Although I had a degree in International Relations, had spent a semester at the UN, and made a career in the science of development, I racially profiled someone in Singapore in 2005. I know it now. I deserve a rusty radiator for racism.
On my way back from Guangzhou, where I had gone for a second visit to see the second-hand shops of Foshan and the "Big Secret Factories" of CRT reuse, I stopped in Malaysia and Singapore for a couple of days. Armed with my camera, I decided to hunt for some "exotic photos" to prove that I too, like Jim Puckett of BAN.org, had "been there". Now, Interpol is trumpeting their act. with a project to describe their efforts to arrest "criminals" I refer to as the "geeks of color".
I understand where David Higgins' group at Interpol is coming from. E-Waste is in the news, and we want to show our credibility, show we have been there, walked the streets, and have seen the problem. We work for the (world) government, and are here to help.
The shop below I presented in a Powerpoint slide at a NERC.org conference as an example (an olive branch to Puckett and Westervelt) of clearly bad imports. I had stayed on the street, waiting for the man who owned this shop (Mr. Teck Recycle) to roll up the metal door. He had a ladder on the inside, which he needed to physically climb up to the ceiling to start to descend items for resale on the street.
I acted like I knew where this guy's material came from. I didn't.
It seemed the guy had packed this 4M x 10M street shop "to the gills" with imports, and was never going to be able to reuse it all. I represented this person as an example of "toxics along for the ride", of being an example of the primitive importer, and contrasted him with the SKD (semiknockdown or semi-knock-down) factories I wanted to "reform", in our view.
I confess that I assumed this was all recently imported material. I had absolutely no evidence of that. We now know that the 6 billion people in the "non-OECD" generate far, far more used electronic scrap than the OECD does.
Lets teach them all the missionary position, put them in top hats, and certify them as non-primitives.
Was Mr. Teck Recycle importing at all? Singapore, though not "OECD", was already as wealthy then as California. It had become wealthy via the "Tinkerer's Blessing", the reuse and refurbishment trade, which evolved into contract assembly, then into ODM (Original Design and Manufacture). Sure, some of this material may have been imported, but I had no idea how long before Mr. Teck Recycle got it. What percentage came from residents of Singapore, which at that time had a higher percentage of engineering degrees, and higher percentage of online high speed bandwith, than the USA's Silicon Valley? Why did I immediately assume the Singaporean shops were filled with USA "toxics along for the ride" (a phrase I pounded at the NERC audience?)
Sure, it was a sound theory. Maybe some of this stuff did come "along for the ride". But I had no proof, all I had was a need to position myself not-too-distantly from Basel Action Network's "80% Primitive Recycling" export statistic, which we now know is no more true than 80% of Los Angeles black teenagers are gang members and high school drop outs (BTW that's said tongue in cheek, it's obviously untrue, but the fact I have to apologize and point that out shows the root of whitey's problem).
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