Jim Puckett, executive director of the Basel Action Network, talked with me about reuse markets in November, at a conference in Las Vegas where we were both making presentations. To paraphrase William Munny (Clint Eastwood's character in Unforgiven), "It's a hell of a thing," shooting a man's reputation. So if you'll bear with me in re-tracking the conversation, I will give you legitimate concerns about the free market exports of used CRTs to Africa. And no, it's not what the press thinks, and the solution is not to ban the trade.
First I'll defend the exporter. Then I'll say what is really going to go wrong with the exporter's business model in the not distant future.
After Jim's Vegas PowerPoint presentation, I raised my hand and asked him a question about this photo (and accompanying article) in his slide show (artified below). Jim said he had taken this photo himself, in Lagos.
The UK article he had shown describe the arrest of Joseph Benson, the Nigerian "waste tourist" who purchased TVs in England and shipped them to Lagos (at an average cost of about $10,000 per container).
First, I told Jim that these uniform size TVs did not look like "80% of UK E-waste". It was actually pretty difficult to put together a full containerload of this size of TV. I told him the demand for these were the urban ghettos, which often had spliced electricity too weak to light up a (more common) large TV set, and living spaces too small for larger televisions. I also told him (as I did in 2006 when we spoke following the Charles Schmidt NIH article) that the amount of copper in the 600 or so TVs in the photo would not pay for the $10,000 cost Mr. Benson paid for the container. At about $3 per burned TV (scrap value), the 600 TVs would only get Mr. Benson about $1,800 of his $10,000 back, and I didn't see how "avoided recycling costs" or "externalized pollution value" would be transferred to him.
Second, I reminded Jim of this result from the 2012 "e-Waste Country Assessment Nigeria"... That of the 600,000 tons (estimated) imports of used WEEE:
First I'll defend the exporter. Then I'll say what is really going to go wrong with the exporter's business model in the not distant future.
After Jim's Vegas PowerPoint presentation, I raised my hand and asked him a question about this photo (and accompanying article) in his slide show (artified below). Jim said he had taken this photo himself, in Lagos.
The UK article he had shown describe the arrest of Joseph Benson, the Nigerian "waste tourist" who purchased TVs in England and shipped them to Lagos (at an average cost of about $10,000 per container).
Second, I reminded Jim of this result from the 2012 "e-Waste Country Assessment Nigeria"... That of the 600,000 tons (estimated) imports of used WEEE:
Approx. 30% of second-hand imports were estimated to be non-functioning
(therefore need to be declared as e-waste): half of this amount was repaired
locally and sold to consumers and the other half was un-repairable. "You may remember Jim's first response was "Who is Joseph Benson? I don't know that name". I told him it was the man's name in the news article he had just shown (arrested) and the likely supplier of the TVs in the container Jim had photographed. It was not a good response. I told Jim that according to the math above, that 85% of the container was reused, just as predicted in my 2010 Blog "Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo", and precisely what I predicted to Mr. Schmidt based on the financial calculations.
