The Noble Informal

Today's blog is just a placeholder for another I've been working on for a few days. 

The topic is my invitation to present to a group of African Environmentalists on the Topic of E-Waste Management in Africa. 

Youth in E-Waste and Greentech Summit

The paper introducing the conference quotes Global Transboundary E-Waste Flows Monitor as follows:

"According to the Global Transboundary E-waste Flows Monitor 2022, Africa generates over 2.3 million metric tons of e-waste annually, with only 1.2% of this waste being collected and recycled in an environmentally sound manner in an ecologically sound manner. The informal waste management sector handles a substantial amount of e-waste, collecting and recycling the majority through unsafe treatment methods. These practices harm the environment and pose severe health risks to women, children, workers, and fenceline communities. The informal e-waste sector's low-value recovery methods perpetuate poverty and hinder sustainable development."

I have been invited by Agabas Ayudor of Appcyclers, who spent a week at Good Point in Vermont last month learning about how hand disassembly leads to more reuse and repair than grinding and shredding.

If I'm able to present, my title will be The Noble Informal, and will focus on Retroworks de Mexico, which opened in 2007, and which for 13 years operated an e-waste demanufacturing facility in Sonora which was banned from the Tucson Arizona contract it was awarded based on the exact same made-up narrative. The Arizona companies who impugned Las Chicas Bravas as "Primitives" wound up creating the largest hazardous CRT waste pile in America - possibly the largest on earth.  The women who ran Retroworks de Mexico in fact recycled the only CRT glass from Arizona that came from that pile.

Africans presenting the dystopian rumors about Africa Tech Sector to young Africans is something that should keep European tax payers up at night.  This is 2022, not 2012, when the lid came off of Basel Action Network's 80% false claims, and the re-arrest of Joseph "Hurricane" Benson in the UK was issued based upon that false, faked, statistic.

I don't want to be pidgeonholed into writing about the same thing, but WHO IN ACADEMIA IS HOLDING GLOBAL TRANSBOUNDARY E-WASTE FLOWS MONITOR accountable for this propaganda?  

The "Informal Sector" knows more about your electronic devices than you do ...

Watching @Vice series 1, episode 1, of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, and it's a fascinating history of the shamans of LSD.  One of my closest friends, the late Brother Dave, followed Grateful Dead Shows selling these concoctions. But he also sold cocaine, and when he had to do time, didn't want to get shot by the coke dealers, so he turned on some of the hippy LSD psychadelic peddlars. This Vice series tells their stories.

I didn't give up the geeks of color to save my own skin. But the perspective of Casey Hardison "don't yap", keep your mouth closed, rings true. The factory film above is closed, I only share about Brother Dave because he passed away about 14 years ago. Retroworks de Mexico is closed. Net Peripheral is closed. They were the best environmental recycling facilities I've ever seen, but they weren't white people, and the so-called "formal sector" came down on reuse the way it came down on LSD. Narcs vs. Shamans. 

If you are one of the 55 people who still follow this blog, the mind experiments and meditation of my late teens is perhaps as important as my grandfather's "Rich Person's Broken Thing" chapter (of Adam Minter's "Secondhand"). The Vice story about psychedelics is very much a triggering memory for me.

Now about the electronics informal "e-waste" business... It's a story of formal sector big OEMs using dimwitted environmentalist do-gooders, like slavers using Jesuit colonialists, to crack the skulls of brainiacs.

Since the assault on the legal import permit of my partners and friends at Net Peripheral in Malaysia, I've been pretty guarded about sharing information on "big secret factories".  After Allen Liu and Su Fung Ow Young opened their doors to @AdamMinter for his 2013 Recycling International article on Fair Trade Recycling, which had also opened its doors to Kelley Keough of GreenEye Partners and Craig Lorch of Seattle's Total Reclaim, Jim Puckett contacted the Malaysia Department of Environmental Protection to protest the legal import permit. Malaysia officials verified the permit was legally issued, but cancelled it, and the factory closed. My company lost $24,000, but Allen and Su Fung and their employees lost their jobs, lost everything.

"No good deed goes unpunished". 

We remain friends, but I no longer expose the Tech Sector to Basel Action Network lynch mobs. Jim's vision is that white countries define what is waste, and the tech sector workers overseas are "rice paddy" primitive recyclers. 

India Rag Recycling: Not so Shoddy

Taking a break from Africa trip, I reminded myself to USE TWITTER for its intended purpose.

Twitter isn't for writing, and reading every person you follow is about as edifying as reading a library card catalog. Booleans and keyword searches have long replaced the Dewey Decimal System.

Twitter is about the SEARCH box.   So for a break, I typed in "Recycling India".

BAM. BINGO.   A textile recycling city.  Tip of the hat to Tweeter Tim Mitchell of the UK.

http://www.timmitchell.co.uk/index.php?/projects/clothing-recycled/

APOLOGIES - I must redirect you to this site, still strongly recommended.
In place of the India photos I originally posted, I have put in several 60 year old Wikimedia photos of rag-pickers from Western cities.  Do visit Tim Mitchell.

I completely understand that an artist saying "yes" to one person can lose control of the images as they are found by other bloggers.   Fortunately, through Wikimedia Commons, I have managed to find practically the same photos (in black and white) as the activity shown in India, mostly taken in Britain in the 1940s.

Wikimedia commons - "Old rags into new cloth Britain"

At the thrift shop I managed for two years, we sold a lot of bales of used clothing, and found the market dominated by Indians, Pakistanis, and Africans.   My long lost chum Yadji told me about his family making treks to Lagos to buy bales of used clothing to bring back to his Cameroon village of Yenwa.

The Tim Mitchell link shows 28 photos taken at an Indian rag and clothing trade village, which I say defies the labels of "formal" and "informal" sector, terms made up by Western academics and then applied by the Chinese Communist Party to crack down on Taiwanese competitors with CCP owned factories.



The mall photo or Mitchell's (#10) reminds me of the Cairo used Technology Malls.   The 28 photos show several links to different niches and segments.  One is actually the business of buying used India Saris, washing them up, and exporting them to the "hippy markets" in Western countries.