Leyla Acaroglu tweeted us about a documentary, aired in Australia, as proof that electronics exports are bad. The reporter is a Brazilian woman, who is now in Singapore. I have an address for her to visit.
Giovana Vitola's documentary "E-Waste Hell" (shown on Australia's DateLine) follows the Basel Action Network recipe.
1. Fly to a big city in an exotic location.
2. Find bored kids burning TV devices (and refrigerators) at a city dump. Take film.
3. Interview an African (Mike Anane) who reads and believes BAN's fake 80-90% export statistics.
4. Go to the sea container yard and take pictures of televisions being unloaded (from Australia)
5. Interview the importer with a hidden camera.
Before you assume this is "same old same old", watch the documentary all the way through. I noticed a few things worth talking about.
First, the standard freeze frame screen shots show, once again, that the devices filmed in the landfill shot look nothing like the flat CRT (2003ish TV year, which would have been made a the Samsung Corning flat CRT furnace in Klang, Malaysia, which made the compact CRTs until 2011). She films one with broken plastic, but it's clearly shipping damage, and it's cosmetic, it doesn't mean it won't work.
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| No, I don't think so. Talk to StEP much? |
Second, the undercover film shows what Interpol recognized in its 2009 "organized crime" report. The sea container is being received by the family business... the importer says his brother lives in Australia, and bought the televisions. Another "Hurricane Benson" being associated with the dump, kilometers away.
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| Interpol: Brothers + buying = organization = mafia |
