Poison Apples 2: Profiting from Ewaste Cures

Things that seemed very important to write about 6 years ago (about things like desktop CRT monitor remanufacturing in Asia, and California SB20) now seem less vital.  But while public discussion of the topics in this blog has quieted, and some wins (like Mr. "Fishing as a Boy" Anane being actively edited out of certain documentaries) institutionalized, individual cases of racial profiling of the emerging market's tech sector continue. I receive a lot of thank yous "under the table".

What I have learned over the 11 years of writing this blog is that being passionate about environmentalism is like being passionate about cures for human sickness and disease. It is a hot topic until the disease is cured, but that different populations struggle with different levels of risk.

And the importance of being green is not passeé.  The theme is to improve environmental health the way we improved human health. Sometimes, that means standing up to the liar wearing the doctor's white coat, promising to end suffering by selling a cure they've barely tested....

E-Waste Policy looks a great deal, through the lens of history, like 1960s infant formula sales.  My mom recently recalled that when she was breastfeeding me at the hospital in Harrison Arkansas in 1962, a nurse in the room asked her, "What are you trying to prove?"  Mom was only 19... but thank god she could see past the nurse's labcoat.

Headline Says where E-Waste Is Born: No USA Birth Certificate

Back in 2010, before the blog's "Bullyboys" Series, before the "Firehose" Series, and before "Environmental Malpractice", or the E-Stork blogs, The UN released a report.  It said that if all the rich nations completely stop all (hypothetical, mythological, or actual) #ewaste exports from the OECD to developing nations - stopped 100% - tomorrow - you'd do nothing to stop the posterchild photos.

UNICEF photographers share the $$

India has never been a significant destination for E-Waste, its ports are very tightly controlled.   The images of Techdogs and Nerddogs (to differentiate from "slumdogs", for those of you who don't yet get it) fixing stuff in Dharvi and Mumbai slums has nothing, nothing to do with Basel Convention or Basel Ban Amendment or CAER's export ban.

In fact, if you erased every international border crossing tomorrow, poor people would still be trying to get stuff from rich people in their own countries, from people on the other side of the tracks.  Rich people buy new stuff and poor people fix good-enough-for-them stuff.  It's like that in the USA used car and thrift shop market... jeez its so obvious I want to shoot myself for writing it again.

But at the E-Scrap Conference in Orlando, I still met lots and lots of people who think the Green-Thompson E-Waste Bill is a solution to primitive wire burning.  Big Shred will save the brown children.  And Lagos, with 6.9M households with television as of 2007, will... um... uh.

Yeah.   About that.  Here's the press release from 2010, the year that the Bullyboy Crackdown started, the year Greenpeace told UK journalists BAN's story about how the dumps in Africa were filled with material from the UK.   The year Joe Benson was targeted, a year before the Ghana E-Waste Assessment, and two years before the Nigerian E-Waste assessment studies found Benson and similar exporters sent 91% reuse - better than brand new product.

Urgent Need to Prepare Developing Countries for Surge in E-Wastes
Rocketing sales of cell phones, gadgets, appliances in China, India, elsewhere forecastProper e-waste collection, recycling key to recovering valuable materials, protecting health, building new green economyBali, 22 February 2010 - Sales of electronic products in countries like China and India and across continents such as Africa and Latin America are set to rise sharply in the next 10 years.
And, unless action is stepped up to properly collect and recycle materials, many developing countries face the spectre of hazardous e-waste mountains with serious consequences for the environment and public health, according to UN experts in a landmark report released today by UNEP.
Issued at a meeting of Basel Convention and other world chemical authorities prior to UNEP's Governing Council meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the report, "Recycling - from E-Waste to Resources," used data from 11 representative developing countries to estimate current and future e-waste generation - which includes old and dilapidated desk and laptop computers, printers, mobile phones, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions.
In South Africa and China for example, the report predicts that by 2020 e-waste from old computers will have jumped by 200 to 400 percent from 2007 levels, and by 500% in India
By that same year in China, e-waste from discarded mobile phones will be about 7 times higher than 2007 levels and, in India, 18 times higher.
By 2020, e-waste from televisions will be 1.5 to 2 times higher in China and India while in India e-waste from discarded refrigerators will double or triple. (continued)

Basel Action Network Accuses R2 Certified Companies of Illegal Acts

On June 17, Basel Action Network released another attack piece, accusing R2 Solutions of violating international law.  In doing so, BAN has indirectly attacked my company, which chose to pay for R2 Certification rather than accepting E-Stewards written offer to pay BAN to certify our operation to their own E-Stewards Standard.

Here's an "as concise" critique of BAN's "concise critique", based on the following international law.

Article 17 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states: 

1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation. 2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Five Fundamental Flaws.   A Concise Critique of the R2:2013 Standard  / June 17, 2013

"The [R2] Standard suffers greatly from its seeming intentional avoidance of international law as it refuses to acknowledge or recognize the definitions and obligations, decisions and guidelines of the Basel Convention, which all developed countries, except the United States have ratified and implemented and is now globally adopted by 180 countries." - Jim Puckett

There are three problems with BAN's analysis of their competitors at R2 Solutions.  The third is the most important.

Nairobi and Lima Prove Pixelized World Theory

From the patio above 28 Av Julio in Miraflores, Peru, I can see I've been through 5 different worlds in 12 hours.

The old cliche "first world, second world, third world" was adapted in the 1970s to make the distinctions that "OECD" completely and utterly failed to make.  Within "non-OECD" there were two entirely different worlds.  The "third world/second world" was then dropped by the 1990s, and the term "emerging world" and "emerging markets" was coined.  It better described the BRICK nations (Brazil Russia India China Korea) or BRIC (when it was pointed out that Korea didn't even belong is that pack, it was an industrial superpower like Japan by then).

What we are witnessing in Kenya and Peru is that the entire concept of "nation" and "country" is completely inept at describing movements of recycling, raw material, and waste.   Geographically, it's like trying to fit Youtube into your TV Remote.  It used to be enough to talk about "what country".  Information is pixelizing the world.

Miraflores resembles Barcelona, Penang resembles Miami, Nairobi resembles Guadalajara.

When it's a super-populated nation, like China, the cities like Shenzhen-Guangzhou-Hong Kong conglomerate into something which is so far apart from "OECD" definitions that Basel Convention becomes an NBA referee in a kickboxing ring.

We drove through some very tough barios last night, and our car was accosted by a legless man at an intersection.    I'm not suggesting that the SuperMarcado (Gringo Supermarket) represents the reality of life across Peru, or that the hotel in Nairobi erases Agbogbloshie.  There is a Tech Mall in Nasr City as well as a Goma Market.   There is Guiyu and there is Foxconn.

Most of the waste in the dumps at these cities, and yes I mean e-waste, comes from inside these countries.

I'll try to get pictures of everything.  Everybody in Lima.   We'll feed all their faces into a computer and spit out a trade policy.   Well geez, it makes more sense than CA SB20.

How we think about  Peru:



How many people live in Peru


How others live in Peru



How people recycle in Lima


How Lima Sees Lima

Spinning: Where are WEee in Africa Study 2011

Readers know I'm following the coverage of the UN studies of Africa (Where are WEee in Africa" 2011) with great interest.  Elizabeth at IFIXIT wrote a good piece, which was hommaged at Treehugger.  The USA Voice of America (which, having lived in Africa, is important), covers the story pretty well, as does Science Daily.

You will remember we covered the first releases of the report HERE at Good Point Ethical Recycling blog in April, 2011, and have been squealing like pigs for 10 months, trying to get attention to it.

For those of us working and trying to help these emerging nations, there are babies in the e-waste bathwater.

The value of this informal economy is difficult to gauge, although the formal and informal income of those engaged in the e-waste sector in Ghana is estimated to be between $106 million and $268 million per year. VOANews.com

The goal of our Fair Trade Recycling is to make this better, not worse.  But we have to be realistic about banning the trade, taking the jobs away without studying them, as HR2284 will do.  End of life and lifecycle science is spinning in its grave.

Where the loads were studied most carefully (176 containers analyzed in Lagos), 70% were fully functional, and half of the remainder were repaired... that's 85% reuse.  Moreover, the report says what we've been saying - this is a huge opportunity, if done correctly (e.g. with fair trade):

In contrast to the informal recycling sector, where collection and recycling of E-waste is almost exclusively carried out by individuals largely consisting of migrant laborers who are often stigmatized in African societies as «scavengers», refurbishment is viewed as a relatively attractive economic opportunity for an increasingly well-educated, semi-professional labor force. In Accra (Ghana) and Lagos (Nigeria), the refurbishing sector provides income to more than 30,000 people.

The report is not without all kinds of caveats and cautions.  Clearly the authors are sensitive to the controversy of the imports of "e-waste" they are studying.

Here's a piece of friendly advice.  If you are a white European expert on environment, and someone comes to you for a quote on the UN Study, you might want to read at least the executive summary.  If you are a reporter, like Cal Milmo of the Independent, you may want to dig a bit next time a Nigerian is convicted of exporting e-waste.


UPDATE NOTE:  I've now met Susanne Dittke of Envirosense via Skype.  She is very smart and very interested in getting to the facts.  She was alarmed that her quote was used as it was in the article below and has contacted the reporter to retract it, said she had not read the UN Report and hadn't realized the article was about something she hadn't even seen...     


I've left some of the original "reaction" to the quote as it appeared in the trade press, but I do not want to imply any ill will on Susanne's part.  Her role as the consultant to this South African e-waste recycling plant is extremely important.   I'll write more about it in a future post.  The use of her quote to "spin" the UNEP report was well in my no-fly zone, but she is a top notch asset to the discussion so long as the reporter tells her what the heck she is commenting on.

Cleaning Up #EWaste Madness Mess

STORY:  Africa turns imported electronics into hundreds of millions of dollars in jobs.


BLACK HISTORY MONTH.... The point has been made.   The anti-export, e-waste watchdog organizations were fueled by an intoxicating certainty that globalization was "externalization", and that world trade is inherently suspect.

They created a fake statistic, out of very thin air, that 80% of the "ewaste" in the USA is exported, and that 80% of the imports into places like Africa were junk.   The math failed on face value, but the images of "scrap boys" banging metals apart carried the day.   Splitting copper from steel in motors was mysteriously labelled "toxic".

Despite my best efforts, in posts like "E-Waste Madness 2010", "We Shouldn't Have to Make That Choice 2009",  and Motherboard in 2011, the "Ewaste police" gathered steam.  I took arguments I'd made in trade print in 2002 (Recycling Today, "Setting a Higher Standard") and used the pulp blogging to document the innocence of the Geeks of Color.  Sometimes I wrote with facts and statistics, sometimes with reason, sometimes with literary allusions aimed at the higher education field, sometimes in other languages.  Sometimes I really stuck my neck out and named influential people who should know better, like Donald Summers, Josh Mailman, Solly Granatstein, and Terri Gross.   Sometimes, I use video and tweets.  But perhaps the most important efforts have been to document the actual trade, and fight the fraudulent statistics with real numbers, examined by grad students and professors in several continents.

E-Scrap News is the first major newspaper to call a duck a duck.   The stats on imports into Africa were fake. Basel Secretariat believed them, and sent researchers, and found ... exactly what I've been describing, in posts like Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo.   The UN found several hundred scrap boys in dumps.  But they also found, shocker of shockers, 30,000 repair and reuse techs, producing value and internet, the exact same way as Singapore, South Korea, and Benjamin Franklin got started.  Buying surplus media production (display units or printing presses), and making them "good enough" for the "good enough market", creating sustainable jobs with added value.  Had CBS 60 Minutes spent one more day in China, and followed the film I'd given them, they would have seen the same thing.

So now what?  Will the E-Waste Madness now end?

UN Pixelizes World: Rich City, Poor City

Wealth and population overlays with national boundaries....  The mega-city (combined borders) of Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen now hosts 120 million people!  That's comparable to Japan!  Every IPad, Android, Blackberry, and Kindle are manufactured there.  And Guiyu is their scrap yard for Chinese-grown "e-waste".

Now, as if comparing OECD Greece to non-OECD Singapore was not silly enough, look at the way cities fit in with the definitions of OECD and the Basel Convention.  83% of the world's population which lies in the "non-OECD"...  Many are poor peasants in the countryside.   But many others live in thriving urban environments.   People in the west are equating "non-OECD" with "third world", and they are quite, quite different.  The UN Report shows that cities are growing like crazy overseas, and they have billionaires and subways as well as their own dumps for their own upgraded "stuff".


The OECD, in deciding how to admit new member "nations" onto the club, has to consider the entire country, no matter how crazy the Europeans were when they drew the lines on the map.  Russia, a non-OECD member, has to answer for Siberia to get admitted.   Recent new OECD members (suddenly ok to trade with, as of last year, according to HR2284) Israel, Estonia, Slovenia and Chile have smaller borders, so perhaps it was easier to admit them.

Brazil will be a tough "country" to approve, even if Rio and San Paulo have converged into a booming mega-city.  Penang and Borneo are both inside the national boundaries of Malaysia - as Singapore used to be... expect OECD to get around to them later.  A lot of China may still be "third world-ish" for years, but look at the map of Chinese markets - cities which have converged to smart phone use on a par with USA and Europe.

So cities are growing, and changing, and getting richer, but the countrysides aren't keeping up.  Kind of like our own USA countrysides, the outskirts are where the landfills are.  Meanwhile, the mega-cities already generate most of the "e-waste" in the world...

The distribution of goods, waste, and wealth within districts of those cities of the world accounts for MOST of the trade of e-waste between "rich" and "poor"... without export or import.  The poor of Dharavi slum of Mumbai have virtually NO imports from the USA (India strictly filters and regulates scrap imports), but they have plenty of e-scrap.  The growing wealth of Mumbai creates more than enough used electronics to keep the slumdog recyclers busy.