5. How Too Quietly Big EWaste Lies Buried: Top Five E-Waste Lies Mapped

Let's ReMap the Five Biggest E-Waste Lies (before the April Fool's Blog traditionally comes out).  In Part Five, let's look at five geographic places the bodies of the truth were buried underneath a pile of false narratives and bogus "E-waste Export" claims. If you are doing a thesis or term paper on electronics recycling this semester, take the blue pill and see how normal ordinary places were sensationalized with poverty narratives despite prima facia evidence that the story was bogus.

We can forgive reporters and news producers like Solly Granatstein (CBS 60 Minutes) at the proximate time that they report. We can roll our eyes at well-meaning do-gooders who react to false claims with alarm, out of a sense of liability. 

But I question why so few reporters do as Ira Glass did following his sharing of Mike Daisy's Foxconn exaggerations and lies. This American Life is alone in re-tracing its steps, and learning that activists and environmentalists are not immune from biased reporting, sensationalism, and creating bricks that build the House of Big Lies.

The Big Lies are about PLACES visible on Google Earth. Please, I need some unprejudiced university student help to link and map these, and I can provide the photos.

1.Guiyu.

2. Foshan

3. Basel

4. Accra

5. Hong Kong

Punjab / Faisalabad is the Sixth Man... Penang, Malaysia gets honorary mention.

Poison Apples Blog: 18 Questions for Research on GPS Tracking of E-Waste

Poison Apples Blog #1 - Labor Day Weekend 2018

It's September, the beginning of a new Academic Year.  Environmental studies and public policy and geography and business majors are arriving on campus, ready to launch hundreds of term papers, thesis, class essays, etc. on lots of topics.

Usually, there are dozens of students researching the topics of the Basel Convention, EPA policy, exports, and externalization of pollution.  And there are quite a few papers that will be written on racial profiling, and environmental justice.

So far, I haven't seen many papers on the thesis that Geeks of Color, the Tech Sector in emerging markets, is being improperly profiled as "primitive", "informal", and "illegal". But if I were to write such a paper, for an A+, I might begin with another paper that had been published that reached a conclusion in its title...

"How does e-waste travel across the world after disposal?" was a hot publication in 2016, and was covered on PBS national evening news broadcast before many of us had a chance to peer-review it. The title of the report asks a question... and has a cover photo at top which clearly shows the plastic casings of CRT televisions.  This raised a question to me... why was there not even a single CRT television tracked among the sample of 205 devices, which MIT's partner claims are a representative sample of "ewaste".

The 30% or so of "stuff" in e-waste collections that does indeed "travel across the world" is the only stuff they tracked. But the paper claims to answers the question "How" without asking the question, "Why"?  And the answer to why would come from the buyers, the black, brown, Asian, African, Latino and Islanders who are never offered a chance to show what they CAN do with your "elective upgraded" so-called "waste"...

Because the NGO knows this, they had to take an extra step. No one is selling spoiled apples in the marketplace, if they tracked the spoiled ones, it would show little export. But if they tracked the statistically good ones, they'd likely find their GPS in a reuse shop (in fact, they did despite efforts to sabotage).

The method, I call "poisoning the Apples"... And its time some people publish some term papers on the obvious errors in scientific method that should have been vetted before PBS was sent the paper.

Injury Box Blog: Pics Parasites Poverty

Last week I "kinda severely" injured my left hamstring in two winter-home-weatherization related incidents.  What has been frustrating has been to be home-bound but unable to sit still, upright in a chair for long.  Makes for halting, sporadic blogging.

Last weekend's post "Missing Poverty: Poverty Comedy" was messy, but I'm kind of excited by something that turned up from inside it.   The parallels between 1960s Ozarks and 2010s West Africa is not exactly uncanny, we've even been there before.  But the Hans Rosling videos I've been engrossed by this winter helped me generalize my subjective insights.



In 2009, South Korea became the first former recipient of OECD economic assistance to join the assistance giving committee.   South Korea was admitted to the OECD in 1996, 25 years after OECD was defined.  The 1961 original OECD membership list was whites - only (not even Japan was considered "developed").  Kids in college today are getting a message about "developing world" from people who considered South Korea a charity case, and they are getting the message on Samsung handheld devices (which they use to shop for Hyundais and Subarus in another tab).

You can track affluence and progress through lifecycle of appliances.  Koreans bought used products from affluent 1970s Japan.  Selling a first used car to a teenager is not necessarily "exploiting" the teenager.  Selling a starter home to a young family is not making them poor.  The guilt-by-association with poverty dogs the used goods market, and photographic snapshots of poverty should not become a modern soul snatching juju.

It's a fallacy that invokes instincts of nurture and instincts of aversion, and it sways crowds of people who self identify as "Agents of Conscience".   The key is to understand spiritual materialism (the desire to be a good soul) and history of development.  Rosling has shown how the majority of humans, like my Ozark cousins, have emerged from poverty within generational memory.  We need to explain to the Royals that fixing and recycling stuff isn't suffering.

Many places have been wealthy for so many generations that they do not have any institutional recollection of the end of poverty.  But for those of us who can remember, boycotting the poor is not how affluence went down.

Once Upon a Time in the North: Certification = Barrier to Entry?

Quicksilver X Man Duct Tape, for all your needs

After two decades of study of the recycling and reuse of electronics, it is increasingly clear that "barrier to entry" and monopolization of services is the biggest economic driver.

The USA Supreme Court is considering an important case this summer, to consider whether licensing rules are truly established to reduce risks, or whether (nudge nudge) they are simply anticompetitive.

GPS' Fareed Zakaria program spotlighted the challenge to Federal Trade Commission's successful defense of public mall "teeth whitening" services, which were banned as "unlicensed dentistry" by NC's State Board of Dental Examiners.   The Board of DE's, staffed completely by dentists, ruled that you have to have a dentist license to practice teeth whitening.

Why we should care about teeth whitening - Zakaria Blog

Jack Johnson, the Galveston Giant (Better Together)

History Channel:   I've learned about Jack Johnson, an African American professional boxer who was finally allowed to fight a white champion, Tommy Burns.  See also the Ken Burns documentary on PBS, titled "Unforgivable Blackness". He's in the news again (last month), for a congressional request to Barack Obama to grant Jack Johnson a pardon for his phoney conviction.

US Library of Congress

Both History Channel and Wikipedia link concern about Johnson's interracial sexual partnerships, and fear of his dominance of the sport, with the passage of the Mann Act. The Mann "White Slave" Act made it illegal to transport a prostitute geographically across state lines.   According to Wikipedia:

The White-Slave Traffic Act, better known as the Mann Act, is a United States law, passed June 25, 1910 (ch. 395, 36 Stat. 825; codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2424). It is named after Congressman James Robert Mann, and in its original form prohibited white slavery and the interstate transport of females for "immoral purposes". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, "immorality", and human trafficking; however, its ambiguous language of "immorality" allowed selective prosecutions for many years, and was used to criminalize forms of consensual sexual behavior.^[1] It was later amended by Congress in 1978, and again in 1986 to apply only to transport for the purpose of prostitution or illegal sexual acts.^[1]

According to the History Channel documentary, the passage of the Mann Act in 1910 coincided with Jack Johnson's peak years, and specifically with Jackson's defeat of great-white-hope champion James Jeffries.  Race riots resulted.  Blacks celebrated, whites tried to stop the celebrations, people got killed.  It was the top news story the year the Mann Act was passed.

How to solve a problem of competition?  With racial discomfort and fear-based overreaction. 

 In addition to his punishing victories, however, Johnson was known for his extravagant lifestyle, and was excoriated by his white critics for his romantic relationships with white women. In 1913, Johnson was convicted (in what was widely considered a sham trial) of violating a federal law, the Mann Act of 1910, which outlawed the transportation of women across state lines for "prostitution, debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose." He was found to have traveled with his second wife, a former prostitute, across state lines before they were married.

That's right.   The 2010 Mann Act law against transporting prostitutes across a state geographical border was used to arrest Jack Johnson for driving his wife, a white woman, and ex-prostitute.   The courts found him guilty because he had driven her across a state border before they were married, in 1908.. Two YEARS BEFORE THE MANN ACT WAS PASSED!  

What does that remind us of?  How about the Basel Ban Amendment, which still hasn't been passed, which is described as some kind of a limit for transboundary export-for-repair, in today's trade journals?

Geography, protectionism, racial segregation... greed and fear... cognitive dissonance.    What's the root story?   Out of fear of competition, blacks were banned from boxing whites in the USA.   When Jack Johnson found a venue (Sydney, Australia) to meet and defeat the white boxing champion, and used his winnings to celebrate with white women prostitutes, whites tried to find a white hope to shred Jackson in the ring,  But the undefeated champion Jeffries, allowed to box Jackson in Las Vegas, would lose in 1910.

Should we stop White Slavery?  Of course.  But was it really a problem in the first place?  Or was it a way to rationalize interfering in relationships which bothered us for the wrong reasons?  People like Jacksons wife are described as victims, transportation is observed.   It doesn't add up to a crime.

Term Paper IV: "E-waste" Export, Geog of Env Justice

Sitting in the exhibit hall of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, at the World Trade Center (an enlightened name for an exhibit hall)  in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In part I, I mapped the toxics in the USA, contrasting the tonnage of serious toxics (remote areas, primarily from raw material extraction) to the number of 100 data points close to urban areas.  I used this to support my thesis that environmental enforcement correlates positively with property value.

In Part II, I put the USA map into a generic Venn-like diagram (below), with the bluer areas representing land with high property value, and the green areas representing forests, tundra, moutains - land not valuable except to minimalist living or raw material exploit or agriculture.   The remote areas, where:

THIS HAPPENS (Mexico primary lead smelter 1999)
THIS HAPPENS (Peru primary ore smelter 2009)
And THIS HAPPENS (Zambia primary ore mining 2007)
And THIS HAPPENS (China primary copper, zinc, lead smelting 2000-1010)

In Part III, I made analogies over 130 years, how mercury mining and Indian wars and extinction of bison in the big green wild USA parallels the mercury mining, conflict metal wars, and extinction of gorillas in the wild jungles.  And the tinker Irish laborers in Boston who made paper mills survive by switching to recycled feedstock were looked down on 130 years ago, and suffered in the "great stink" of flushing toilets in Baltimore, much like repairpeople in Accra are looked down upon by recyclers while the goods they fix are labelled toxic, and while rich flood the markets with used devices...  Accra repairman lives in an Irish ghetto in a USA eastern city, and Congo mercury miner lives in the wild green lands of Wounded Knee.

In Part 4, I want to explore how the miracle of transportation allows trade between different zip codes in different countries.

Term Paper #3: Environmental Justice, a Little Drop of Poison

I'm going to put this up temporarily with a Tom Waits song (a little drop of poison) and then delete it in a few days.  It's below the fold...

Well a rat always knows when he's in with weasels...

1) Mining and smelting investments are driven away from property values;  they create most of the poison, species and habitat loss, carbon, etc.  It's an ugly business.  Most of the "harm" your computer will ever commit to the earth was done before you brought it home from the store and opened the box.

2) Labor value is found in high density in ghettos (lighter blue) and "emerging" neighborhoods.  It is a resource, and it is agnostic... it does not recognize whether metal is "Mined ore" or "Recycled Ore", and putting a label of "waste" onto urban ores has had unintended consequences.   In the past few years, the term "waste" has been abusively applied to material which is "in surplus" in one geographic location (e.g. working CRT monitors) and sold, added value intact, to a market where the goods are not in surplus.  An alien would not understand how recycled metal is regulated differently from virgin metal, the wealth or nationality of the previous scrap metal owner would be undetectable.

But the alien de Tocqueville would be able to see material moving around, and see the economic value of the property that people were living in, and see the regulatory functions were associated with property value.

The Spock de Tocqueville would observe People trying to feed their siblings hungry kids will do a lot of things.  "Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People" and "E-Waste Poster Child" blogs were my attempts to treat people doing "e-waste", primitively or immaculately, in a position as an equal.

Below is a chart which I have trouble fitting here, but it's my attempt to show the jobs people have moving value and creating value out of the various land value areas.

If you follow the movement of material and value through the digestive system of adolescent nations, you learn that the free market has a lot of environmental credit.

Term Paper II: "e-Waste" Export, Geography of Environmental Justice

Yesterday's thesis about the relationship between land value, environmental enforcement, and pollution, used a map from http://scorecard.goodguide.com/env-releases/land/,  showing toxic release sites on a map of the USA, and a chart from the same website showing the relative amount of toxics generated in specific localities.  When the releases are charted as "an occurance" and each release is given a single data point, the map shows the "superfund sites" to be concentrated in urban areas.

The sites, when weighted by actual tons of pollutions, are 83.75% in the top 20 / 100 sites (suggesting the 80/20 rule or Paretto Principle may apply).  The top 10 sites are in Alaska, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Missouri (Doe Run area), and Orange Florida.  Each of these sites has a "drilldown" function for data at Scorecard.Goodguide.com  Orange County Florida, the one non-western, non-mining area on the top ten list, has a NASA, USA Department of Defense, WR Grace, Dupont, Department of Energy, Chevron industry, etc. on its list of "potentially responsible parties" for lagoon pollution.  The nine sites above it are raw material extraction industry sites, none of which, my thesis states, could function economically inside a high-property value area.

1.	NORTHWEST ARCTIC, AK	481,382,100
2.	HUMBOLDT, NV	350,591,683
3.	PINAL, AZ	248,792,746
4.	SALT LAKE, UT	138,824,328
5.	ELKO, NV	83,494,740
6.	GILA, AZ	57,220,938
7.	EUREKA, NV	43,572,135
8.	OWYHEE, ID	28,887,324
9.	REYNOLDS, MO	27,313,480
10.	ORANGE, FL	24,032,977

The enforcement and likelihood that a site is identified as a threat is proportionate to its proximity to a landholder complaining about it.  For this reason, the "superfund" target sites on the USA map above are concentrated around cities and population centers.  This "NIMBY" or "Not In My Back Yard" dynamic is part of a normal democracy.  The spotlight on "environmental justice" in the USA focused on the difference the likelihood of enforcement correlated to race of neighborhoods;  that's an overlyer, according to my thesis, for economics and property values.  As I pointed out in one of the Slums Blogs last spring, 5th Avenue in Manhattan had auto repair shops a hundred years ago... but these relocated to Queens because it's easier to do repair work on an area with lower property value.

The Diagram Below generalizes the relationship between property value, wealth, and awareness of pollution. People live in rural villages, forests, and plains, but their population density is lower, and enforcement of all types is less likely in these areas.

The difficulty or unlikelihood of an enforcement paradigm outside of a population center is why emerging market city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore are more likely to achieve OECD-like status sooner than an emerging market like Malaysia or Indonesia or Brazil... the most recent nations admitted entry into OECD have been small.   Large nations admitted to OECD tend to have gained entrance early on, because of their econmic power (like the USA).  The USA was admitted into OECD while the pollution in Orange County was occuring, but as one of the "founders" of the OECD, the USA benefitted from a simpler formula - wealthy and white.  Not even Japan was not on the first OECD list.

Term Paper on "e-Waste" Export and Geography of Environmental Justice

Thesis:   Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head... And wrote a thesis chapter in one sitting.

Regulatory burdens are primarily driven by property value.   People are mobile, but their investment in property is a non-liquid asset, and they will pay a lot to keep it from being polluted.  If it's federal land out west, or a jungle island like Borneo - not so much.    Borneo has more species and more "environment" to spoil, but the property values there make it easier to mine than a richer vein of ore on Long Island.

As wealthy neighborhoods have resources to worry about smaller and smaller cognitive risks, compliance with risk (e.g. toxics in air or wipe tests, employee safety standards) become more expensive in wealthy jurisdictions.  This provides incentives for markets to outsource, or purchase from, areas with lower property values and less regulatory oversight.

This phenomenon has been examined through a lens of "environmental justice" for two decades.  Groups of people who tend to live in less affluent neighborhoods tend to be less critical of local employers who tolerate these risks.  Whether the "disproportionate enforcement" of standards is based on race, income, or real estate value, it coincides with the opinions of neighbors.

In environmental risk, the "worst neighbors" are the industries with the highest toxics and workplace hazards. These are know to be metal mining.  Virgin ore extraction is strongly correlated with releases of mercury and lead.   The number one source of mercury in the USA is gold mining;  number two is silver mining.  The more valuable an end product, the higher the tolerance for pollution, but the farther the activity occurs from high property values.

During the past 50 years, this dynamic has led to the "most polluted places on earth" being located in the least accessible, lowest property values on earth.  Property value is known to be correlated with demand for the property, and remote property has less demand.

Kabwe Zambia has been named the most polluted place on earth (Time Magazine).

La Oroya, Peru is definitely in the running. (NY Times)

Even within the confines of the USA, the most toxic industries are found in the most remote places, usually on federally owned land (a private landowner is less likely to tolerate pollution than the public landowner).  Of the top ten most areas with the most toxic releases, the first eight are in remote areas.. and (according to Scorecard.goodguide.com TRI reports), the states with the most land covered by the General Mining Act of 1872 have the most toxic releases.

1.	NORTHWEST ARCTIC, AK	481,382,100
2.	HUMBOLDT, NV	350,591,683
3.	PINAL, AZ	248,792,746
4.	SALT LAKE, UT	138,824,328
5.	ELKO, NV	83,494,740
6.	GILA, AZ	57,220,938
7.	EUREKA, NV	43,572,135
8.	OWYHEE, ID	28,887,324
9.	REYNOLDS, MO	27,313,480
10.	ORANGE, FL	24,032,977

Calculated as a percent, the Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule) appears to apply.  The top twenty sites on the list of 100 are 83.75% of the total toxics:  The top 4 sites of the top 20 represent 73% of toxics.


Total Toxics Emitted (Top 10) 1,484,112,451

All Top 100 1,991,863,954
Top 10 of 100 74.51%
Top 4 of Top 20 73.11%
Top 20 of 100 83.75%


Yet spending on "Superfund Enforcement" is not correlated with the toxics... it's correlated to property value and population.  One has to wonder how many sites on federal lands haven't even been sampled... if a pound of mercury drops in the forest, and no regulator is there to detect it, it still makes pollution.



This data is USA only, but the trend (in my thesis) is that the more environmentally damaging or toxic a process (e.g. gold or silver mining), the further the extraction will be placed from property values and populations.   Property value correlates with population up to a certain point (Manhattan Apartment) and then declines (ghettos and slums) because the more income people have, the more personal space they can afford.

Fast income growth would be associated with increasing property values.

In this thesis, the "good enough market" will be a rapidly emerging city, with electricity and potential wifi (like 1990s Guangzhou and Lima Peru, Cairo and Jakarta in the 2000s).  There is a labor force here, but the percentage of that labor force engaged in scrap wouldn't account for the fact that nothing "e-waste" is being shipped to rural areas even lower on the evolutionary scale;  for that matter, the presence of e-waste in concentrations at Guiyu or Agbogbloshie (with proximity to Shenzhen or Accra, cities growing at a faster than average pace for their continents), and the absence of a proportionally similar concentration of E-waste in even poorer cities like Mogadishu or Port-au-Prince, would be best explained by the growth and value added and not by the economics of externalization of pollution.

Haiti is closer and poorer than Accra or Kuala Lumpur, but the prices offered for e-scrap are much higher in cities (see Alibaba or Recycle.net) which are growing.

This establishes a reverse normal curve.  The demand for "used goods" and "cheap displays" like CRT monitors is very low in Manhattan, rises in middle income markets earning $3000 per year, and then drops precipitously again in very poor cities.    Mining, in comparison, grows in direct proportion to poverty, the lower the income level and property values, the greater the potential investments in raw material extraction.  You find coltan mining and gold mining investments in jungles.  A single mine like the OK Tedi Copper Mine, in a single day, dwarfs the toxics created by all the aqua regia and wire burning in all the cities of the world for a year.  If you want to find cataclysmic environmental damage, look in the opposite direction of recycling and repair.

According to my thesis, it is therefore the perception of "waste" formed by rich cities in areas with high environmental enforcement (driven by property value) which has been projected onto middle income cities which are actually buying used goods for "good enough" purposes.  It is true that the middle income cities have lower wage and environmental standards than the rich cities, but the correlation is exaggerated if you can't replicate the business in an even poorer city.  This is an example of "cognitive risk" which is marketed to by corporate interests in planned obsolescence, anti-gray markets, and competition from contract manufacturers scaling into good enough market economies.

It is the relative inexperience in rich nations with extreme forms of poverty which cause us to conflate "good enough markets" with images of suffering.   We create artificial groupings like "non-OECD" which basically mean "not as rich as us".   It's like creating a term "not forest" to describe everything that is not a forest, grouping deserts, meadows, swamps, and tundra together into a single term.

There are many types of snow.

End of Part 1.

Liberal and Conservative Conservation

I've got some swell new posts in draft form, just need to do the customary cutting back (trimming some to make new topics, or "part IIs").

As it's Sunday, I have time for Facebook, we have Vermont friends coming over for a barbecue, and I have family calls to make.  Made air reservations for a liberal friend's funeral in California, made a lunch date for a conservative friend in Dallas two days later.  I'm getting the Facebook "like if (I) love Jesus" from friends in the midwest, and "like if I like George Carlin" from the Northeast.

I'll be thinking about how important it has been to get the older gals in Mexico (like Ms. Vicki above) drives to demanufacture, because our strategy of being the end market for TVs is getting hard on their backs.   Everybody, liberal and conservative, is alarmed about exporting hard drives with "information" on them to places like this, where elderly unemployed Mexicans without college degrees take them apart slowly by hand, keeping things like hard drive magnets with rare earth metals.  Texas, Vermont, and California are united... Ms. Vicki must be stopped, either because I'm exploiting her, or she's incapable, or polluting, or stealing sensitive hard drive information, or stealing American jobs.

We don't want her jumping the fence to take apart drives in the USA, and we don't want to ship the drives to Mexico.  So we put them through machines, destroying the reuse which the Thailand flood hard-drive shortage makes valuable, and destroying the rare earth metals in the magnets, which cling to the steel.

"Smiling and waving and looking so fine, I don't think you knew you were in this song"....

Pixelating the OECD and Non-OECD E-Waste Geography

I'm about to submerge into Mexico with some professors of history and geography.

The best way to visit the "fair trade recycling" concept will be with history, geography, and economics.  A lot has been written by OECD scholars about "converging markets" and "contract manufacturing".    The question is whether hand- disassembly recycling, repair, and reuse is a decent way to achieve environmental benefit, amd whether it can create sustainable jobs in poorer countries?

OECD lens of Penang, Singapore, and Borneo:  Basel Convention Chaos

My theory, which I've approached from many angles in 2011, is that there has to be something good in trade for two parties to agree to it, and to do it over and over.  If it's not all bad, then it needs to be reformed, not prohibited. Prohibitions and boycotts never work because they ignore supply/demand.

The "attractiveness" of the export boycott is to Americans with typical weakness in geography, math, science and history.  Ignorance lends us to bias.  We draw conclusions from photos.  We think that the entire south of Missouri is wiped off the map when we see homes destroyed by tornadoes in neighborhoods of Joplin.  We think that "non-OECD", plus or minus six billion people, is "primitive".  And if people invest capital around that misperception, they will tend to promote and market to it.

The unholy grail is to get the processes of your competitors declared illegal.  Selling CRTs to be rebuilt into TV/monitor combos?  There may not be any pollution to it, but if I'm running my CRTs through a shredder I bought, it's ok by me for your process to be called "illegal".  As Dilbert calls it, "Using the law to keep justice at bay."  Whether patent law or environmental law or export law, if there are lawyers there are interested parties.