Recycling Is NOT a "LIE". Alexander Clapp Fails Math Racially Profiles Geeks of Color

New York Times Opinion Editor Tim Schneider introduced us all to another "tell all" author, Alexander Clapp, with the headline "The Story You've Been Told about Recycling is a Lie".  It's been forwarded to me by a half dozen colleagues, readers, and scholars, who know that these "Recycling is a Lie" claims have been the whole reason this blog exists. 

It's strange.  "Health Care is a Lie".  "Barber Shops are a Lie". We never see those finger waving headlines.  But somehow a writer gets a flight - and yes, Alexander Clapp's focus in the Op Ed is on Agbogbloshie, in central Ghana - stays in a hotel and spends a few days with poor African primary school dropouts who burn wire (mostly from automobile harnesses, not electronics) which been in use in the city since the Akosomba Hydroelectric Dam was built in the mid 1960s.  And how he's an expert, telling everyone that people like me are lying about recycling.

I will start by disproving Mr. Clapp's completely false claims about Agbogbloshie, and then if I have time, take on his judgement of plastic recycling in Southeast Asia - which I've also visited decades ago.

Funny how Agbogbloshie is in the highest electricity consuming city - per capita - in subsaharan Africa... 100% electricity access. But Alexander Clapp finds TVs in the city dump, and jumps to a bizarre conclusion. 

Tim Schneider, let's start by taking about ELECTRICITY in Ghana (NASA, 2018), the number of televisions per household, and see if you can distinguish between the geniuses in Africa's Tech Sector and the primary school dropouts in Agbobloshie, and how the mystery is how good African Techs are and why that explains there is so very little E-Waste in Accra City dumps compared to a city of 5M in the US or Europe.  I sent Mr. Clapp a link to a 2011 Op Ed I had published in Vice, and sent him a Linkedin and X.com invitation to meet.

To the NY Times Editors (Tim Schneider et. al.)

While international Recycling is certainly not perfect, the patently false claims made by Alexander Clapp author of a new book Waste Wars: in "Recycling Is a Lie" have been called out by dozens of University research studies and noted authors such as Adam Minter (Bloomberg columnist and author of Junkyard Planet and Secondhand). 

I will start with my many filmed interviews of the so-called burner boys of the Agbognloshie described in the piece, at the scrap yard in Accra Ghana, whom I've introduced not just to Minter, but to many other reporters with integrity.

No one has ever seen a sea container unloaded there.  The idea that African city junkyards are fed directly by USA exports is absurd to anyone who has spent any significant number of years there (as I have).

The E-Waste there is collected from the streets of the city of 5 million by men with push carts. They collect it from the millions of businesses and households in Ghana who have had electricity since the 1960s. 

If you search for World Bank data on televisions per household since 1999 in greater Accra, the glaring question is why there are so few e-waste tons at the city dump.

The answer is that they repair and reuse electronics far longer than wealthy westerners do. Yes, Africans do conservation better than we do. A lot better. Poor people tend not to throw working stuff away.

Data exists.  Electricity consumption. Televisions per household. Lack of sales of new electronics. If the electronics they buy and test are really burned as junk, what is using the electricity and creating the blackouts and brownouts from record demand? If there were over 300 TV stations in Africa when I first arrived in 1984, who was watching them? Where did the critical mass of users (UN term) come from who made those investments possible? There were no BestBuys or Walmarts. But there were thousands of talented Geeks of Color, who deserve credit for creating African Mass Communications. Summing them all up as wire burners is a liberal own-goal.

It's distressing that authors fail to interview ANY, not one of, the talented importers in Africa's tech sector, and to see the NYT profile them as wire burners is painful. Those wire burners (who I also know pretty well), by the way are mostly burning automobile harness wire from the scrap automobiles. Racial profiling is not something do-gooders are immune to.

If you don't do any secondary research and expect a city of 5 million people to have a dump full of coconut shells and banana peels, it hardly qualifies you to call Africa's talented tech sector liars about what they are capable of selecting testing and reusing.  The Op Ed calling us liars doesn't have any data at all. The words "much of" did not use to pass editorial muster.

I don't have time to explain how plastic buyers fly here and inspect the plastic they buy and pay for not just the plastic but the shipping and the customs fees. But start with plastic consumption in rapidly emerging markets and you see that the plastic waste photojournalists see there was domestically generated. 

Who is the liar?

My son (now 28) spent a 7 week internship with Karim, a TV refurbisher in Ghana while at Middlebury College.  There is just no way Alexander Clapp can pass himself off as an expert if he believes wire burners are buying used electronics from Americans.

How can you explain the electricity, the TV stations, the traffic, the mobile phone towers in Africa if you are so much better at recycling and repairing than they are?

See the youtube video by Alex Wondergam, "In The Life:  Scrap Metal Men" to see how the scrap at Agbogbloshie is collected, busines-by-business, house-by-houses, street by street.  And you will start to get a feel for the mystery here - why is the Accra dump so SMALL?????  Because of men like Karim.  And I wanted to make sure people in my son's generation got to experience circuit-board-level repairs that Americans once did 50 years ago.

Same history in Asia, by the way. I wonder if Alexander Clapp or Tim Schneider has ever heard of Simon Lin, Terry Gou, or Lee Kun-hee?  All three started out like Karim.  As did Steve Jobs and Michael Dell.  See? If you can stop racially profiling the Tech Sector as "primitive recyclers" you might learn what I did.

The Empty Chair: Raise Your Hand If...

Raise Your Hand if you know who STEVE JOBS is.

Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who Jim Puckett or Basel Action Network is.

Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who TERRY GOU is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Simon Lin is.

Keep your hand up if you know Dr. Graham Mytton is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Prince Nico Mbarga is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Awal Muhamed, Yaro Muhammed, or Razak of Savelugu is. 

Keep your hand up if you've ever been to Savelugu.

Now unless you are author Adam Minter... my guess is your arms are back to your side. You'll need both of them when I conclude this talk.

The technology for "touch-screen" information feedback - sending data via touching a display device - was originally developed for cathode ray tube CRTs in Germany in (I think) the 1960s (based on my interview with Allen Liu, retired CEO of Net Peripheral, in 2016).  That patent was either abandoned or purchased by the Taiwanese engineers - graduates from University of Taiwan in Taipei - decades later. These tinkerers* applied to very small handheld touchscreen devices.  The "patent claims" by Apple and Samsung over smartphone touchscreen technology went nowhere 15 years ago (if anyone remembers those court cases, keep your hand raised) because neither invented it. Taiwan was the Cyrano of electronics invention, rising from "contract manufacturing" to schematic design wizards.  Terry Gou is the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, which manufactures most iPhones. Simon Lin is the Taiwanese CEO of Wistron and Acer.

Author, Author!

The seat next to me is empty, because those of you who lowered your hands might think I'm an expert. But everything I'm telling you today is either public data, available from World Bank and IMF loans for electric grid and hydroelectric projects which provide electricity to more than 90% of people in the world.  And if you had not interviewed fake experts like Jim Puckett of BAN, or Sasha Rainbow (Placebo MTV documentary director), or photojournalists like Kevin McElvaney and other "poverty porn purveyors" who got their information from Mike "Fishing as a Boy" Anane - that the center of capital city Accra was a remote fishing village in the 1990s... etc.

For twenty years, what I have learned by listening to the Tech Sector, listening to importers, listening to the founders of great OEMs, was derided by a lot of idiot white people who were given the privilege to sit before conferences in that chair.  People from Greenpeace, from European institutions, people like Interpol's Cornelius... people who probably meant well, but who were completely responsible for the false arrest, denigration, defamation, discrimination, and imprisonment of Tech Sector workers like Joe "Hurricane" Benson, an African who may well have become the "next: Steve Jobs, the "next" Terry Gou, or the "Next" Simon Lin. (Keep your hand raised if you remember Steve Jobs second company, "NEXT").

The Circular Economy of "e-waste" Parts: Opening Our Eyes to Value Added

The European theory of the "circular economy" focuses on the final value of metals, minerals, and petrochemicals. Today I'll try to explain, as succinctly as possible, why this "Ptolemy" circle (stuff revolves around us) wasn't recognized in Emerging Markets.

While researching the CRT Recycling Infrastructure for the Massachusetts DEP's first-in-the-nation statewide e-waste disposal program in 1999, I was told about Dr. Yuzo Takahashi (by Panasonic rep and Japan history buff David Thompson). Dr. Takahashi had published a brief book titled "A Network of Tinkerers: The Advent of the Radio and Television Receiver Industry in Japan."

As a "cross culture" professional (hired by Peace Corps to train incoming Americans in 1986), I found Dr. Takahashi's brief history lesson to make complete sense. Japan's electronics economy - and its imitators to be in Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and eventually mainland China - was in one special way COMPLETELY different from USA and Europe. It was a cultural difference.

... and reading about how Asians traded parts and components (readily visible on Alibaba, Exporters.com, RecycleINME, and Recycle.net back in those days) are seen by Asians starts in the Japanese living room.

When a society is building it's devices from components, the value added of the parts is far more important than the scrap value. Most USA and Europeans buy a pre-assembled electronic device sealed in a box and sold under warrantee. That blinded us to the parts and components trade, which is FAR more valuable than raw materials. Like aftermarket car parts, 20% of a scrap device is worth 80% of the money.

Africans Import Used Electronics Because They Are: ______

A)  "Africans buy used because they are Smart."

Emeagwali 1998 "Superbrain of Africa"

- The 1990s used equipment is less susceptible to ESD (electrostatic discharge)

- Equipment which lasts 15 years drops 50% in cost after 2 years.

- Warranty laws that protect consumers in "rich" nations make their used equipment more valuable.

- Capacitors that cost $2.15 can repair a Dell Optiplex worth $800.

- CRTs cost less, but withstand heat and are less prone to theft.

- If you have access to electricity and earn $3,000 per year, a $21 CRT monitor is smarter than a $800 monitor that may or may not work.

- If you are worried about burglary, CRTs are heavier as well as less valuable.

- If you buy new, there's a 33% chance you lose all your money.

- African reuse of WEEE is 85%-91% after repairs.  Brand new has a 33% failure rate.

@TheGuardian finally reports the other side of the "ban on exports" story, as Dell's eyes adjust to the light.  Maybe Africa's "superbrains" are not as primitive as the "experts" told us.  Hope they have stronger legs than HP's Africa venture of 2009 (year that "e-waste export hoax" hit top gears).

Top of the Tops: Li, Lee, Romney, Kate Middleton

THE TOP ASIAN LEADERS GOT THEIR START IN GOOD ENOUGH MARKETS -

Meetings of the Kings of repair and refurbish and semi-knockdown and shipping in Asia could tell us much about the "mystery" of Chinese imports of used electronics.   If they talk about old times... if walls could talk! Shipping line magnates offered cheap sea containers to electronics shangzai mock-upiers in Korea, who had  new plastic cases minted by Taiwanese molding companies, who had the wares re-assembled by contract labor commanders.  The history of development of the Asian Tigers, told through the eyes of "e-waste".

Kate Middleton found it missing

Here an article by By Jung-Ah Lee and Jeffrey Ng, via the Korea blog of Evan Ramsted of the WSJ.  It shows a rare meeting between two rich, wealthy, billionaire LEEs.. Li Ka-shing of Hong Kong's Cheung Kong Holdings, and Lee Kun-hee of South Korea's Samsung electronics.  Both are from the generation where Asian entrepreneurs learned to cloak used and repaired electronics (radio, stereo, tape player, computer) in new plastic garb, putting used CRTs into new "television" boxes, etc.  As young men, each lived in a country as poor as Africa is today.

Li Ka-shing is now one of the world's 20 richest men. He can get containers into Hong Kong.  Lee Kun-hee started out buying used Sony and Phillips gear, and found he could sell it for more if he got brand-new plastic cases, perhaps from (Taiwan) Simon Lin's Wistron, who began in the business of molding plastic for computer monitors and TVs.  Terry Gou, also of Taiwan, was able to assemble assembly lines to put it all together in Shenzhen's Foxconn, and Rowell Yang's Proview turned them into monitors for Dell, Panasonic, IBM, etc. at Proview...

Missing woman found on beach, after safe search, not to be Princess Kate Middleton

These tycoons wrote an end to Monopoly and patent troll boundaries when Japan, USA and Europe were extending trademarks and patents at the urging of established tech manufacturers.  They took a lesson from Japan, "A Network of Tinkerers", and built companies from "good enough" into global brands [Economist].

Wistron's Simon Lin, Proview's Rowell Yang, and Han Hoi Foxconn's Terry Gou represented the Taiwanese ownership Beijing Chinese generals wanted to fail.  But the money brought into southern China by those men, and the billions made by Li Ka-shing, and the rise of South Korea, proved irresistible.  Communist China couldn't beat 'em, and today has joined them.  But these guys are all of the age to remember the wars, the battles between Mao and Cheang Kai-Shek, the Korean War, all living in lands at the edge of starvation, dominated by Japanese and USA industrial giants, trying to just copy their way out to make a living.