New Study: Africa's "E-Waste Hoax" is a Gift that Keeps On Taking

No surprise to regular readers of this blog...

The 5 year old hypothesis that African technicians and entrepreneurs are illegally importing "e-waste" to save money for USA and European Recyclers is still full of @#$*.

Global Circular Economy of Strategic Metals – the Best-of-two-Worlds Approach (Bo2W)
Oeko-Institut Authors Andreas Manhart , Tobias Schleicher, Stefanie Degreif

Here is the full report, view pages 13-14 at a minimum.

FIREHOSE: New York Times Opinion Page (Leyla Acaroglu)

From today's NYT... An Opinion piece in support of the type of "export police" I've been writing about this month, in the Firehose Series.

"In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals — copper wires, gold and silver threads — inside, which they sell to recycling merchants for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside. Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network and others have posted YouTube videos of young children inhaling the smoke that rises from burned phone casings as they identify and separate different kinds of plastics for recyclers. It is hard to imagine that good health is a by-product of their unregulated industry."


Smashing batteries to recover cadmium?  Descriptions of the same Youtube videos which have been discredited?  There is no new information in the column at all.  A lot of imagery of harsh conditions, poverty, victimization.  Who wrote the article?

Leyla Acaroglu is a sustainability strategist based in Melbourne, Australia.

Here are pictures of the people who buy and recycle cell phones.  Some of these pictures will look familiar.  Most will not.   I got these from a rare blog kept by David Kousemaker (dkousemaker), TechTravels Blog, a mostly photo blog (much less wordy) about used technology.  But unlike BAN and Greenpeace's photography, it's not political, and he isn't soliciting your "charitable donation".

http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-1/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-2/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-3/
http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-4/

I've put a handful of these photos in small scale below (fair use, and Kouserman actually allows non commercial commons use, see bottom).

Leyla, if you want to talk about sustainability in development, give me a ring.  I chose repair and refurbishing because the "Network of Tinkerers" is a model for development which offers an alternative from the curse of natural resources (and foreign aid, which appears to have the same effect as oil and diamonds, creating a Darwinistic government class that provides the greatest rewards to the sharpest elbows).  Tinkerers, networkers, technicians, fixers, repairers, geeks... those are the people who turn discarded tech into affordable access.  We called it "Yankee Ingenuity" in the Northeast.   There is no better way for a smart kid without connections to make $300 per day than by fixing and salvaging.

Read the other blogs here, Leyla, and you'll find that BAN and Greenpeace are filming the city dumps at major cities, and the used imports are mostly not the same stuff people throw away here after using it for 20 years.  Five reports show 9%, 10%, 13%, 15% of the imports are waste, which is actually less than new "affordable" product imported into places like Africa or sold in shops in China.  The free market is not as bad as you've described.  And no one can afford to pay for scrap to be shipped across the ocean just to dump it, something of value must be there for the ride (and it isn't batteries smashed for cadmium... who told you that?).

In May, 2011, I channeled a book from 1960.   No, not Vance Packard's "The Waste Makers", about planned obsolescence.   No, not Rachael Louise Carlson's "Silent Spring", about the invisible toxics from our heavy industry, and their heavy poisonous toll.

In "E-Waste Bloggers Play Atticus Finch", I referenced Harper Lee's dramatic novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird".   Ms. Lee, who has recently been in the news over copyright and author control, told the simple story of her native Monroeville, Alabama.

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

FIREHOSE BLOG: Africans, Malaysians, Middle Eastern Technicians - Run for cover

The firehose of disinformation about our Fixer brethren continues.

There is a war against the "Good Enough Market".  CAER, Greenpeace, and Basel Action Network have refused to withdraw the falsified and disproven statistic that 80% of used electronics exports are primitively burned in a horrible toxic process.  Interpol in Europe, acting on the fake, discredited, false, made-up statistic, has arrested 40 African export businesses.  USA EPA has publicly accused an Egyptian man of primitive ape-like processes for 100,000 computer monitors for which he paid $28 each ($21 per monitor plus approximately $7 in shipping).

You think the USA had a problem in the deep south in the 1960s?  Look at how we are treating the Deep South of the world.  Firehose of false, fake, brutally dishonest allegations against technicians in developing world.  And it's "environmentalists" holding the firehose.

Emerging markets (3 billion people with per capita income ~$3k/year) online more hours than West

Greenpeace Europe video accuses these men of burning these TVs.  Interpol arrested their boss.

Malaysia has now taken away the permit from this factory, written about by Shanghai reporter Adam Minter.

I got out of the Egypt business just before the crackdown by shipping monitors to the Malaysia company, which refurbished them to new-in-box warranty for my old Egyptian partner.  Now, the Environmental Malpractice is making them the fourth victim.

FIREHOSE: Environmental "E-Waste" Sustainability: Peter Sellers "Being There"

Following the blog policy to keep video to a minimum (it consumes a lot of bandwidth for readers in "good enough" internet bandwidth markets, even if their CRTs actually display better video quality than LCDs...) I will not embed the trailer to Peter Sellers' 1979 Film, but encourage you to follow the link.

BEING THERE.  (link to trailer on youtube, plot summary from wikipedia below fold)

Ewaste advocates think they walk on water

The analogy/allusion?

We meet someone who gets all his information from TV... cannot read or write.  Someone else, involved in something really important (economic policy) bestows their faith to the someone who just repeats things he saw on TV.   They become "insiders", powerful people with lots of influence.

Someone (Jim Puckett) took a picture of mixed electronics in the USA, then took a picture of sorted/single unit electronics unloaded from a sea container in Africa, then took a picture of (decades old) junk TVs generated in Africa at dumps.  He announced that the Africans are buying the unsorted junk from the USA and burning it in fires in Africa.

Some of us who really were "being there" in Africa decades ago know that the technicians who import the goods are the best darn hopes their nations have, the Ben Franklins of their emerging democracies, used computer displays filling the role of the used  printing equipment Franklin brought to Philadelphia.

BAN and Greenpeace's story... It's mathematically and economically impossible, its disproven by looking closely at the second photo (sorted, stretch-wrapped black hotel-upgrade quality TVs).  There's no interview with the Africa buyer.  Then, when the gobs and loads and piles of shredded TV glass appear here in the USA, our friend Jim shows up with a camera, saying "Tsk, Tsk" to the New York Times.

CBS 60 Minutes, NPR Fresh Air, PBS Frontline... the list of media consuming the images and reporting the "conclusion" makes Sellers movie seem more than possible/plausible in the Sustainability community.  How will college PIRG "E-Stewards" activists look international students in the eye when the simple hoax becomes apparent?  It's a hatchet job on the reuse market, planned obsolescence and big shred, playing us for fools.

FIREHOSE: Werner: Where there is no Doctor

Flashback to Peace Corps.  Each of us was given a copy of David Werner's book, "Where there is no doctor".  I'm looking for copies to give my teenagers for when they leave the home.  It was basic good sense, and I learned things I still rely on today.  From today's wikipedia:

Where There Is No Doctor: A village health care handbook is the most widely used health education book in tropical and sub-tropical developing countries. Based on David Werner's experiences at his Project Piaxtla in western Mexico, it was originally written in 1970 in Spanish as Donde No Hay Doctor. It has since been revised multiple times, has sold over one million copies and been translated into over 100 languages. The book is available for purchase, in either book form or on CD, at Hesperian's bookstore. Because the non-profit publisher's mission is making health information readily accessible to everyone, portions can also be download free-of-charge in pdf format.