"IT'S ALIVE!" Author Stephen King's Personal Vintage FM Broadcaster To Go Back Online In Ghana, Africa

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Vintage Stephen King FM Station Broadcaster “Rises Again” for Halloween—Bound for Accra, Ghana to Champion Reuse & Recycling

IT’S ALIVE!

Middlebury, VT & Accra, Ghana — [October 28, 2025] — In a season made for re-animation, a piece of broadcasting history is getting a second life. A 1980s-era FM radio broadcast station once used by author Stephen King has been recovered in Maine by Matthew Strong, a retired electronics recycler, collected and conserved by Good Point Recycling of Vermont, and purchased by BridgeSolarPower.com CEO Emmanuel Nyaletey of Ghana. The vintage gear will be co-owned by BridgeSolarPower.com and Good Point Recycling and installed in Accra for community programming that spotlights electronics reuse, safe recycling, and circular-economy jobs.

Broadcast Electronics FM10 10Kw FM transmitter with qty 4 4CX7500A tubes

“Finding this equipment felt like uncovering a time capsule,” said Matthew Strong, who recognized the significance of the station and preserved its key components. “It’s satisfying to know the next chapter won’t just be museum glass—it’ll be on the air, creating public value.”

The project pairs BridgeSolarPower.com’s energy-access mission with Good Point Recycling’s fair-trade reuse ethos. “Stephen King helped make Maine famous for stories that travel,” said Robin Ingenthron, spokesperson for Good Point Recycling. “Sending this gear responsibly to Accra—where radio still stitches communities together—turns a great story into a working system. It proves that reuse, when done right, is not a horror show—it’s the hero of resource conservation.”

BridgeSolarPower.com will host the restored studio as part of a public-interest broadcast initiative focused on right-to-repair, safe handling of end-of-life devices, technician training, and the economics of reuse in African markets. The programming will include interviews with local repairers (“the real experts”), call-in shows on product longevity, and segments demystifying environmental compliance and downstream accountability.

“This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake,” said Emmanuel Nyaletey, CEO of BridgeSolarPower.com. “Ghana’s tech sector runs on ingenuity and repair culture. A functioning broadcast studio gives us a megaphone to share practical advice, highlight good actors, and inspire young people to turn reuse into careers. It’s about jobs, access, and dignity—and doing it transparently.”

To Matt Strong, it was not immediately evident that Stephen King’s broadcaster had survived since it was decommissioned.  “When we arrived at the transmitter site, it was obvious that nobody had been there for quite awhile… the door stuck… And as we got it open, it erupted into the Sargasso Sea of ticks. They were everywhere, outside, inside the equipment, and began to crawl all over us!  We all agreed it could be a theme for a Stephen King story.”

The partners emphasized that all international movements are being managed with proper documentation and that the equipment, once commissioned in Accra, will operate as a teaching platform for electronics testing, safe refurbishment, and compliant materials handling. “We want trade readers to see the model: verify demand, document flows, elevate local technicians, and measure impact,” Ingenthron added. “That’s how reuse outperforms disposal.”  The three businesses are aligned under the mission of FairTradeRecycling.org, an international NGO based in Middlebury, Vermont.

Specifications

STEPHEN KING’s Broadcast Electronics FM10 10Kw FM transmitter with qty 4 4CX7500A tubes, one installed and 3 spares (all filaments test good). Complete manual, large box of (new) spare parts, spare blower motor (new in box).  Tuned @ 103.3 (was WKIT in Bangor Maine) 

Made in October of 1987.

About BridgeSolarPower.com

BridgeSolarPower.com develops community-scale energy and technology solutions in West Africa, bridging access gaps with practical, locally serviced systems. The company invests in training, local supply chains, and circular-economy practices to keep equipment in service longer.

About Good Point Recycling

Good Point Recycling (American Retroworks Inc.) is a Vermont-based, ISO/R2-certified electronics reuse and recycling company known for Fair Trade Recycling partnerships and transparent downstream management. GPR supports right-to-repair, technician training, and data-driven environmental compliance.

Media Contacts

Good Point Recycling (Vermont)
Robin Ingenthron, Spokesperson
(802) 382-8500 | press@goodpointrecycling.net | GoodPointRecycling.net

BridgeSolarPower.com (Ghana)
Media Relations
info@bridgesolarpower.com | BridgeSolarPower.com

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Halloween kicker: From the King of horror to the kings of reuse, this station isn’t haunting the attic anymore—it’s back on the air. In recycling, we don’t fear the afterlife… we call it a second life. 👻📻

@AlexanderClapp Officially Blocks My Twitter X Posts

After hearing about his book interview on an NPR podcast, I tried to suggest he take a look at dozens of taped interviews I made with importers in Ghana and scrap workers at Agbogbloshie between 2010 and present day.  When trying to introduce him to Olu Orga, who gave Adam Minter and I our first tour of Agbogbloshie in 2014, and to share my interviews with Olu in 2017, I found Alex has blocked me, so cannot see any of my posts or replies.

I haven't said anything impolite, though I tried to ask about his book's misapplied quote from me here in this blog.  But here's a screenshot.  

Followed by a link to just one of Olu's interviews I wanted to share with him.

If you want to leave readers a review of his book on Amazon, here is a link.  Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash

Here again is Olu Orga's description of his years working at Agbogbloshie, where he specialized in repairing thirdhand goods discarded by wealthier homes and businesses in Accra, Ghana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qQM3WLdYR8&list=PLZQiwXcn3NV9ohL-tYCTdGdXH9b1ohBX_

The Guardian Environmental Division Experiences Situational Irony

Carmignac photojournalism award: Ghana and e-waste

Photojournalists Muntaka Chasant and Bénédicte Kurzen and investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas have documented the flow of electronic waste between Europe and Ghana for the 13^th edition of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award

By Muntaka Chasant, Bénédicte Kurzen, Anas Aremeyaw Anas and Fondation Carmignac

The opening paragraph of the Guardian's weekend E-Waste Ghana Story is fascinating, because it goes on to completely disprove itself in award-winning own-goalism.  The Guardian attempts to actually do what we've been calling on them to do for more than a decade - interview the diaspora and the Tech Sector in the Importing Nations, and don't focus on Basel Action Network and Greenpeace's whitemansplaining of how people buy stuff for reuse.  In so attempting, not unlike 2015's UNEP Waste Report "Waste Crime Waste Risks" (where the documentation completely obliterated the Executive Summary, see "Criminal Negligence" reviews in Discard Studies), the Guardian completely nails its own coffin.

Jerry Sekou Adara: “I had a dispute with the environment department here in Holland and we went to court. I asked them: ‘How do you come to the conclusion that these goods are waste? Who checks them?’ Deciding that something is waste is like going to the doctor. You’re told what illness you have. Don’t say a television is waste beyond repair just because you plugged it in and didn’t see any image. The judge in court was a lady and a very good judge. I said to her: ‘Look, this laptop is not waste when it’s on your table, but it is waste when in African hands.’” She knew I was telling the truth. The economy is good for the people here – they don’t suffer – and what they think of as waste here, somebody will use in Africa.”

The Torching Critical Mass of Used Solar Voltaic Panels at Africa Barber Shops

Accra, Ghana:  Every barber in the city knows the other barbers in the city.

Every person in the city knows a barber in the city.

The leasing of used solar panels, imported from Vermont, can light a torch - so to past-speak - on rapid adaptation of solar panel electricity in Africa.  And Africa is obviously the fastest growing population on the grandest continent. Unless our plan is for Africans to live without electricity and not cook their food, they will continue to buy expensively off of a limited electric grid, and buy illegally deforested charcoal to cook their meals.

Jim and Daniel Puckett, just come here right now and attack this export of used solar panels for good and proper use. That's your thing...Get it over with.

The electric grid in Africa was meticulously studied before I lived in Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer+-3

See these African Tech Geniuses getting free secondhand panels and measure the gallons / liters of diesel they save every day, every single day, from the ubiquitous diesel powered electric generators which are feeding demand since IMF and World Bank ran out of rivers to Akosomba Dam Hydroelectric fund.

WasteDive Asks: Are Solar Panels the Next CRT Recycling Problem?

 Our small Vermont company gets 2 big stories in July.

First, Recycling International is publishing a 2 page interview with Yours Truly, whose small Vermont Recycling Company has catapulted to #36 on the Magazine's list of Notable Recyclers worldwide (and that's not just "e-waste").

Do we belong on a list that includes Robin Weiner of ISRI at #15, or author Adam Minter at #6?

My only explanation is ironic - compared to similar lists a decade ago, Recycling International now realizes there are hundreds of well-managed recycling companies in places like Ghana, India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore.  After reading their interview of me, I realized the irony that a) thanks to us (and this blog), the list is much harder for a white American to get onto, and b) we are deliciously placed several rows above Basel Action Network (screenshot below), which tried to get me labelled as a pariah after being called out for profiling Joe "Hurricane" Benson as a "primitive recycler" (rather than a 25 year expert at reuse export) based on his nationality.

But before I "bury" the lead about solar panel recycling ---  it's been my honor to put together an esteemed panel on how Solar Panel Reuse in Emerging Markets may offer the same solutions as it offered SVGA computer monitors 20 years ago... Register at NERC.org for a front row on Zoom, as I participate with Emmanual Nyalete of Ghana, Lennart Banaszak of Germany, and Good Point Recycling's very own Solar Nerd Trevor de Young (who's trailer home is almost completely "off grid" with salvaged solar panels - including some deliberately smashed by the solar de-installers in an botched "end of life" crime).

(see hammer marks, which rendered this panel 50% efficient. If it is relocated to Ghana, the 50% efficient panel will produce more KWH - due to abundant sunlight - than it produced in Vermont before it was "sabotaged" to prevent reuse).

Katie Pyzyk's interview in WasteDive explores our pilot program for solar panel reuse... and finds parallels to the CRT Reuse concerns that resulted in California SB20 and piles of shredded leaded CRT cullet across the West.

2020 Vision: What to Expect In Good Point Ideas

While the population in Africa is growing very quickly, it is not growing nearly as quickly as the number of televisions (and phones, computers, other electronics) per household.

When you study the number of years that Africans have been watching TV (see Dr. Graham Mytton's "Mass Communication in Africa" 1983), the shocking thing about Agbogbloshie is just how bloody few TVs are at the city dump. Africans keep fixing and fixing them, using them over and over, longer and longer.

Somehow, however, the world has been fed a story that places Africans as primitives surrounded by burning waste electronics delivered by evil people in the west.  Somehow, good reporters are sending a message to boycott and arrest citizens of Africa's Tech Sector.

Here's a 2019 report from France 24, by Franck Hersey... no evidence of any research of % of Agbogbloshie waste from electronics vs cars, no "baseline" research of how much a city like Accra normally generates (not imported waste, but eventual waste). No interview with Grace Akese, Emmanuel Nyalete, Adam Minter, Robin Nagle, Jenna Burrel, Josh Lepawsky, Ramzy Kahhat, etc. Our pal Awal Muhammed of Savelugu and Tamale - the most photographed man in Ghana - gets plenty of screentime. Franck Hersey actually films Awal pointing to a 1990s Sony TV and pretending to read that it was Made in France...



Accidentally bigoted reporting has been a theme of the blog. And its still a problem. But I'm not feeling that important to the fight any longer. Is it time for Obi Wan Ingenthron to lower his light saber and join the blue ghosts?

Interview with Ghana TV Repair Veteran, and Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

A Great Gift - The Ability to Interview Elders

Why do some of us become very attached to our grandparents, and others of us secretly dread the holiday base-touch?  Why do some of us spend thousands of dollars per year flying back and forth to visit elderly relatives, and others don't bother to make a ten minute drive, more than once a year?

The gift of boredom.  It's something perhaps lost on the current generation of non-fisher, non-hunter (I'm neither, either), non baseball-watcher generation.  The ever-ready internet is at our fingertips. The cell phone has balmed our boredom so thickly that even minutes lead to fidgets.

Will this reduce book reading?  Great books have made me better than who I am. Could I have finished reading them if I'd had internet in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s?  I appreciate many people who know history and still read books (many far more often than I do). But in wondering at my own weakness for distraction, I fear that great books will not die in fire... but in ice.

Master Baba of Tamale Ghana, retired Tech Sector, on the history of West Africa Television

Help Us Define "Waste Colonialism": Talking Secondhand

Looking for University Research to Help Us Define "Waste Colonialism"...

Robin I

@WR3A

·

2m

Actively seeking university researchers interested in "waste colonialism", or the use of apparently environmentally minded rules to serve planned obsolescence and protectionism. #wastecolonialism #freejoebenson #fairtraderecycling

"Waste Colonialism" comes up in the final chapters of Adam Minter's new bestseller "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale".  Adam kicked off his book tour at the University of Vermont, in part to thank my company and our global partners for "dropping our drawers" and giving him access to secrets of the trade.

In fact, the next to last chapter is titled "A Rich Person's Broken Thing". That is drawn directly from conversations I had with my Ozarks grandparents, both on the farm as a child, and in long talks with them after I returned from the Peace Corps in Cameroon, Africa (June 1984-December 1986). Adam captured my grandpa Clarence Fisher's anecdotes about when automobiles first came to the Ozarks (his own father had a horse and wagon, and signed his name with an "X"). As many family members were leaving the Ozarks during the Great Depression (along the "Hillbilly Highway"), his older brother, he said, got into the used automobile business. He explained that no one they knew could afford a new car (and the unpaved roads would be heck on them anyway). Used cars were affordable... but his brother's method was to go to St. Louis, Memphis, or Chicago and listen for sounds a car was making when it had broken down or was about to. If you knew what went wrong with a car, what the sound that problem makes, and how to fix it, you could buy the "rich man's broken thing" for a lot less. They'd bring it down to Cedar Valley, fix the car, and flip it for the price of a working used car.

I explained to my grandparents how I'd seen Africans doing that exact same thing. And Adam not only put it in the book, but recounts the tale of Joseph "Hurricane" Benson of BJ Electronics in England, who was sentenced to prison for buying used hotel CRT TVs and selling them to Africa.

Adam shows the wisdom of the African traders, and accepted my challenge, which was to ask why do rich countries (and in particular white people, because Japan and South Korea don't do this) create "rules" by which Africans can buy secondhand equipment?  And when the UK House of Commons reported that the African exports needed to stop - not to "save" the Africans from pollution, but to retain "strategic minerals and metals" for European industry - why did no one from that House of Commons think it worthy to write the UK Barrister who was recommending Joe Benson be prosecuted?

Adam's answer is "waste colonialism". He doesn't use "racism" the way I have in the blog, but he certainly calls out the bigotry involved in confusing (sometimes deliberately) the secondhand (and "thirdhand") Tech Sector with the unschooled wire burners of the scrap sector.

As I said when apologized to 7 years ago, the apology from Basel Action Network should not be made to me, but to the Africans, Asians and LatinX whom the NGO has been racially profiling as "primitives".

A Short, Short 3 Minute explanation of Ghana's Agbogbloshie Scrapyard

Intern Nanja Horning and Liotolio Gahd whipped up this brief and  entertaining short video to explain to people what Agbogbloshie is, and isn't, about.



Dinky funky funny rap on whitesaviorcomplex and the geeksofcolor who pay the price for sensationalism.

* Sneak Peak * Fair Trade Recycling Documentary Transcript

Fair Trade Recycling is finally working on our own short documentary. The only purpose of giving this advance narration (we have the film already) is to solicit donations or in-kind services for editing.

Contact me if you want to help.

Certification and Racketeering: Part 1 Ahmed Hussein Suale RIP

International Crime does take place.

"Racketeers offer a deceitful service to fix a problem that otherwise wouldn't exist."

Let that definition sink in.

"On 16 January, Ahmed Hussein-Suale, a Ghanaian investigative journalist who had collaborated with the BBC, was shot dead near his family home in Accra. Ghanaian police believe he was assassinated because of his work." - BBC

His work exposed bad calls from African referees, paid bribes to control the outcome of soccer matches. It's a textbook racketeering case, with a deceitful service (bad calls) sold to change the play that had occured on the field. People were convicted, resigned, or fired as the truth spread. And Africans who had watched the matches on TV and seen the bad calls with their own eyes, grew to esteem the Tiger Eye Team of Hussein-Suale and Anas Aremeya Anas.

Regulatory Gymnastics: Officials' Time Out for Recycling Waste Offset

Hey, just a quick note to those of you who have been asking what the latest is with the Fair Trade Recycling Offsets.  I remain really excited about this.  But we had a little setback which has stalled the project.

Here's the history, the latest roadblock in RED.

1. Fair Trade Recycling started with Purchase Orders and Fair Trade Contracts.  When we wrote down what overseas buyers DID NOT ACCEPT, it became pretty clear very quickly that they were not buying stuff to burn it or to operate a "Pollution Haven".  Someone paying us 10 times more for a CRT than it's worth in scrap, but paying ZERO for the same make and model which has damage (disqualifying it from the purchase order) is presumed to be a good actor.

regulatory gymnastics (Labadi Beach Accra, Ghana)

Nuance Delivery 3: Eyewitnesses To Hell - Oluu Orga

The Agbogbloshie waste site has really become a crucible for examination of the charitable industrial complex. The richer the African city, the more consumer electronic waste it generates.  When I go to Agbogbloshie, I don't see anything I didn't see in Mobile, Alabama.

But once, I thought did.  When Westerners go to unfamiliar places, something happens. We photograph something that seems exotic, and the more shocking and unfamiliar, the more valuable the photo.  It's interesting to contrast our Western photos of Agbogbloshie to those taken by an African who lived and worked at the place. Western photojournalists (e.g. Kevin McElvaney) earn a better living selling their photos if there's a nice Biblical Halloween Titled Hyperbole around them.

In Nuance 1 and 2, we focused again on Awal Muhammed of Savelugu, Ghana, the guy in his mid-20s who figured out that adding more gasoline - literally - to the ewaste (and tires, mostly) burning fire was a recipe for handouts. On my first visit to Agbo in 2015, he certainly stood out. (And he video calls me too often ever since, see last night).

Today, let's focus on an authority, Oluu Orga, who is everything Awal is not. He also came to Agbogbloshie from the North, he also pushed a cart around the city, but he didn't ever learn to perform fire tricks for the Photojournalist convention (which started in earnest a year after Oluu left).

Oluu Orga didn't have much to spend on film, but he took pictures of his friends doing different jobs.

In the mid 1980s, I returned from 30 months in Africa with 7 undeveloped rolls of film. When they were all developed at once, I could see where my priorities had been.  Excited to be in remote Africa, the place I had heard about as primitive and natural and exotic.. many photos apparently were intended to "validate" my time there. More shots of grass roofs than corrugated steel, no pictures of paved roads.  When I went through Oluu's photos of his time there, Agbogbloshie finally got real.

Reversing ER#3: J-School Background Checks on E-Waste - Benson Released, Rowe Fired?

Here's an interesting statistic on "e-waste" (like most, made up on the spot).  Four out of five journalists who contact me beforehand decide not to run the story on "e-waste" at all.

Reporters are initially attracted to the Basel Action Network's press release or photo opportunity (exotic brown child perched on familiar looking old electronics).  That BAN press release has, for 15 years, triggered interest in reporters and college researchers. An easy story to write, as BAN served "facts" up on a platter.

But Jim Puckett is no Upton Sinclair. He wrote about Agbogbloshie in chilling text - before admitting to me he had never been there at all. He had never even read a peer reviewed article.

The "ewastehoax" says junk in cities across the globe is the fault of "sham recyclers"... if only we use a USA recycling company that pays dividends to Jim Puckett, we will quickly clean these places up.

The Ewastehoax promises a moral lesson of "environmental injustice", and triggers three Steven Pinker-esque cognitive biases:

1. Nurture. We actually care about the poor child.
2. Greed. We suspect someone else's actions were driven by it.
3. Fear.  We are afraid of our own liability for our "stuff".

It's an easy recipe.  BAN isn't the only organization to use it. Annie Leonard, Blacksmith Institute, StEP, R2 (SERI), E-Stewards, CBS 60 Minutes, The Guardian, etc. all followed the trail on these instincts.

If you are a good photographer, that is all you need to put some guy like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson of BJ Electronics behind prison bars.  You can be the reporter that made him sell his house, that cost him his business and his retirement.

You are so cool.  You no doubt picked up all kinds of dates interested in your brave reporting.  Did you tell them about Joe Benson, the Nigerian TV repairman who shipped a TV with a GPS tracker to Ghana? Did you describe the satisfaction of Benson going to jail, like Raphael Rowe of BBC's Panorama did?

Oh, wait.  News flash.  Raphael Rowe got fired? (According to this article, "Pushed Out", but there's still some uncertainty as I research this, he's still on BBC 2 local).  And Interpol has pulled the plug on Project Eden.  All since Fair Trade Recycling's 2015 trip to Agbogbloshie, where we saw a city slum near a dump full of tires, cars, and junk appliances - all once owned by Africans, from a thriving city of millions of consumers.  Even the dozens (not thousands) of (adult) orphans there all carry cell phones, and can send photos of where they collected the scrap... at Accra homes and businesses, which had millions of TVs in the mid 1990s.

Benson may have the last laugh on Raphael Rowe. Though he has suffered, journalism students once attracted to "environmental justice" stories are increasingly documenting "environmental malpractice", "friendly fire", and "collateral damage" to Africa's Tech Sector.

Whether or not Raphael Rowe stays on at BBC, he's still know for having been racially profiled.  As will be Joseph "Hurricane" Benson.  As Rowe said in an interview "bitterness never leaves you".