very large e-waste dump... perhaps "biggest in the world"
That the Odaw River was a pristine, green African "Eden" just a decade ago, "teeming with fish"
That the lead in the soil at the dump does not come from automobiles, but from dumped electronics
That 80% of the electronics shipped to Ghana are "junk" and the other 20% "fail after between 2 and 6 months"
That most of the work done at Agbogbloshie is by children, orphans, under age 18
That the majority of workers at AGbogbloshie die of cancer in 2 years.

Well, well, well... this is the information that was recited by Anane and Puckett at an Interpol meeting I attended at EPA offices in Arlington VA in March 2010. Puckett and Anane were introduced by the UK's Environmental Agency head, Lord Chris Smith.

These horrible "e-waste facts" were also recited to Raphael Rowe of BBC in "Panorama".

If half of the "e-waste facts" were half true, it would indeed be understandable that the Environmental Agency prosecuted Joe Benson, Mark Daniels, and Ezenwa Ogbonnaya for dumping - or rather selling - used electronics to Africa's Tech Sector.

But the accusers, the prosecutors, never met anyone in Africa's Tech Sector, did they?

UNEP doubled down, using photos of "primitive recycling" in its 2015 report on "e-waste". But the actual statistics hidden throughout UNEP's own report told a different story from it's press release headline. If the majority of sea containers of used electronics shipped from Europe are "illegal", then why do the seizures of hundreds of containers only find 1/3 which had anything illegal?

Just one of dozens of examples where the #ewastehoax needs to answer the simple question, "duh?"

UNEP is only pointing fingers, however. One nation abandoned nuance with flair 5 years ago. Indictments and prison sentences. While Agbo workers burn wire, England is burning witches.

The photo above shows Mike Anane of Ghana briefing reporter Raphael Rowe of BBC Panorama, on the ground in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Mr. Anane was back at Agbogbloshie 2 days before my arrival in March... briefing Jacopo Ottaviana of Aljazeera's #ewasterepublic... see below.

"When I look at these things, I would not call it importation. For me the bottom line is dumping, because from all of these containers that come, only about 20% are functional, and 80% are junk, garbage" - Mike Anane Aug 2014

http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/biografieen/a/mike-anane.html

PRISON FOR DANIELS RECYCLING?

Anane's accounts to journalists were covered on this blog a few days ago. I met him face to face at an Interopol Meeting in Washington DC in 2010, where he presented between UK Environmental Agency Director Lord Chris Smith and Jim Puckett of BAN. You know the claims... 80% dumping. 500 sea containers per month arriving at Agbogbloshie. The biggest E-Waste Dump in the World. Teeming with fish, Anane recounted, just 10 years earlier.

Mike Anane: "For the past 11 years. That was when I first saw the trucks with e-waste coming from the port to Agbogbloshie. Agbogbloshie happens to be a place I’m familiar with. I have been hanging around the area when it was a lush, green, beautiful wetland with lots of birds and some wildlife, and the river and the lagoon that run through the dump site had so much fish. The fishermen, the people in the communities depended on these rivers for their livelihood. Agbogbloshie used to be an amazing, beautiful wetland, a Garden of Eden. A wetland performs enormous environmental functions. When the water from the city goes to the sea, it goes through the wetland and gets filtered. Fish from the sea come and make babies. Wetlands are so important to every country, to nature, and to mankind.

"But now, the river and the lagoon are both dead: no fish, no organisms, nothing. The river and the lagoon both end up in the sea, and when the fishermen at the seaside throw their net, hoping to catch some fish, they get computers, television sets, and fridges. Their poisons spill into the sea every single day... So for me Agbogbloshie, which was a green Garden of Eden, is now paradise lost."

Note that this interview was in August 2014, describing "11 years" of experience. But his 2010 interview with me at Interpol, he said it had been ten years. And in his first interview, with Greenpeace in 2008, it was ten years. And on PBS Frontline, it was since he was a boy.

My personal interview was during the meeting that set Lord Chris Smith up against Hurricane Benson. Lord Chris Smith, as I recall, introduced Jim Puckett and Mike Anane to the audience of Interpol enforcement experts. It set up the first arrest and indictment of "Hurricane Joe Benson". And this week, LetsRecycle.com, a British environmental online newsletter, reports that "Hurricane Joe Benson" has company.

MORE AFRICAN TECHS FOR UK JAILS

Five Sources of E-Scrap (ewaste) at Agbogbloshie, Ghana, Africa

I keep having to answer this specific question again and again:

"Where does the WEEE / E-Waste photographed in Africa come from? Wasn't it obviously imported?"

Sure, anything not manufactured in Africa was imported, and Africa has even less electronics manufacturing than the USA does. But beware the "car waste" fallacy. Junk Volkswagens at a dealership show trade-ins, after decades of use, not "illegal German a-waste dumping".

Retailers we interviewed in Ghana sell mostly used Western electronics. They often do repairs, not just on what they import, like a car dealership that has a repair shop (most USA dealerships).

With these interviews in the background, here is a list of 5 Sources of E-Scrap at Agbogbloshie.

Exhausted product. For example, TVs imported to Ghana in 1970s, 80s,, 90s that are no longer worth repair.
Elective upgrade. For example working VCRs which people choose to replace with DVDs, due to affluence and declining costs of newer technology (DVD players).
Home Breakage. Product damaged by electric surges (see reports on Ghana electric grid problems. This is more likely to be brand new product, lighter circuits which can't resist power surges. It explains why Ghana consumers prefer "solid state" 1990s products.
Fallout of recent imports (est. 9% of new and used imports). "Fallout" is called "breakage and spoilage" in tracking commerce. A percentage of rice, of cars, of books, etc. always finds damage in shipping or human error. This includes working goods which sit on the shelf too long and don't sell (and are not re-ordered).
Working Refrigerators, Air Conditioners, etc. New electric standards in place in Ghana are designed for energy conservation. Older white goods are seized by Ghana customs (working ones which are eligible for subsidy to reduce electric grid demand).

Yes. There is scrap being recycled in ugly ways (See 2012: Ten Most Toxic Africa E-waste Recycling Practices). But the sources of that scrap are not what photojournalists claimed.

Number 1 is blatantly obvious to anyone who lived in Ghana in the 1980s and 1990s. Ghana has 21 Television stations. Most households in cities like greater Accra (4M residents) have had electrical appliances, computers, TVs, cell phones, radios, VCRs, etc. for decades.

2015 Imports

Ghana is generating far more "ewaste" than we can see in Agbogbloshie (which is mostly car and appliance scrap metal). African consumers, like Americans, tend to believe a 1970s television (which they purchased in the 1980s) is more valuable than it is. No one in Africa wants to buy a VCR, but the consumer remembers how much it costs. USA car dealers have these discussions all the time... consumers believe their 1980s Volkswagen is worth more than the dealer does.

Number 2 is the devil wrestled with by retailers. They must place orders now for something consumers will buy 3 months later. Retailers can't afford to pay reuse price for scrap... no matter what the continent. As a result, African retailers wind up with stuff "traded in" or abandoned or not picked up after repair. Sometimes they made a mistake in importing a device... They order 3,000 large 27" CRT televisions, but can only sell 2,000 at the price they predicted.Number 5 was reported as the largest "illegal" percentage by the Ghana customs agents we interviewed, which are included in the 1/3 of randomly intercepted containers Interpol reported contained some illegal goods.

The "elective upgrade" also impacts #4. Consumer demand changes, and sometimes Africa's Tech Sector imports too many Pentium 3s, or non-smart-phones, or older displays. That's the same as Western retailers who must discount stock and sell surplus. It's not "wastecrime". The retailer has already been punished by purchasing something, transporting it, and having to mark it down.

Repair Shop receives TVs imported 1990-2005, most by weight are not recent imports

Bullyboy III: Meet The Real Environmental Criminals

"The Perfect should not be the Enemy of the Good." My first face-to-face with Donald Summers (the guy who told reporters I lie through my teeth), ended on that note, and Donald said it first. We must prioritize our environmental issues, not based on the money and attention they bring our environmental organizations, but on the risk and harm.

When I met the head of Interpol's "Project Eden" in Lyon, France, last Monday, he had just returned from a trip to Sri Lanka, where 300 elephant tusks were seized. Cees described his feelings, seeing the tusks there, and imagining the scale of the slaughter.

And toxic waste dumping in Africa is real, too. Here is a 2006 story about a Dutch shipping company which dumped tons of highly toxic waste (from the cleaning of sea ship gasoline tanks) - the Transfigura Ivory Coast case was settled for $45M, thanks to a Dutch Court. Amnesty Inernational and Greenpeace did important work. The money is actually being distributed in Africa, not used to fund NGO offices in Seattle. WR3A's attorney/stagaire, Fred Somda of Burkina Faso, was the first to make the point that planned obsolescence campaigns by OEMs should not distract from serious need for enforcement of the Basel Convention.

From Wikipedia 2013.07.28:

"The 2006 Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump was a health crisis in Côte d'Ivoire in which a ship registered in Panama, the Probo Koala, chartered by the Dutch-based oil and commodity shipping company Trafigura Beheer BV, offloaded toxic waste at the Ivorian port of Abidjan. The waste was then dumped by a local contractor at as many as 12 sites in and around the city of Abidjan in August 2006.

Ivory Coast kid poisoned by Trafigura - photo Al Jazeera

The gas caused by the release of these chemicals is blamed by the UN and the government of Côte d'Ivoire for the deaths of 17 and the injury of over 30,000 Ivorians, with injuries that ranged from mild headaches to severe burns of skin and lungs. Almost 100,000 Ivorians sought medical attention for the effects of these chemicals.^[1]

The substance was claimed by Trafigura to have been "slops", or waste water from the washing of the Probo Koala's tanks. An inquiry in the Netherlands, in late 2006, revealed the substance was more than 500 tonnes of a mixture of fuel, caustic soda, and hydrogen sulfide for which Trafigura chose not to pay a €1,000 per cubic metre disposal charge at the port of Amsterdam. The Probo Koala was turned away by several countries before offloading the toxic waste at the Port of Abidjan.^[2]^[3]

Fifteen people died, and thousands were treated. We don't want to forget how important it is to truly enforce the Basel Convention, when someone is avoiding the true cost of disposing toxics by dumping it in sacks on African shores. We do not want to label environmental watchdogs and enforcement agencies as "bullyboys".

At the Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit, Frederic Fahiri Somda made a clear case for the risk and danger of dumping toxic waste in Africa. But he also said it's absurd to compare TV repair to Tranfsigura.