UNITAR Global E-Waste "Monitor" 2024: Better, but still kinda cringy?

I have yet to read more than the Executive Summary and Table of Contents of the new UNEP Global E-Waste Monitor report, but I can already see that it's being mis-reported.  The "hook" is an emergency, that only 22.3% of e-waste is "documented", and the rest (the Executive Summary implies), is presumed to be "improperly" managed or "lost" to the so-called "informal sector".

Readers may remember this blog previously defined "informal sector" as "a white person didn't enter it into a spreadsheet"... in response to the "Criminal Negligence" 2015 Report.

UNITAR (another UN agency) describes the reports findings as follows:

"Meanwhile, less than one quarter (22.3%) of the year’s e-waste mass was documented as having been properly collected and recycled in 2022, leaving US $62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for and increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide. "

The "five fold growth" in "e-waste" is describing worldwide generation, not just wealthy countries.  This raises questions about the measurement of "undocumented" used electronics... but lets list a few obvious premises.

1.  The size of electronics PER CAPITA is declining due to the miniaturization effect.  In 1992 it peaked because we needed a desk phone, an answering machine, a fax machine, a camera, a radio, etc.... all of which now fit inside the smart phone in my front pocket.  

2. The export market, which the previous 2015 UNEP Report described as "primitive", is mostly for reuse.  So if there was less e-waste generated in the past compared to the future, that can only be explained by the continuous reuse of past devices which continue to be reused and maintained in places like Ghana, Nigeria, Angola, etc.  

3. The UNEP reports conflate the end of first consumer use with "waste generated", as if reuse and repair, if not "documented", is in the "ewaste" volume assesssed.  That would mean that if a white person owns a TV for ten years, and it's purchased and reused by an African for another 40 years, that the "waste" is counted twice - the first time it was "generated" and the actual "end of life" of the TV.

Photo of TV Repairman Ibrahim Alhassan in Savelugu, Ghana, who we introduced to author Adam Minter, who wrote about Ibrahim in the seminal reuse non-fiction book "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale".  Ibrahim was repairing a 1970 Japanese CRT television, or rather improving it by addint a remote control function absent in the original knob-tuned TV.  This TV certainly would have been destroyed by "Big Shred" in Europe decades ago... but hard to describe the African's continuous use and extended life as "primitive"... unless you are a wee bit racially-profilly.

Right To Repair Act - Grandparent Tire Time

Since we are on the subject of passing big laws to save our soldiers, African children, or UK's circular eddy current economy from lost strategic metals, here's a reminder of another big law out there.  EFF and IFixit remain the champions of protecting consumers from "copyright" and "patent" laws taking away their right to tinker with their cars, electronics, and other stuff.

This was a major battleground - in my mind - in the 1990s.  I was raised (here in the Ozarks, where I'm visiting for an unrelated EOL issue with a relative) that the smartest farmers knew how to fix stuff, and could save their family a lot of money by buying broke stuff from rich people who didn't know how to repair (or just wanted "elective upgrade").  Every summer my grandpa had me under a car or truck, showing me how they were making the spark plugs harder and harder to replace.  "Why in the world would they design this motor so that you need hydraulic motor hoist to change he spark plugs!?!?"  His suspicion was that they did it on purpose.

Copyright and patent laws entered into a gray area with software.  The right to own and copy some software that an author wrote was protected by different laws than protect the consumer's property rights and warranty rights under the Magnusum - Moss Act of 1975. Below is a rare "5-mod-up" comment of mine on the subject of Right to Repair on Slashdot /. which is a forum I started following at MassDEP when the internet was new, and I was researching electronics repair.

I've written about that law because when I first went to college and  Minnesota PIRG had a negative-check-off to add a fee to my Carleton College tuition bill, I wanted to know who PIRG was.  I read up on it at the library (nothing online then), and saw they were associated with consumer rights advocate Ralph Nader, who I learned about in high school when "planned obsolescence" and Vance Packard came up in class.

Headline Says where E-Waste Is Born: No USA Birth Certificate

Back in 2010, before the blog's "Bullyboys" Series, before the "Firehose" Series, and before "Environmental Malpractice", or the E-Stork blogs, The UN released a report.  It said that if all the rich nations completely stop all (hypothetical, mythological, or actual) #ewaste exports from the OECD to developing nations - stopped 100% - tomorrow - you'd do nothing to stop the posterchild photos.

UNICEF photographers share the $$

India has never been a significant destination for E-Waste, its ports are very tightly controlled.   The images of Techdogs and Nerddogs (to differentiate from "slumdogs", for those of you who don't yet get it) fixing stuff in Dharvi and Mumbai slums has nothing, nothing to do with Basel Convention or Basel Ban Amendment or CAER's export ban.

In fact, if you erased every international border crossing tomorrow, poor people would still be trying to get stuff from rich people in their own countries, from people on the other side of the tracks.  Rich people buy new stuff and poor people fix good-enough-for-them stuff.  It's like that in the USA used car and thrift shop market... jeez its so obvious I want to shoot myself for writing it again.

But at the E-Scrap Conference in Orlando, I still met lots and lots of people who think the Green-Thompson E-Waste Bill is a solution to primitive wire burning.  Big Shred will save the brown children.  And Lagos, with 6.9M households with television as of 2007, will... um... uh.

Yeah.   About that.  Here's the press release from 2010, the year that the Bullyboy Crackdown started, the year Greenpeace told UK journalists BAN's story about how the dumps in Africa were filled with material from the UK.   The year Joe Benson was targeted, a year before the Ghana E-Waste Assessment, and two years before the Nigerian E-Waste assessment studies found Benson and similar exporters sent 91% reuse - better than brand new product.

Urgent Need to Prepare Developing Countries for Surge in E-Wastes
Rocketing sales of cell phones, gadgets, appliances in China, India, elsewhere forecastProper e-waste collection, recycling key to recovering valuable materials, protecting health, building new green economyBali, 22 February 2010 - Sales of electronic products in countries like China and India and across continents such as Africa and Latin America are set to rise sharply in the next 10 years.
And, unless action is stepped up to properly collect and recycle materials, many developing countries face the spectre of hazardous e-waste mountains with serious consequences for the environment and public health, according to UN experts in a landmark report released today by UNEP.
Issued at a meeting of Basel Convention and other world chemical authorities prior to UNEP's Governing Council meeting in Bali, Indonesia, the report, "Recycling - from E-Waste to Resources," used data from 11 representative developing countries to estimate current and future e-waste generation - which includes old and dilapidated desk and laptop computers, printers, mobile phones, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions.
In South Africa and China for example, the report predicts that by 2020 e-waste from old computers will have jumped by 200 to 400 percent from 2007 levels, and by 500% in India
By that same year in China, e-waste from discarded mobile phones will be about 7 times higher than 2007 levels and, in India, 18 times higher.
By 2020, e-waste from televisions will be 1.5 to 2 times higher in China and India while in India e-waste from discarded refrigerators will double or triple. (continued)

Father's Days Communiqué Part I: Passing a Business Down to a Next Generation

Dear Sonny,

Here is what I can tell you about starting a recycling company from scratch.  Or really, starting anything from scratch.  It could probably apply to a doctor's office or a house painting company.

writing about digital waste handling

At the beginning, when you are the sole employee, you pretty much have to work on getting the clients, and not promising to do more than you are able to do.  At the beginning, you are earning a reputation, which will compound over the course of the next ten years of your business.  My first "motto" was "we are who we say we are and do what we said we'd do".

You will learn on your own that it's really difficult to do every job in your company.  You can try, and it's worth trying so that you know what it is.    But you will discover what Adam Smith observed, that every hour you take away from a task you are indispensible to, to do a task you can outsource, will stunt your business growth.

You will find that you are completely indispensible to about 20% of the hours, because those hours are key to 80% of your income.  Which hours those are will be different for a 2-person, or 4-person company, than they are to a 40-person company.