Deliberate Falsehood About "Ewaste" and Basel

E-Stewards Abandons Morality

Basel Action Network released a newsletter today heralding what they hope is imminent passage of the "Ban Amendment" to the Basel Convention.   At least this DOES acknowledge that the Basel Convention does NOT currently require "tested working" or fully functional, and does allow repair and refurbishment... and therefore they hope to amend it in three years and close those options.

Aside from the acknowledgement of the current legality of these exports under the Basel Convention, what is their case for amending it and banning repair and reuse in the future?

According to BAN E-Stewards, it is because refurbishers (geeks of color) "often produce hazardous waste, which is responsible for inflicting tremendous harm on the citizens and environments in these nations."  It's because reuse and repair poisons people and pollutes the environment.

"Only recyclers meeting the requirements of the e-Stewards Standard are in conformity with the Ban Amendment, which stipulates that no hazardous waste, including e-waste, can be sent from developed to developing countries. This includes untested and/or non-working equipment exported for refurbishment or reuse, some of which is currently allowed under the R2 Standard. Refurbishment often produces hazardous waste, which is responsible for inflicting tremendous harm on the citizens and environments of these nations."

Logically, if it were true that the refurbishing and repair industries "inflict tremendous harm on citizens and the environment", then banning import/export from rich nations is not enough.  They should also be banned from repair and refurbishing of product in their own country.  And in America, reuse and refurbishment should also, logically, be banned.

Show us "tremendous harm" in Indonesia.  Show us the hazardous waste "often" produced by refurbishment.   Show us how the Basel Convention, as passed, needs to be amended due to a single actual case of poison.   There is absolutely not one shred of evidence that one iota of toxic release came from refurbishing, repair, and elective upgrade.   No such factory was found at Guiyu, and no material at Guiyu came from such a factory.  This is why the Convention (the international law currently passed) does indeed allow export for reuse.

The Worlds Most Polluted Places (TIME) are metal mines, not recycling yards.

E-Stork 4: It's the Journalism, Stupid.

From "precautionary principle", regulators defined export as an action with "suspected risk".  While a case can be made that the risk has been exaggerated, it's too bad that case is being made by me, a self-interested, partisan, biased exporter - one who has no editor and little time to proof-read (cutting too long posts into 4 parts didn't work in college very often, either).

I believe in dialectic, and the "marketplace of ideas", to bring the truth.  But I wish more professional writers would take interest in repair, reuse, knockoff, and tinkering - the true opposite of the "resource curse" in poorer but emerging markets.

The "suspected risk" comes from the same source that cleaned up the Blackstone River.  No, not the Saturday Evening Post.   But journalists.   Ethical journalism provides us a shortcut for proper due diligence, a reason to "suspect" risk.   Until or unless a river has been traced upstream to a repair and refurbishing factory, the journalist can "follow the money trail" and interview people telling both sides of the story.   They have the power to invoke or water down the "populist cognitive bias" against, say, interracial marriage.  Journalists may not be able to tell where our soul comes from, or where it burns when we die, but they have the power to interview people who CLAIM they know.

It's ok that we still believe in heaven and hell as a matter of faith.   As Chaucer said, a thousand times I've heard men tell of joy in heaven and pain in hell... but none of them has been to either place and lived to tell about it.   Faith and crusades are fine for spiritual upstreams and downstreams.   For rivers and environmental policy, we need science.  Journalists accepting statements like "80% of e-waste is exported", without a single fact or figure to go by in ten years, need to wake the heck up.