Geography Baiting 4: BAN Investigates Un-American Recycling Activities

Well, this guy must not be a credible source...

"Just a few days after arrival, the printer left Vermont and travelled to the Chicago area and then onwards to the port of Long Beach, California. It next pinged off of the coast of mainland China before arriving at the port of Hong Kong. Two days later it was in Mr. Lai’s Farm. " - Jim Puckett

He's talking about ME.

Sounds very "Un-American".  Sounds like Evidence that we are exporting 40% of our waste, according to BAN.  Or worse, sounds like companies that PAY the NGO tribute money are a "safe" solution to the Un-American problem, we must be shipping more than 40% just to buck up the average.

Caution:  Wet Taint

Sounds like.  This NGO makes a lot of noise, but the report they issued says in one place that 50%-80% of devices are exported, in another place over 80% are exported, and in the press release says 40% are exported.  In Geography Baiting #3 we showed what the actual MIT data say, and when corrected for the sampling error (not GPS tracking the 60-80% of e-waste that's almost never exported), what they actually have is data that is pretty close to the 7%-15% range of other vetted studies.

But this is about sound.  Jim doesn't want people to listen to me, he wants to discredit the blog.  So he's got a GPS on a device purchased by an R2 Company in Hong Kong, traces it to an R2 Company we sold it to in greater Chicago, and traced that back to us, who was downstream for our client in greater Boston - the one with no public drop off point - who someone told MIT undergrads to deposit the normally reuseable laser printer they were told to sabotage inside.

They did probably expose something we didn't know - that the buyer of our buyer in Hong Kong is using Hong Kong EPD's non-chemical non-hazardous waste classification of printers to outsource those devices on the cheap.  That's information, and we began acting on it last May.


But the "Geography Baiting" is making all Asian recyclers - all "Un-American" recyclers, seem primitive.  Telling readers that what happened to Robin could happen to you.  If a device might be reused, might be repaired, but someday eventually gets disposed, it will impugn you for doing business with someone who does business with someone who does business with someone overseas in the first place.  That is why they name the client in greater Boston, who is 4 transactions away.  

We do allow some printers to be exported.  Not very many.  Less than 6% of the printers that arrive at Good Point Recycling are intended or approved for reuse, and it was one of those BAN tracked to the R2 buyer whose R2 buyer sold it to someone at MLPF. 

Our problem at Good Point is that we believe in, and want to support rather than boycott, the best practices and state-of-art recycling in emerging markets.  We now know that the downstream 2nd tier audit didn't tell us everything, but we'd have no more info about that than if we had used an E-Stewards company, and BAN/MIT have not demonstrated that E-Stewards is superior to R2 in their study.  (But look at how my pal Craig Lorch is portrayed in an inset, compared to me).

Bullyboy 1: Toxics, Consumption, and Racism

There were 3 seminal works, all published in 1960, which have guided me.

• Silent Spring, Rachael Carlson.
• The Waste Makers, Vance Packard
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

Toxics, Consumption, and Racism.   The Story of Stuff, or E-Waste Exports, is “...tria juncta in uno...”



Used electronics recycling policy, as a lens, reveals how liberal occidental policy responds to risks.  The risk of a "toxic", the risk of product obsolescence, and the risk racism.   Particularly of black men taking white women.  Oh, you didn't know white liberals had fears about the third?  How subliminal of me.

These three seminal works have salted the discussion of used electronics regulation.  Racially charged imagery, planned obsolescence money, cognitive risk of "toxics" without borders, are everywhere as we look at the arrests of men like Joe Benson, the seizures of goods purchased by Hamdy Moussa, and the closure of refurbishing factories like PT Imtech in Indonesia.  American society, as much as it has progressed, still betrays a willingness to believe in crimes based on the brown-ness of the accused.

Lagos Nigeria has 6,900,000 households with television.   But when someone photographs a solitary junk TV at a Nigerian dump, we assume it was dumped there from Europe.   So sure, that even when it turns out the trade in used electronics is owned, operated, and successfully steered by African owners, the goods triaged by African technicians and repairmen, in a marketplace echoing the success of Singapore's R&O (repair and overhaul), Japan's Network of Tinkerers, Taiwan and Korean reverse-engineering and good enough markets, NGOs are satisfied to see African businesses enchained rather than question the Story of Stuff assumptions.

Answer:  Not much, you?

The sparse number of scrapped goods in the photos at African dumps (see below fold, under the tire) were probably, statistically, generated in the streets of Lagos, one of the largest cities in the world.   But the story, parrotted by all the western press, is that it came out of a sea container, diverted from a recycling program in the USA or Europe.  We are so sure, in fact, that the US Congress now has a bill (H.R. 2791) introduced to make sale of repairable used electronics to Africans a crime.  Why look at photographic evidence when Annie Leonard has drawn it so simply?  African kids get junk because fat western businessmen don't want to pay to recycle it.

Washington, DC, Jul 24 - U.S. Reps. Mike Thompson (CA-05) and Gene Green (TX-29) today introduced H.R. 2791, the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (RERA) of 2013. The legislation promotes the U.S. recycling industry by prohibiting the exportation of some electronics whose improper disposal may create environmental, health, or national security risks. 

"We'll start by burning the TVs from London hotel upgrades"

So, to truly connect the dots, Africans like Joe Benson and Hamdy Moussa are motivated not by consumer demand in cities like Cairo and Lagos and Accra, but by an altruistic need cut whitie's recycling bill.  But they don't want to do him such a big favor that they'll take ALL the junk, or any of the most expensive.  They cherry pick out the newest looking TVs and computers, to burn them, despite the fact the new ones have much less copper and gold than the old ones we never see in the African containers filmed by BAN and Greenpeace.

This was the circumstantial case presented in the arrests of Africans during the past year.  A few days ago, I got a chance to do a one-on-one, exclusive interview, with Joseph Benson, the man profiled in Jim Puckett's powerpoint presentation, in London.

Leading up to the meeting with Benson, I did a whirlwind tour of Europe by car, meeting at Interpol offices in Lyon (FR), with Basel Convention staff in Geneva and Fribourg (CH), and flew out of Copenhagen.  I met with four Africans accused publicly by Basel Action Network, Greenpeace, Rupert Murdoch's SkyNet News, and the UK Independent reporter Cahal Milmo, of buying used TVs, sold in Lagos for $100 apiece, to be burned by children for $2 in copper scrap.

Robert Ewell, call Sheriff Heck Tate.  There's a Tom Robinson running loose.

The Economist Gets It: Modern Slum Nariobi

Early in 2012, I wrote about the "pixelized slums" in Lima Peru, from the inside, and showed the OECD slums (Mexico, Japan) from the satellite beside the non-OECD slums in Delhi (Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People).

In its expose on Nairobi (where Fair Trade Recycling sent 3 representatives to a UNEP conference last March), the Economist gives readers a taste of entrepreneurism, rich and salty, in the free markets of Africa's largest shantytown.  "Upwardly Mobile Africa: Boomtown Slum"has incredible photos by Piers Benatar/Panos, taking us inside "a day in the economic life of Africa's biggest shanty-town."

Piers Bneatar photo of private ambulance entrepreneurs in Nairobi (Economist.com) Fair Use/ description

It's easy to take a photo in a tough part of town and use it to simplify a continent.  The Economist takes lots of different photos, not seeking to prove an a priori angle, but to bring us closer to understanding the complex.

The Economist shows an exploding fresco of creativity, of nuance, of good-enough affordability, of people living so close side by side one another that they have a communal interest in peace.  And up close, we see the same seeds of economy that hatched in Franklin's Philadelphia, in Gou's Taipei, in Tokyo and Seoul...

FIFTH Film of E-Waste Samaritans This Week

Thanks to Waste and Recycling News for adding a 5th film to the list of "E-Waste Samaritans" this week.   The teaser video on Vimeo for the documentary "Zabaleen" rounds out a busy week for investigation of the crime of the decade - Recycling While Brown.  In Zabaleen, director Justin Kramer digs into the social, political and economic divide inside Egypt's own have-and-have-not society.

WRN Editor John Campanelli not only found this Fifth video of the week on Recycling Samaritans, but also by pens a very accessible Editorial, Film reveals the story of Egyptian trash collectors.  Campanelli interviews the director of the documentary, Justin Kramer, by telephone to make sure that his own "aha" moment he obviously experiences is clear to all readers.  (Disclosure:  WRN  also reprinted my modest proposal post on "A-Waste" this week, so far the highest hit count of the weekly publication.)


Campanelli keeps it simple and not political.  Appreciate garbage people and recyclers.  They could be heroes.  While the editorial maintains WRN as an apolitical, unbiased interviewer, Campanelli gets makes the Brown Recyclers' story to be an environmentalists story, an underdog's story, a refreshing change from the "primitive toxic" story.

""The general view is that these people are what they handle," said Kramer. "Most people, especially younger people, look at them as just disgusting. They don´t see the good that they are doing."

The good is an astonishing diversion rate. The Zabaleen are able to recycle or reuse 80% of what they collect. The organic waste becomes feed for their livestock. The paper, plastic and metal go to recyclers.

"The sustainability of these people is completely off the charts," said Kramer. "They don´t waste anything."

The citizens of Cairo didn´t realize the service these people provided until 2009, when, in the wake of a swine flu scare, the government ordered the slaughter of all the Zabaleen´s pigs – hundreds of thousands of animals.

10 Year Green Entrepreneur: Good Point Recycling Decade

My January 2002 Purchase (home equity loan)

In January 2002, I drove this rusty blue used Penske truck through the snow, across Applachia, from Memphis to Middlebury.  I always remember seeing myself in the mirror the morning after I signed the papers, a chill feeling of ice water in my abdomen.


On the road that night, I had hours to think about what I'd just done with my home equity, my wife and two young twins in the small car trained in my headlights ahead of me.


1.  We have good ideas.
2.  We do them.
3.  We tell the truth every day.

Among Green Entrepreneurs, "good ideas" are plentiful.  Successful, sustainable, self-sufficient environmental programs are one in a dozen.  Recycling passes the tests so well, it has become taken for granted, like laundromats and gas stations.   Few remember the challenges of setting up the recycling infrastructure, the net to capture subsidized extraction and keep it in the loop of consumption.  I've tried doing this as a protester in my twenties, as a regulator in my 30s.   For the past ten years, I've been putting my own silver, sweat, blood and tears into this, and its time to assess.  I was not by myself on the front lines, in the foxhole, but I was in a place somewhat unique among advocates, lobbyists, regulators, policymakers, and corporations.

If you were a green bullet

What kind of bullet would you be?

One that stays in the air the longest before coming to rest?

One that lands in a safe spot?

One that is 100% accurate, directed by God?

You would not want to be fired by someone who simply believes he is directed by God.

"My aim is true."   Truth must define the aim.  The choice of target is in your head, but the target must be in your eye.  If I am to be your bullet, know that faith is gravity, truth is light.  I can believe in the faith of your goal, but do not want to be shot in the dark.