Missing Poverty: Poverty Comedy to Clear the Air

“Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open.” - Atticus Finch  To Kill a Mockingbird

Thinking today of walking a mile in another man's shoes.   And soon I'll be walking where, according to the press, "hundreds of millions of tons" are dumped in "the most toxic place on earth".

Every summer in the Ozarks, I sat in the back seat on a regular drive back and forth between my dad's mother's house in Forsyth (Taney County seat) and my mothers parents home in Ridgedale (Arkansas line).  US Highway 65 was one lane each direction.

migrant family of Arkansas - wikipedia hillbilly

My Grandpa, when he drove, told me about how it was one lane, and unpaved, not too long ago.   By the time I was a teenager, a four lane highway had split his farm in two.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, as now, most of the signs were aimed at tourists.   Branson Missouri would go on to become a top USA tourist destination in the 1990s.

Many of the signs were about hillbillies.

It was the place to see American poverty... Poverty comedy is the place you land when Poverty Porn loses its shock value.

Hillbilly (for internetional readers, and those under 40) was a very popular term in the 1900s, to describe backwards, unwashed, ignorant, and happy Americans who lived in exotic places, like the Ozarks and Appalachia.  Snuffy Smith, Lil' Abner, and Pogo were popular Sunday morning comic strips.   The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Petitcoat Junction, and Green Acres were popular comedies.   Soon the movies Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes would appear to make it scary.   Silver Dollar City was the county's #1 draw, and hillbilly music shows would grow to line the strip between it and Branson.  It was about the same time that Sanford and Sons, and Good Times, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby were making fun of urban African American poverty.

I started to ask why we never went to one of those shows.

My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and great cousins had the same answer.   There wasn't a single true "hillbilly" in one of them shows.   Nobody in the USA knew anything about the people who lived here.   The whole thing was a Hollywood exaggeration... exaggerated to such a grand proportion that it became an embarrassment.

"A tourist came up to me the other day and asked me where they could see a real hillbilly!  I said 'you're lookin' at one right now!"

I never heard a tourist ask anyone that, but I heard the claim from many friends and relatives over the years.  Usually it was about a tourist with a camera, who wanted to take a picture of a "real hillbilly".

Poverty Comedy isn't as funny when an outsider makes the joke.   It's a shade of poverty porn.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.” Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

Snapshot of Lagos Nigeria. Not your daddy's "Third World" country

When Basel Action Network shows a junk television at an African dump, and then accuses African traders of doing mysterious favors to avoid UK or USA's recycling costs, it hits a chord... with people who have never lived in Africa.

If you've spent time in Africa, you know the real problems in Africa are things like TRAFFIC JAMS.



Multiple reports show that most of Africa's e-waste is generated by Africans.  Cities like Lagos (over 15M inhabitants) have televisions and computers and cell phones, have had them for decades.  

And it's a good thing.  People are much more likely to get their electronics from repair and reuse, which creates sustainable African jobs, for geek entrepreneurs, than from new tantalum mining in the Congo or tin mining of Indonesian coral islands.

And it's fundamentally good.  That's why it's so criminal for UK's Environmental Agency to put the Geeks of Color, like Joe Benson, in jail.

From 2010 to 2014, Africa's Internet usage increased by...

5,219.6 %

Here's a link to da stats http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

EU E-Waste Policy: Disarming Friendly Fire & Environmental Malpractice (Part B)

In Part A, I gave RecyHub the review they asked for, suggesting they are trying to place themselves in a halfway point between fallacy and fact.   It's a slippery slope, being cozy with a fallacy.

Why RecyHub thought we'd applaud the webpage?  Probably because in Part B, they call for "improving the informal sector".  Sounds a lot like what WR3A called "E-Waste Reform" eight years ago, when we too tried to compromise with the Ayatollah of E-Waste.

B) E-waste is a source of income and an incipient local industry. Metals and plastics can be scrapped out of old electronics and be sold in local markets for smelting and recycling, closing the materials loop. In Ghana families from the North send their kids to work in the dump because they value more the scarce but regular cash they get for the metals recovered than the irregular income from agriculture. For some Western countries it doesn’t make economic sense to manually remove the metals from e-waste, because it’s labour intensive, while for countries with lower wages it’s more suitable. In contrast, components like printed circuit boards can only be recycled in a handful of factories in the global North (and now in India too, by Attero) and therefore could be exported back, following a philosophy called “Best of Two Worlds” (PDF, 1Mb.). Improving the informal sector, including its workers’ health and safety conditions, could result in a local industry of e-waste recycling.

What about the "worst of two worlds"?   In part A, @RecyHub implies that the worst is when Europe fills boats with toxic waste electronics and dumps the waste on primitive beaches.   I don't think that's the right diagnosis.   How about an alternative diagnosis?

The worst of the West is its willingess to assume the worst of the blacks.

The "White Knights" of E-Waste reform accept a comic, rude, and insulting premise.

With less of "the right tools" we can stop shredding value to begin with.  Below is my modest proposal, our proposed model at WR3A:

1. Start with carefully assessing the situation.   Start by asking questions, get a proper diagnosis.
2. Sell Africans what they want to buy - working and repairable displays and computers.  They prefer a 3 year old they can repair to a 6 year old "tested working".   The point is, give African buyers exactly what they want. Ask them why they want things if you are confused, but don't be condescending.
3. Once a price is agreed to (about $7,000 per container), offer the Africans a deal.   Give them back $3,000 of the containerload if they take back used electronics from African cities each time they sell one.  This creates a takeback infrastructure at the used retailers, just as used auto yards are connected to the auto scrap yards.
4. With the other $4,000 buy tools, buy better used equipment, do something to incentivize the proper management of used electronics.
5. Fly your Western staff to work in Africa (as Vermont does with its staff sent to Mexico), and fly African scrappers to cross train with your staff in Europe (as Vermont does with partners in Africa, Latin America, and Asia).

This does not presume a "best" or "worst", or even the geography of "two worlds".

This takes the $7000 which is WASTED in EU WEEE shredders and uses it to finance the simple hand-disassembly which you've already recognized is a darn good job for many Africans.  I don't label this as "inside the box" because the rest of the world doesn't live in the Basel Action Network's box.  This is the same "secondary market" economy that automobiles, ink cartridges, ships and airplanes "waste" comes from.  Waste is almost never generated from the first purchaser in the chain, unless a conscious decision is made to "obsolete" it.  Wealthy people tend not to drive their new cars into the ground, or their cell phones or PCs.

WR3A's Model Improves not just the environment (reuse saves more carbon and toxics than recycling), but the entire Social Progress Index in Africa.  Africa doesn't have to make a choice between barefoot-and-pregnant backwater and brand new product.  They should be encouraged to tinker their way through the same way that Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea did, achieving economic growth by repair, recycling, knockoffs, counterfeiting, reverse engineering and contract assembly.   Africa's got Terry Gous and Simon Lins and Rowell Yangs all over their cities.  They are in their 20s and 30s now.  Give them a chance.

The poor nations growth in internet outpaced the USA's by a factor of ten - using "discarded" CRTs

Korea on Korea E-Waste Trade

Tip of the hat to Adam Minter, who's burrowed in to complete his "scrap book".

I'm not really sure what to make of this story in Mainichi Daily News, which is about the arrest of a South Korean for selling used PCs to North Korea.  But what is clear is what it is not about.

• It's not about the South Korean exploiting North Korea's poverty.
• It's not about racial guilt.
• There's no discussion of "OECD" South Korea trading with North Korea.
• There's no discussion of whether the personal computers were "fully functional", or "tested working", or ewaste.
• No one speaks about toxics, hard drive information, or other ju-ju words which elevate the e-waste crisis.

Silence!

It's not about a dictator calling the imports e-waste.  Dictators normally want to restrict the sale and distribution of cell phones, display devices, and internet.  In places like Pakistan, people call computer assets commodities, they are something people bid, something people want.  Labelling them "waste" leads to an SOPA-like uproar (Daily Times, April 2010 ‘No ban on import of used computers’).

In this case, the dictatorship is silent about the exchange of goods.

The outcry is from the nations who don't want North Koreans to be using the internet.

I don't know enough about this particular set of computers, who sold it, who bought it, or how they'd be used.  Maybe for a weapons system, maybe to edit porn.  Maybe to translate John Lennon songs...

Computers and Press Releases are blunt instruments

(photos from MAILonline, cited under fair use policy)

That is basically the story at the UK MailOnline

"...The boy had grovelled in the dirt for mercy, whimpering as blood dripped from his cracked skull. With the computer monitor that had been broken over his head lying on the ground nearby, filthy children with glassy-eyed stares and twisted smirks had stood over him."


Just how bad is donating a used computer to Africa? According to the Mail, you have blood on your hands. Your monitor is being used as a club to beat small children.

What shocks me is that the photos appear to be a ratio of about 20 good computers to one thing being burned on the ground for copper. The author is so over the top, it provides the best explanation for what Jim at BAN calls my "apologist" attitude for exporting. The kids at the landfill look sad, but I don't actually see many PCs there.

Ok, just to warm up for the E-Scrap 2008 conference, here's some push-back...

BAN and SVTC are promoting companies which have zero reuse policy, which destroy everything. They mean well. But by doing so, BAN and SVTC create a vacuum for our competitors to mix bad material into. We have met the enemy, and he is us. If they stand behind an article like this, they are hurting the people they claim to champion.

Another quote from the article

"Most of the hard drives were empty, but one contained medical records relating to patients based in Leeds. It came from a computer marked Northumbria Healthcare Trust, although the data found did not relate to its patients but to customers of a pharmacy that had used the computer after the trust had disposed of it."

Let me get this straight... the hospital the author is attacking... it wiped all of its hard drives. But one was re-used by a third party. So the author attacks the hospital...

Threatening to hurt and embarrass people who have sent wiped, working computers, is a bully tactic. As a former Peace Corps volunteer, as a man who housed African refugees, homeless people, impoverished women from a Mexican coop, international students, young Egyptian computer repairers, Peruvian small businesspeople, and others in my own home this year, I am so frustrated I could cry.

Companies with "no export" policies, and laws like California SB20 which REQUIRE destruction (obsolescence in hindsight) of working monitors, are morally wrong. While the Pledge is careful not to ban all reuse exports, the easiest way to join the Pledge is to end reuse, and that is what many "True Stewardship" companies have done. Put in a big shredder, and you are golden, even if it leaves a pile of toxic fluff (printers and CRTs do NOT shred well, people).

To quietly accept export of "tested working units" (even though that could include a 1988 286), does not go far enough. BAN needs to speak out against California's perverted SB20 "cancellation" rule.

The "tested working" rule is not even in the Basel Convention, which explicitly states in Annex 9 that exports of used CRTs for repair and reuse is completely legal. Critics of digital divide programs state that "someday the monitor will go bad", but that was true of MY first computer when I bought it in 1992 (and there was no CRT recycling infrastructure), and it is true of a brand new computer any African student might buy.

Many people in our industry say they agree with me, but that I am sticking my neck out. BAN has officially refused my company offer to sign the Pledge, over our interpretation of Annex IX, (and officially endorsed a company which exports more than twice the monitors I do). Well, this isn't really a promoted blog, it is intended only for people who understand the nuances of the export issue. So in the words of Huckleberry Finn (when he abandons his guilt over not turning Jim in as a "runaway nigger"), "All right, then, I'll go to hell". It's my favorite line in all of literature...

Companies like mine are not "wishful thinkers". We fly to see our partners, we ask for reports of our mistakes (if we are sending something they couldn't use, we need to know in order to correct it), we fly buyers here to pre-inspect our loads. We have had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends, and changed a lot of practices along the way.

Did you know a tested working Dell 17HS Trinitron monitor is 'waste' at the factory in Jakarta, and the non-working Dell E773 is good? I didn't until I visited the buyer of my tested working monitors in 2004. In Peru, the Dell 17HS Trin is fine, by the way.

We must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. BAN should not take its toys and go home over the reuse repair "loophole". The only way the situation will get better is if companies like mine succeed in establishing a recycling infrastructure in the countries which REFUSE to stay barefoot and pregnant. If California breaks every monitor, they will buy the monitors from a mobster who sends them junk TVs mixed into the load. The war on drugs approach has had 6 years, and let's admit it now does more harm than good. Companies in WR3A are actively engaging wonderful people in Egypt, Senegal, Malaysia, Peru, Mexico, Singapore, Indonesia, and China, and doing the same kind of work that micro-lending organizations are doing.

If African doctors cannot get affordable working computers, children will die.