A Modest Hypothesis: Did Guiyu and Agbogbloshie Make the River Cleaner?

A professor visiting China emailed me this morning and jokingly asked what he should look for in Guiyu or Wuhan in his spare time.

Sometimes a pithy email response makes the best blog fodder. My response:

You don't need to really go to Guiyu or Agbogbloshie if you have Google maps. Just find press coverage of Basel Action Network or Blacksmith Institute's toxic River sample. Then identify the river and find a site a few kilometers upstream and then Google search for contaminated water samples upstream.  

Based on that evidence, Guiyu and Agbogbloshie are making the river cleaner (though of course that is because the samples upstream were taken years earlier when it was even worse).

Science!!!

I'm referring of course to the Guiyu river samples from the largest textile factory hub on earth, upstream from Guiyu, whose water samples are nearly identical to the Bangladesh Lourajong River samples downstream from the Bangladesh second-largest textile manufacturing hub on earth.  Surprise, Guiyu's samples look the same as the river samples of the textile effluent samples upstream from Guiyu.  

Agblogblogshie: E-Waste Tsunami Covers Sodom-Gomorah in Understated Hell

Agbog-blog-shie Unplugged:  E-Waste Tsunami Covers Sodom & Gomorah in Understated Hell

Starved of facts and nuance, reports from African city of Accra - found on verge of catastrophe.

[BSNewsire, Accra, Ghana  April 1 2015]

Longtime a skeptic of "ewaste" dumping claims, WR3A Founder Robin Ingenthron arrived in Ghana last Sunday, and was shocked to find the situation far graver than he imagined.

"It began when our Delta Airlines flight was unable to land," said Ingenthron.   "We could see the junk televisions from 4,000 meters above Accra.   They were scattered in stacks, up to 90 feet high, on the runway and tarmac, and along the highway."

The Agbogbloshie dike, which separated greater Accra from the largest collection of electronic waste on the planet, had broken.    Teenagers could be seen pouring out of the Agbogbloshie fences, trying to regather the discarded computers and televisions.  But as fast as the kids worked to burn them, a tsunami of CRT televisions continued to spout through the gates, covering the streets of Accra and stalling traffic.

Ingenthron and other passengers were dropped via small white parachutes, like baby Dumbos, into the zoo of e-waste.  From the ground, the confessed electronics reuse kingpin came face to face with the toxic consequences of his "reuse excuse".

As reported in The Guardian, by Greenpeace, and at weather.com, "millions of tons" of obsolete electronics arrived in Agbobloshie each year.  At 34 units per ton, or 102 million TVs and monitors per year, 279,452 pieces had to be burned each day, keeping the 27 scrap boys who work in Abogbloshie on double shifts.  American households throwing away an average of 2.8 TVs per day are blamed for the mess.  Unfortunately, faced with the relatively small fires and lack of lighter fluid, the scrap boys had allowed a tinderbox of 10 decades of throwaways to amass.

Meanwhile Back in Yaounde Cameroon ... Eden is Noisy Picture

The place has grown since I lived there in the mid 1980s.  My wife is back in Yaounde again, and just shared the photo below by Facebook, the view from her hotel.



One thing is the same.  Electricity.  Yaounde had electricity when I arrived in 1984.  And had the first television broadcasts by the end of 1986 (showing Alex Haley's "Roots" in English to people who didn't speak English... it was awkward).

So, since television stations started broadcasting in 1986, not even counting the CRT televisions people had to watch VCR tapes with before that, how many "e-waste" televisions would you expect to find in the Yaounde dump in 2006?

If you can count over 12 of them in the Guardian's "e-waste Chernobyl" photos, how long were the twelve TVs sitting there on the ground?  Is it so difficult to image the city above can generate as many TVs as the town of Middlebury, Vermont?

Don't the statistics from the UN studies start to sound less crazy?   Doesn't it start to make sense that it's only 9% fallout (unrepairable, tossed) rather than 80%?  If it was only 20 percent reuse, how many containerloads of TVs would they need to set the city up with television?

Or maybe, that's not the point.

"Back to Eden Project".



Ah!  That's better!  That's the way Europe likes to remember Africa.

No TVs, no radios, no computers, no hassle.  A tropical paradise.

Now, cue the crouching children.  Oh, shoot.  No crouching children in the rain forests.  They are still crouching at the city dump.



Pictures of Africa suitable for Europe?   Picture this:  African kids playing free vintage games on used CRTs.  And no, they cannot hear our healthy "tsk, tsks" across the Atlantic.  

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets #5: Urban Youth

Basel Amendment to End E-Waste

When we discuss the rapid meshing of cultures in rapidly growing cities, and how the "last mile" of people tend to migrate to the first mile of track (and electric cable, TV broadcast, and internet), there's another factor to consider in making comparisons:

Age.

Rural families tend to be large.  My late buddy Yadji had a brother in Yenwa who had 12 kids and 4 wives, and said his goal was to have 25 kids.   I met other men in Cameroun who boasted of 30 children.  It has been well studied that this is a rural phenomena that tends to decluster within a couple of generations of living in a city.  Quarters are more cramped, school is expensive, and multilingualism is mandatory. Girls get to school more often, and educated women have fewer kids.

But life is tough in the slums for the first generation.  As Adam Minter told me, the young Cantonese may take the super-long workshift at Foxconn for a year or two, but they burn out and adapt more reasonable habits.   It's a difficult way out of rural poverty.  But the rural immigrants don't remain "suckers" for long...

It’s estimated there were 1.2-billion people in extreme poverty in 2010. That’s a decline of 700-million since 1990.  - Chronic Poverty Report

There are about six billion people in the "non-OECD", but "non-OECD" doesn't mean poverty or hunger for most.  The young kids from rural villages have it the worst, and they are the fodder for sex traders, child soldier warlords, pirates, drug runners, etc.  The worst jobs Africa has tend to fall disproportionately on the families with the most children.

Youths have a reputation in every country for thinking they are ten foot tall and bullet-proof.  If you want a challenging environment for OSHA rules, hire a bunch of recently graduated blue collar high schoolers.  The race of the kids doesn't matter, the geography doesn't matter, kids are willing to exploit themselves and to be explioted, especially if they are hungry.

But the flame of experience burns quickly.  You can fool them once.  You cannot exploit them permanently, you either have to hire more rural immigrants, or move to a place where they are more abundant.  And in the meantime,  you have grown an urban middle class which will stick around another 40-50 years.  Visit the demographics in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Incheon.

[China's] costs have grown while surplus labour has shrunk, as three decades of the one-child policy means China’s working age population will likely fall by 20% in the next 40 years, and by a further 20% from 2050 to 2100.

Tweets responding to Fareed Zakaria's links (to Jack Goldstone in TheCoversation.com) always yield interesting links.   Jonathan Berman's Havard Business Review (10/13) article "Seven Reasons Why Africa's Time is Now" points out, among other things, that Africa will have more working population than China by 2050, and that investments in "assessembly" jobs are already coming strong.   Today only 24% of Africa's $2 Trillion economy come from natural resource extraction.  The "resource curse" in Africa is beginning to look a lot like Indonesia and Malaysia, which (as I've frequently written) are seesawing away from resource economies into "tinkerer blessing" repair-and-assembly economies... the same path as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and originally Japan followed.   The less rural land a country has drawn ("lines on maps") around it, the faster it makes this motion.  Singapore was originally part of Malaysia, and it's stunning growth is as attributable to its cessation from rural geography as it is the country's difference from Penang, KL or Jahor Bahru.  The growth of Taiwan correlates to its ability to concentrate on the "first mile of track".

Cities shrink families. Smaller families have more disposable income.  That's the parentage of e-waste at African dumps, smaller families from a generation passed own TVs, and the TVs are scrapped by kids from rural families, more recently immigrated.  It's ripe for improvement and reform, either through StEP or Fair Trade Recycling or by Indian and Taiwanese entrepreneurs.    It has nothing to do with ratification of the "Basel Convention".  

Ask Nneka Egbuna (Soul is Heavy artist)

@Nnekaworld

BAN Spins: How the Basel Action Network Saved Africa

This month, the UK is moving to change its laws to stop the export of used televisions.  You know, the used TVs which make up 70% of sales in African markets, which created about 7 million households with TV in Nigeria.  And the CRT computer monitors, which Africans used to set up the internet cafes which led to the Egyptian Spring.

In about 10 days, new regulations will come into force to explain the 2009 arrest of an African, Joe Benson, who sold the TVs before the laws were changed.  You could call it "tying up a loose end".

But there's another loose end to attend to.   Last month, Basel Action Network publicly disavowed the "80% Export" statistic in response to a Bloomberg editorial (Adam Minter).   Also, BAN Executive Director Jim Puckett applauded this UNEP study.

"The majority of refurbished products stem from imports via the ports of Lagos. The interim results from project component 2, the Nigerian e-Waste Country Assessment, show that 70% of all the imported used equipment is functional and is sold to consumers after testing. 70% of the non-functional share can be repaired within the major markets and is also sold to consumers. 9% of the total imports of used equipment is non-repairable and is directly passed on to collectors and recyclers."

- Final report of the UNEP SBC, E-waste Africa Project,  Lagos & Freiburg, June 2011 

Here's another quote from the Nigeria E-Waste Assessment Study:

"Refurbishing of EEE and the sales of used EEE is an important economic sector (e.g. Alaba market in Lagos). It is a well-organized and  a dynamic  sector that holds the potential for further industrial development. Indirectly, the sector has another important economic role, as it supplies low and middle income households with affordable ICT equipment and other EEE. In the view of the sector’s positive socio-economic performance, all policy measures aiming to improve e-waste management in Nigeria should refrain from undifferentiated banning of  second-hand imports and refurbishing activities and strive for a co-operative approach by including the market and sector associations."

Sounds a lot like "Fair Trade Recycling".  So how does BAN balance the UN Study, showing 91% reuse, recommending AGAINST laws like CAER's Green-Thompson bill, with its applause for the crackdown by Interpol and Europe on exporters like "Hurricane" Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics?

First, embrace the study.  Second, take credit.

Quotes from Jim Puckett:

"I am very satisfied with the quality of the UNEP studies. I know well the authors and have worked with them and discussed findings with them.   These studies were funded due to our film Digital Dump which was shown at the Basel meeting whereafter the EU donated 1 million Euros to assist Africa in solving the e-waste crisis.  

"Nigeria was faced with a very serious abusive importation scene when we first arrived in 2005.  They took the appropriate action and Nigeria is one of the great success stories of addressing the e-waste crisis.  In China it has worsened, in Nigeria, they have really exercised control over the egregious toxic e-waste trade impacting their environment.  "

This is Jim Puckett's spin on the UNEP study, which took 279 sea containers in Nigeria (104 of which came from Joseph Benson's adapted country, the United Kingdom).   The researchers pieced all the TVs out, and found 91% reuse rate.   He tries (in the second quote) to take credit for the turnaround.

In fact, BAN was very, very busy in 2009 and 2010, the period when the 91% reuse was documented in the UNEP study.

Here is a report from the University of Northhampton (UK) which uses BAN as a source, stating only 25% of what Nigerian techs imported could be fixed or reused - complete with photos by master photographer Jim Puckett himself.  What a terrific turnaround it is, from only 25% reuse to 91%.

So fast a "turnaround" that the innocence/improvement happened before the crime!

Here is the infamous 2009 Interpol report, which uses the same (or similar, they never seem to be exactly the same) statistics from BAN's "study" on the percentage of waste in African used electronics exports.  Did Puckett notify Interpol that it was actually much better in 2009?  No.  BAN issued a press release, referring to the Africans as "Organized Crime".  And the source of Interpol's data on the extent of the dumping - MSU - cites who else?  BAN, their report that 80% of exports of CRTs are for primitive recycling.

More from 2009 and 2010:  The smoking guns

Peace Through Trade Between Recycling Tribes

"How can there be peace without people understanding each other; and how can this be if they don't know each other?"   -  Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lester B. Pearson

How can there be fair trade without people trading with each other, and how can this happen if they don't know each other?

I make many arguments about the wisdom of prohibitions, and the unintended consequences of isolationism in the name of anti-exploitation.   Drawing the blinds on Africa won't make the poor children go away.  

But I also know that the e-waste being generated by the "other billions of people" in the non-OECD is piling up, just as it is here.  Exporting used equipment may not be the direct cause of those piles, but it  will not by itself solve those piles.   Fair Trade Recycling is intended to attach conditions to the sale of used equipment which seed the collection and proper recycling of that equipment in the nations generating it.

When IT buyers from Africa come over to inspect equipment they may buy, they are exposed to a facility which is properly dismantling the equipment they don't want.   They don't see a big heavy shredder that they could never hope to afford.  Instead, they see hand disassembly, people doing jobs they can imagine their family or tribe members doing.

(Yes, I used the word tribe.   It's cool, trust me.)

Fair trade recycling is about getting to know each other.  Even if no price is agreed to and no sale takes place, simply agreeing to meet an African, Chinese, or South American buyer, to shake their hands, and to listen carefully to learn what it is they want to buy, that is getting to know the e-waste trade.

Creating laws and corporate policies which ban the trade preserves ignorance. 

I hung out with a couple of very nice people at the ISRI recycling trade show this week.  Excellent people.  They were talking about people who stack and pack old televisions, like the ones that make up 60% of our collections.  I said I'd never met such a person.  I think that maybe if they relax their policies against exporting used equipment, they will hear out more of the buyers, and get to know them.

Whether or not they make money, they'll learn how make a little more rare the stereotype that never actually exists.  Most of the information that has been provided online and through the press about used electronics trade and recycling has been concocted by people who don't know what they are talking about, and are making it up as the go along.   That's the same problem with people who criticize alternative marriages, or want to choose neighborhoods or co-workers based on race or color.  

The more we isolate ourselves, the more we don't learn good.

Vermont Ilsley Public Library: Vermont Child E-Waste Tinkerers

Today (Friday March 15, 2013) is an "In-Service Day" in Addison County, and the Middlebury public schools are closed.   One of those days that's not a holiday for parents, and we schedule little things like tonsillectomy (my son, 8:00AM), or trips to the dentist (my 16 year old twins) if we are thinking far enough ahead.

If you are in Middlebury Vermont today, and you didn't plan that far ahead, here's another opportunity.  Good Point Recycling and the Ilsley Public Library are putting on a Special Event for Kids.  In the spirit of the "maker movement", "yankee ingenuity", and can-do tinkerer blessing, we will exploit ... 'err.. hold on, I'm getting an urgent call from our PR office.

Imagination Vacation:  Tinkering With Technology

Event:

Imagination Vacation: Tinkering with Technology

Start:

March 15, 2013 10:30 am

End:

March 15, 2013 12:00 pm

Category:

Kids

Updated:

March 1, 2013

Venue:

Community meeting room

Address:

Ilsley Public Library,Middlebury

This hands-on workshop allows school-age children the freedom to explore the art and science of  ”how stuff works” in the spirit of the popular “maker movement.”  Library staff and re-use experts from Good Point Recycling will help you use hand tools to explore the mechanics of a variety of technologies from computers to telephones.  Bring your own hand tools, such as screwdrivers and pliers if you have them.  Adults and welcome too.

Environmental Malpractice Part 4: Poverty Porn

Born in:   Mexico, Mexico, USA, Palestine, USA, Taiwan, USA, Malaysia

So at our meeting in Vegas, Jim Puckett made the case that the world will be better if we all obey "international law", and that defamation of technicians, and closure of sustainable repair and reuse factories, is acceptable "collateral damage".  Jim presents himself, again and again, as an authority on Basel Convention.

The use of international treaties to simultaneously protect the 6 billion people in "non-OECD" nations from ... bubble, bubble, toil and trouble...  and the same time generate millions of well-intentioned dollars for a Seattle non-profit... This is not BAN.org's invention.  Poverty Porn has been around for decades.

Since my days studying international development at Carleton College, and as both a volunteer and employee (cross-culture trainer) for Peace Corps Africa, we've been aware of the "poster child" syndrome.  Here's a recent editorial on "Poverty Porn" by Nathaniel Whittemore at Co.Exist  (and here's a film from an admittedly donation-based organization in Africa, MamaHope.org, which does at least give hope for a different message).

The Hollywood and not-for-profit-Guilt-Industrial-Complex are really nice people to hang around with, as Jim and Mike both were in Vegas.  They are nicer people than I am.   Calling them accidental racists or ayatollahs of #ewaste was a decent into frustration.    If we are to turn them around, we need to first get their attention (which I've done) but then to find an alternative to the touchy word "racism".

Marketing Confirmation Bias for E-Waste

Here's the simple thing about electronics recycling.  If you are an electronics recycler, which would you rather unload into your building today?

1)  Two trailers of gently used rich people stuff (high repair and reuse value)
2)  One trailer of gently used rich people stuff, and one trailer of obsolete "ewaste"
3)  Two trailers of obsolete "ewaste"?

Does the answer to this question depend on your race, your language, or your identity?  Or is it a universal obvious fact that we prefer items of more value?

No tech or geek I know cares about the "nationality" of a device.  A Chinese geek will prefer a P4 to a P2.  An African geek, working diligently on repairing a P3 for hours, will quickly abandon his invested time if a newer laptop is set on the desk.   Everyone prefers gently used rich people stuff.

If this is boring and obvious, then why is 100% of the dialog about banning poor people from importing rich peoples stuff?  Why are the African e-waste PACE project assuming "no imports"?

Dictators and Planned Obsolescence.

It's normal that BAN has a confirmation bias about the plight of poor kids who have toxics in their blood.  Even if the toxics from leaded gasoline or gold mining accounts for far more poisoning, any poisoning of any child seems unacceptable.  And if something is completely unacceptable, we will have a confirmation bias (ban exports) towards anything that appears to move the other direction.  They see the import glass as 20% empty.

But those of us who have lived in the developing world and have friends there see that geekdom is the opposite of the "resource curse", and that the jobs creasted overseas by the trailerloads of gently used rich people stuff are far better for Africans than other jobs available.  So our bias is that the import glass is 80% full.

I'm as guilty of confirmation bias as any human, I'm going to get a high from UNEP studies which confirm my 2005 hypothesis.   But I have no source of funding to promote my bias.

BAN got another rich company, Sims, to join their E-Steward campaign.   The origin is California, where counties were disqualifying Sims bids, and in particular, California Universities... which are the biggest source of trailerloads of gently used rich people tech there are.

Running rich people tech through a shredder means that the African and Asian and South American e-waste recyclers will get more trailers of obsolete junk, low profit material, as a percentage.  We have demonstrated in Retroworks de Mexico that they are able to do that work, that it's possible to do by hand.  But if they can do it for the domestic junk, why can't they do it for the 20% of bad stuff in the export trailer?  If they can buy tested working, and then properly recycle the unit 5 years later when it stops working, why can't they properly recycle it if they cannot repair it, and keep the money - the big money - they would make on it if they can?

Banning exports of used electronics is a marketing campaign which touches on the basest biases that Europeans and Americans have.   Finding a small piece of electronics, upgraded from a working unit or replaced from a unit sent for repair, is an obvious example of confirmation bias.  If you have set up an E-Stewards program based on no exports, or you've built a shredder to manage California material, or you are selling brand new product and don't want "market cannibalization" competition with your own used product, or you are a dictator who doesn't want tweets and youtube to be widely accessible, then you can all agree, can't you, that the tiny capacitor replaced by a geek of color makes the entire trailerload illegal waste?

And you can pool your resources to market over and over again, pictures of dirty, poor, sad children... whose parents will unload two trailerloads of material today at their African e-waste processing plant.

HR 2284: Banning A-Waste and E-waste

Missing children, typical used car sale

It's a modest New Year's proposal.

The most toxic product Americans own in their lifetime is the automobile.

Filled with toxics, flammables, carcinogens, ewaste, inhalants and pollutants, and capable of violent safety violations, the cars have an agency, the Department of Motor Vehicles, to ensure proper stewardship, from cradle to grave.

Unfortunately, our government has let us down!

Stop the feeding of used antifreeze to poor kids

Automobiles don't last forever.  Americans like buying new automobiles.  Especially middle class and wealthy Americans.  We spend billions getting the latest new wheels.  But what happens with the old cars we discard?

Sadly, wealthy neighborhoods have a dirty little secret.  The used car dealerships and junk car lots are never found on Fifth Avenue.  Old, used cars are passed along to poor people, with all their toxics along for the ride.  Whenever you buy replace your old car, you are complicit in exploitation and environmental crime.

Watchdog groups indicate that eighty percent of used car sales go to people with less money than the people who bought new cars.  All the problems and headaches of the old car inevitably flow to people with less means to deal with the toxic tons of deadly waste.

E-Stork II: Where Poisoned e-Waste Babies Come From

The first E-Stork post was a tale of three rivers:  Blackstone, Louhrajang, and Cape Fear.  Each poisoned river was traced upstream;  in each case, a textile mill was found.

When science sends journalists upstream, to witness the cause of pollution,  it's excusable to use a poster child baby in the story.  In the case of the Blackstone River, Saturday Evening Post stories about mill working children brought the pollution of the river into stark, cognitive risk.  Laws corrected the textile mills, and the rivers healed.

China's industrial revolution looks a lot like the Blackstone River Valley in the early 1900s.  Regulations may be ignored, but ignoring regulations is being documented.   This group of professors in China is bringing attention to an unpermitted steel mill (shanghaiscrap.com).  They aren't using baby pictures, but they are generating attention by being viral on the web.

Consensus over regulation begins with facts and science, getting the upstream and downstream on the table.   Annie Leonard is right about demand for "Stuff" driving competition to cut corners.   But the WSJ is also right, that cheaper goods benefit the poorest people (both in manufacturing and consumption).  It's easy for the rich to assert that Cheap is Bad.   If it helps you sleep at night to wear certified organic wool, good for you.

EPA took an important step in 2008 to try to bring groups to the table to air out such a compromise, in what eventually was labelled R2 or Responsible Recycler certification.