Ducking the Dunning–Kruger Effect (Part 1)

Dunning-Kruger Effect describes a lot of activists on the right and left. The only cures are hindsight, skepticism, humility, and listening. Duck.

We slowly learn that "e-waste dynasty" is really not that special.   It has been a good ride. It brought something new for career recyclers like myself to get excited about, after the goals of universal curbside recycling, recycled content, household hazardous waste collections, and landfill capping and closure became yawn-ho-hum.

And it is indeed important not to squander the carbon embedded in the manufacture of gadgets.  Vital to respect the enormous burden of mining on Earth's habitats. Our demand for copper, silver, gold, zinc, palladium, rhodium, tantalum, and other minerals and metals to make our chips, capacitors and circuits is crushingly important.  

But the "impact" of discarded electronics on landfills and foreign beaches has been overplayed.   The associated toxics are far less newsworthy than "a-waste" (automobiles), original mining of the metals, original manufacture, or even the use and disuse of the electronics during its life.

What "the great e-waste crisis" offered was illusory superiority.  In a vacuum of data and definition, we became our own titles.  We announced ourselves as "non-exporters", or "professionals", or "stewards", or "certified".   We became "Good guys".  Our companies were "Creative", and "Synergistic" and "International" and "Solutions", all competing (for attention and investment) in "solving the e-waste problem".

A new cause is an opportunity to claim expertise as the journalists come looking.  But what were we "experts" in, really, except the "topic" of a new category of scrap?

What do you know, really, about the oldest Texas Instruments calculator in your house?   You've owned it 30 years.  Are you an expert about its end-of-life?  Does the fact that you own it, and the prospective buyer (in China) does not (yet), make you the expert on e-waste?

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.^[1] Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding."

"Where Unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority..."  How well does the Dunning-Kruger effect describe rallies to the cause of electronics recycling?

Everyone in the developed world, and billions of people in the emerging world, have something electronic which was worth a lot of money once and now isn't.  It's the "wealth" of "e-waste" haves.  You are a "have",  I'm a "have".  Six billion out of seven billion - the "non-OECD" - have been defined as the "have-nots".   Yet 80% of them are actually "haves" as well.  But if you are looking for a 30 year old "waste" item, like a TI calculator, you better look first among the "haves" of Christmas Past.

We have evolved to save things which we procured at cost.  Our ancestors survived on the reuse of spear-heads, and scavenging biproduct bones.  We are programmed to get value back out of things we have invested in.   But if there's nothing economic to do with it, it just manifests itself as guilt.

Environmental Malpractice, Part I: Due Disclosures

[Note:  Last week I had initial meetings at the IQPC "E-Waste Summit" at Caesar's Palace with Jim Puckett and Mike Enberg of BAN.  We had a chance to try to clear the air a bit following the infamous Donald Summers blistering of "fair trade recycling" at Chicago Patch, Jim's equivocation of fair trade recycling and "poisoning people" in E-Scrap News, the effect of fake math on real people in the developing world, and the collapse of the California Compromise.    They in turn shared their genuine hurt over insinuations of racial profiling and accusations of financial motives, via my blog.   I need to treat that carefully, but have already cut this post into 3 parts after writing on the redeye from Phoenix.  It is hard to find the time to write this as carefully as it demands, but also vital to strike while the iron is hot... ]

First things first: The study of holistic environmental health parallels the evolution of the human health sciences.   Species diversity, carbon, toxics, ecosystems, sustainable consumption, over-population, etc. connect in ways we must study in order to understand them.  Western medicine has made monumental strides, but on the way to discovering a cure for AIDS and smallpox, we went through waste-centric periods of giving tapeworms for weight control, and liquid mercury as a laxative.

Western medicine grew up by making mistakes, discovering them, and admitting to them.  It has developed certain principles, like primum non nocere "first, do no harm".   But when well-meaning doctors accidentally do harm their patients, we don't call accuse them of "racism" or "poisoning people".  We have another more professional term.

"In law, malpractice is a type of negligence in which the professional under a duty to act fails to follow generally accepted professional standards, and that breach of duty is the proximate cause of injury to a plaintiff who suffers harm. It is committed by a professional or her/his subordinates or agents on behalf of a client or patient that causes damages to the client or patient."

-wikipedia 2012.11.16

Basel Action Network and Fair Trade Recycling offer different remedies to imbalances in the trade of used electronics.   Junk exports, or "toxics along for the ride", can happen either because a shortage is created (California SB20) or because of over-supply, or changes in prices of new product.  It is not the intention of the "E-Steward" to create a shortage, nor the intention of ISRI's overseas clients to pay for shipping of useless material.  We both agree that improvements can be made which will help the people in the developing world, emerging world, or non-OECD.

It's not a major concession on my part to swap the word "malpractice" for "accidental racism".  E-Stewards / BAN really want to be treated deferentially, as environmentalists, as watchdogs, as protectors of the poor, not "parasites of the poor".   But here is why I think it's a step forward:  Malpractice insurance is something well-intentioned health professionals need in case of an accident.

One of the first tests in court to differentiate accidental malpractice (unintentional harm) from criminal malpractice is how quickly the do-gooder responds to the mistake.   If a doctor takes a follow up X-Ray and sees she left a surgical tool in your belly and has to re-open the abdomen to fetch it, it's a lot worse if she pretends not to see it or refuses to review the x-ray.

Facts is facts.   It is time for BAN to give Due Disclosure about their "export statistics".

BAN may be excused for using the statistics "80%" a few years ago, and could say there wasn't good information.  They may have missed their own 2006 researcher's paper from Kenya, estimating 90% reuse.  They may have been skeptical of the paper by Williams and Kahhat, showing 87% reuse in Peru imports.  They may not accept my experience in estimating acceptable fallout when the cost of shipping to African ports is over $7000 - In Monkeys Running Environmental Zoo article, we calculated 85% reuse based on prices paid for product and shipping.  And they have loudly objected to the reports by ISRI and IDC that over 80% of used electronics are treated in the USA prior to export.

But a year ago, in 2011, the United Nations Environmental Program and the Basel Secretariat issued studies from in depth research (279 sea containers, following exports from Nigerian Joseph Benson from London to Lagos), and found - again - that 70% of the imports were fully functional, and half of the rest (15%) were repaired and reused.   That makes FIVE reports which estimate that between 80-90% of the used electronics purchased by Africans were legitimate.