BREAKING: Lord Chris Smith's African Witch Hunt Continues: Part 1

UNEP doubled down, using photos of "primitive recycling" in its 2015 report on "e-waste".  But the actual statistics hidden throughout UNEP's own report told a different story from it's press release headline.  If the majority of sea containers of used electronics shipped from Europe are "illegal", then why do the seizures of hundreds of containers only find 1/3 which had anything illegal?

Just one of dozens of examples where the #ewastehoax needs to answer the simple question, "duh?"

UNEP is only pointing fingers, however.  One nation abandoned nuance with flair 5 years ago.  Indictments and prison sentences. While Agbo workers burn wire, England is burning witches.

The photo above shows Mike Anane of Ghana briefing reporter Raphael Rowe of BBC Panorama, on the ground in Agbogbloshie, Ghana.   Mr. Anane was back at Agbogbloshie 2 days before my arrival in March... briefing Jacopo Ottaviana of Aljazeera's #ewasterepublic... see below.

"When I look at these things, I would not call it importation. For me the bottom line is dumping, because from all of these containers that come, only about 20% are functional, and 80% are junk, garbage" - Mike Anane Aug 2014

http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/biografieen/a/mike-anane.html

PRISON FOR DANIELS RECYCLING? 

Anane's accounts to journalists were covered on this blog a few days ago.  I met him face to face at an Interopol Meeting in Washington DC in 2010, where he presented between UK Environmental Agency Director Lord Chris Smith and Jim Puckett of BAN.  You know the claims... 80% dumping. 500 sea containers per month arriving at Agbogbloshie. The biggest E-Waste Dump in the World. Teeming with fish, Anane recounted, just 10 years earlier.

Mike Anane: "For the past 11 years. That was when I first saw the trucks with e-waste coming from the port to Agbogbloshie. Agbogbloshie happens to be a place I’m familiar with. I have been hanging around the area when it was a lush, green, beautiful wetland with lots of birds and some wildlife, and the river and the lagoon that run through the dump site had so much fish. The fishermen, the people in the communities depended on these rivers for their livelihood. Agbogbloshie used to be an amazing, beautiful wetland, a Garden of Eden. A wetland performs enormous environmental functions. When the water from the city goes to the sea, it goes through the wetland and gets filtered. Fish from the sea come and make babies. Wetlands are so important to every country, to nature, and to mankind.

"But now, the river and the lagoon are both dead: no fish, no organisms, nothing. The river and the lagoon both end up in the sea, and when the fishermen at the seaside throw their net, hoping to catch some fish, they get computers, television sets, and fridges. Their poisons spill into the sea every single day... So for me Agbogbloshie, which was a green Garden of Eden, is now paradise lost."

Note that this interview was in August 2014, describing "11 years" of experience.  But his 2010 interview with me at Interpol, he said it had been ten years.  And in his first interview, with Greenpeace in 2008, it was ten years.  And on PBS Frontline, it was since he was a boy.

My personal interview was during the meeting that set Lord Chris Smith up against Hurricane Benson. Lord Chris Smith, as I recall, introduced Jim Puckett and Mike Anane to the audience of Interpol enforcement experts.  It set up the first arrest and indictment of "Hurricane Joe Benson". And this week, LetsRecycle.com, a British environmental online newsletter, reports that "Hurricane Joe Benson" has company.

MORE AFRICAN TECHS FOR UK JAILS

Here to Help Part 2: The Words Don't Fit The Picture

Math test:

Q:  "If Ghana gets hundreds of millions of tons of e-waste per year, and e-waste is 5.76% of irony scrap (cars, white goods, appliances), and the world generates 106M tons of irony scrap, what percent of the world's e-scrap / e-waste does Ghana receive?"

 A:  If world e-Scrap exports are 5.76% of 106,000,000 metric tons*, then world e-scrap would be 6,105,600 tons per year.   To get hundreds of millions of tons, the rest of the world has to wait for 20 years - disposing of no e-waste - and then dump it all at once on Ghana at the end of two decades.

FACT:   Ghana receives somewhere between 0.000014 and 0.000439 of the world's #ewaste - between four and six /100ths of one percent.

          Calculations below.

	after 90% reuse	of 570,000,000 tons (include domestic scrap)	Of 48,900,000 tons (exported only)
215000	21500	0.00003771929825	0.0004396728016
80000	8000	0.00001403508772	0.000163599182

Non toxic copper extraction

So, it's just ludicrous.  If you want a higher percentage, you need a lower denominator.  StEP's higher estimates numerator (215k tons) includes fridges and air conditioners and washer-dryers in "e-waste", which makes for 48.9 million tons per year worldwide.  In which case, for Agbogbloshie to receive hundreds of millions of tons, it would take only 5 years of 100% of all e-waste in every country being dumped there... still ridiculous.

How would China, India, and Nigeria get their share of the "e-waste crisis" if Ghana's Agbogbloshie was being so selfish about it?

*est. based UN University 106,000,000 tons of steel exports (of 570 MT recycled... including domestic use in all nations). ratio on ISRI 76M tons irony scrap + 4.4M segregated e-scrap.

The Truth About Used Electronics Exports

These shots of CRT Display Imports, taken between 2002-2007, were for reuse.  They were sustainable.  No mining or refining, the carbon and toxics and pollution made them the best way ever that three billion people could get online between 1995 and 2010.

It wasn't perfect of course.  More controversial "gray market" wasn't photo'd.   One Contract manufacturing plant, assembling brand new CRT monitors, also had a used SKD operation on another floor.  They insisted it was a different floor and that a used CRT could never be swapped out with a new one.  But of course that's how the whole sector started, bleeding used ones into new lines in the 1990s until there were actually more used ones than new ones in the early 2000s.  By then, 100% used refurbishing factories were the norm.  

CRT manufacturing for the West was in decline. Fortunately, there was a new "good enough market" where professionally assembled used goods became the most profitable in the sector.

Most of the buyers for these cheap, durable, affordable display devices has been in places like India, Egypt, and Indonesia.  The 3B3K, three billion people earning $3 thousand per year, who were getting telecom and ICT and satellite TV at 10  times the rate of growth of the rest of the world.  CRTs were on fire - in a figurative sense, not a literal one.

While the environmental NGOs were playing games with "percentages" understood by laypeople, some of us were actually travelling around the world documenting the purchase orders and uses of the export market.  The percentages make a lot more sense when you actually know what you are talking about, rather than making things up as you go along.

How do display devices move, geographically, around the world?

In the big geographic picture, here are 5 import-export scenarios:

Import 1. Reuse of secondary CRTs (Tema Port, Ghana)

Import 2. Raw materials for new CRT factories (Videocon, India)

Import 3. Clandestine reuse of 'passable' used CRTs into new CRT assembly lines (China 1990s)

Import 4. Whole 100% semi-knock-down (SKD) reuse factories, often converted from closed #3

Import 5. Import for recycling of junk CRT displays (Calexico, Mexico).

Import 6. Mixed lots of used electronics to be assessed in country or scrapped on receipt

Below is the evolution of the smallest cause - #6 - and how it grew to swallow our attention and become reported in the press as the largest illegal envionmental crime of our time... #ewastegate.

I'm working on the Agbogbloshie Report, and there's a lot of background that I can't really fit into it.  Since I haven't published on the blog in over a week, I thought I'd share some of the edited references which provide some history and perspective to #ewastegate.

People who don't know what they are talking about, making it up as they go along, get much farther if they festoon their reports with imagery of poor children.  It's like UNICEF, except not a penny, not one tiny penny, goes from E-Stewards donors to the poor in the photos.   It's macabre poverty porn, the Charitable Industrial Complex, and the history of the credible, peer reviewed reports which got us here are profiled below, so that we hopefully won't make the same mistakes again.

While I was producing this chart in 2008, I made a serious blunder.  It doesn't have any children's photos.

European Making some Sense of Agbogbloshie Ghana

http://accrareport.com/feature/agbogbloshie-a-local-solution-for-a-global-tragedy/

It is not the largest e-waste dump in the world.

And these people who spent time there describe it accurately.

Thanks Rafa Font and DK Osseo-Asare

People have been showing photos like this in Agbogbloshie, and referring to it as "the largest dump in the world"...  Incredible.



It's not particularly big.   For a city of 4.5M residents, this is a fairly modest, normal dumpsite.

Upper central, where the smoke is.  500 containerloads per month?  Not.

Here is the largest dump in Rhode Island.



Here's a pile in East Syracuse, NY

Vermont Apple-to-Orange Software Validates CRT Recycling

(This is part of an April Fool's blog tradition, and I hope no one took it personally)

Small Northeast State Solves E-Waste Recycling Glut Profitably, with New Validation Procedures

[Middlebury, VT  April 1 2014]  It turns out there are two ways to solve the E-Waste Recycling Crisis.    In a stunning turn of developments, Vermont has validated a brand new way to recycle CRTs.


1.  Charge manufacturers more (42 cents per pound rather than 28)
2.  Demand less (allow land application)
3.  Profit!

Suppose there are two ways to do something.  One way takes a lot of labor hours, and then costs a lot to transport and treat the material.   The other way takes fewer hours of labor, but creates a mixed mess that is even more extremely expensive to transport and treat the material.  Normally, this is called "getting what you paid for".

But with an online thesaurus tool, Vermont "recyclers" are now "solving" this "e-waste" "problem".

Inequation disproved in 6 month study

"We were as stumped as the next state with the need to change our award winning state recycling program," said Vermont ANR Commissioner David Mears.   "But we made lemonade."

John Obfusca of Cali Waste Systems described the new development.  "One of our guys, at the end of the shift, just goes 'Hey, what if we just don't recycle it, but we call it something kinda alternativey?'  It turns out, you just have to name the process right to get it approved."

Diverting waste from a landfill into another landfill?  Land cover that fits the defination (per RFP) of "no land application"?   There's an app for that.

Cultural Gulfs In Developing Markets #1: BlueGrass, Soukous, & 9 Mile

The Urban v. Rural path of development is a common theme in this blog.   "Emerging markets" in Brazil, China, South Africa, India, Egypt and Indonesia have their own "story of stuff".    For 3B3K (three billion people earning $3000 dollars per year) internet = entertainment.   It's a whole mass media market creating a demand for "good enough" devices.  These markets now produce/consume more "stuff" than rich nations do, but they also reuse and repair devices, like rich nations did 25 years ago.

Afrikan Marilyn Manson Die Antwoods Volandi Visser

Huge factories devoted to refurbishment of good enough display devices served these markets for the past 20 years.  They deserved more credit than they got in the "E-Waste Toxic Dump" press.  Unfortunately, I'm the only person writing about it, and I've been labelled.  This "well is poisoned".

But what about the demand, the noise, the hunger for music and videos coming from inside those cities?
How are the new hyper-cities like Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Guangzhou (a metropolis with a population as large a Japan) incorporating music and culture from the rural areas migrants came from, and how are those sounds changing when infused with world pop?  When we call six billion people "the third world", we put megacities into the same category as Somalian refugee camps.

We talking about a very cosmopolitan three billion people, my friends.

Fair Trade Recycling: Interpol Promises Fact Check

Not bathwater: Baby bassinet found at Mexican dump 2008

Here's a novel idea.  Habeus Corpus.  Find the body.   Make sure a crime has been committed before you start arresting people.  Witch hunts and mob justice have plagued democracies for thousands of years, and our system of justice has learned, over the centuries, that accusations need to be investigated before arrests take place.

Environmental Crime enforcement thus reminded itself last week.   Interpol, the Lyon, France-based international police force, announced that it would take a year to re-study the WEEE or used electronics trade.  Why is a study a victory for Fair Trade Recycling?  It's called "back to the drawing board"... Interpol studied it once, gobbled up some baloney Basel Action facts, and started an enforcement campaign it is now going to revisit.  Mockingbird will be retried.

11/7/2013 "The impact of pollution caused by the dumping and mishandling of waste is global, affecting the quality of our air, water and soil," said Cees van Duijn, a Specialized Officer with INTERPOL's Environmental Security Unit.

"Through Project Eden INTERPOL will support its member countries in their efforts to implement national legislation and regulate the international movement of waste to ensure healthier local environments and help protect the overall integrity of our environment worldwide," added Mr Van Duijn.

With the recent launch of the Countering WEEE Illegal Trade (CWIT) Project, INTERPOL and its partners will conduct extensive research into the illegal e-waste market in Europe and provide technical and policy recommendations.

- See more at: http://www.noodls.com/view/1E03CF366C333C703F1EE40A61E2A293816DCAF3#sthash.ysnd6TSY.dpuf

Now Interpol's "Project Eden" doesn't sound all that big a departure from the past 12 months of seizures, arrests and enforcement.   Why do I assume there could be good news here?

"INTERPOL and its partners will conduct extensive research..."

What caused Interpol to take a breather, and to make sure of its prosecution?  WR3A, the World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association, monikered "Fair Trade Recycling", perhaps played a  role.   Our organization introduced Interpol to researchers from Memorial University, PUCP Peru, USC, MIT, and Middlebury College.  We introduced them to importers from Ghana and Mexico and Burkina Faso.  We introduced them to recent studies by UNEP and US International Trade Commission.   And I took a few days from my vacation in July to meet Interpol at their offices in Lyon, en route to Geneva and Copenhagen, and to my meeting with Mr. Collateral Damage himself, Joseph Benson.

TVs replaced at London hotel by flatscreens make false arrests

Fair Trade Recycling applauds legitimate investigation of the used WEEE and electronics export trade.  Cees (pronounced "case") van Duijn, the head of Interpol's environmental unit, met with me in Lyon in July, extended his hand, and promised to do what is right.  And I believe him.  He was not there when the enforcements and seizures and questionable arrests based on "80%" baloney statistics got started.  He was not holding a torch, and does not seem to be in the lynching business.

We are on the heels of a year of arrests and seizures of exporters of used electronics, following a great E-Waste Hoax.  Interpol had taken a fake, false, hootenanny statistic from a puny Seattle non-profit, and based on the fake number, had seized hundreds of containers or used computers, displays, televisions, and cell phones.  Items, it turns out, which are reused or repaired 91% of the time.

Habeus Corpus means "Habeus Stuff", habeus #ewaste.  Start at the crime scene, start at the dump. "Stuff" is not, by itself, evidence of environmental injustice.  Just keep the facts straight, that's where justice begins.