Recycling Vocabulary: Environmental Fetishism vs. Informal Markets

Recycling Vocabulary: Environmental #fetishism is a term to describe a structural bias of high-liability laws in OECD nations. Our well-off sensitivity has a perverse effect. Rich nations demand to KNOW FOR CERTAIN a surplus iphone was shredded rather than accept a probable - but undocumented - reuse fate in emerging marketplaces. Tech Sector in Africa and Asia is obviously buying for so-called "informal" (not recorded) reuse.

Environmental laws are enforced to protect real estate value. This was observed as "environmental injustice" three decades ago - but that term has been misapplied to denigrate scrap reuse and recycling (which moves to poor neighborhoods with lower labor costs and higher repair skills) in urban areas, at the expense of virgin mining and extraction in even lower-land-value forests and deserts.

The legal liability created by RCRA is all downstream, no upstream. You can buy packaging made of baby seal pelts, but cannot export highly recyclable PETE plastic to some overseas markets.

It made no sense that Joseph "Hurricane" Benson would pay for hotel CRTs during a flat panel display upgrade, and rather than dispose of bad ones for free in the UK EPR marketplace, pay an additional $10,000 to export them to Ghana and Nigeria, to be busted apart for $2,000 worth of copper. No matter how lax the environmental laws, there is no incentive, which is why academics discovered that it never happened. Raphael Rowe of BBC Panorama served a decade in prison for the same false accusation as he made against Joe Benson.... All that is now exposed. But the EU Charitable-Industrial Complex has now moved the goalposts.

Some never even bothered to show a single piece of e-waste in their "expose"

It's not that Benson's market was dumping 80% of anything. It is the fact it was unknown, "informal", undocumented, which creates a sense of wealthy liability.

What is the purpose of "informal market" vocabulary?

Carl A. Zimring's "Clean and White", A Premature Review

This is a pre-Review of a book I haven't yet read... on a subject I write about obsessively.  And because I can now be accused - literally - of "prejudice" (prejudging a book about environmental justice is like, a mind trip).

"Clean and White:  A History of Environmental Racism in the United States" by Carl A. Zimring.

Carl A. Zimring is Associate Professor of Sustainability Studies at the Pratt Institute. He is the author of Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America and general editor of the Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste: The Social Science of Garbage. His new book Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States is available from New York University Press. 

This is all in good fun, I will read the book and hope others will order it too, giving Carl A. Zimring some early buzz should be forgiven...

Blacksmith Institute Ghana Project: Environmental Injustice or Economics?

Blacksmith Institute's "top ten list" of "most toxic places" put Agbogbloshie, Ghana at the top. (Later it was clarified that it was at the top of the alphabetical list because it began with A).  The Blacksmith press release is now 16 months past.  While I've tried to call Blacksmith out in debate, both with personal calls and emails and with a little blog chiding of Dr. Jack Caravanos' use of disavowed BAN export statistics (bad data), my friends have warned me to be careful.  Blacksmith Institute isn't a Greenpeace or a Basel Action Network.   They'd be a powerful adversary.

Androcles pulling a thorn from the lion's paw

My response has pretty much been that scientific and academic approaches applaud "peer review", it's part of the Scientific Process.  If I've been wrong all this time, I believe in Socratic method, and like Plato said, would be as happy to have a wrong idea removed from my mind as I would to have a thorn removed from my skin.   If I'm making a mistake, I want the mistake to be corrected.

I trust Blacksmith would see it the same way, if they take the time.


This morning I got an email from Rafa at @RecyHub, cc'ing a subset of interested parties like Josh Lepawsky following #Ewastegate, with a link to a public update on the cleaning up of Agbogbloshie project.


It's about AMP Project, the MIT-CoLab style "appropriate technology" approach to wire burning in the Accra city dump, which has provided the update below.

More on the Blacksmith Institute, what do you think?
http://www.pureearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Ghana-Pilot-PCR-2015.pdf
Link to the project completion report for phase 1 of the pilot project. 

I was trying to figure out who to cc in my response, and decided to post it for the world below.