Part 1: Why You Can Be For African Development, Or Against Secondhand Imports, But NOT BOTH

Almost anything mined can and should be reused before that material is mined again. Almost anything mined can and should be reused before that material is mined again. Almost anything mined can and should be reused before that material is mined again.

Ask them.

The photo above was taken this week in a city in Spain.  It shows three carters.  Carter is a legal term (see New York City statute) for the job of pushing a cart through the street to look for items discarded by businesses and residents that can be economically salvaged and should be reused, repaired, or recycled.

This photo is interesting because it humanizes the carters.  I tweeted a photo last week of a carter showing up to scavenge a waste container ten minutes after a previous carter had already sorted through it. In the photo above, two carters have idled their own carts to help a third repair the broken wheel on his own cart - which contained a computer and microwave ("e-waste").

It's also interesting because it's an opportunity to follow the cart, and see that 80% of it is sold locally to European formal sector scrap yards, by the African immigrants. The only things they keep to ship home are working and repairable devices... to countrymen who develop Africa, not dump on it.

500 Year Young Unborn Superchild Salli

She's four years old, 15.4 kg (34 lbs), has dark brown hair, and dark olive green eyes. Her skin is mocha, the product generations of shuffled melatonin across generations of slapjack diaspora who spent generations falling from and rising to power over five centuries of globalism. Globalism is a word in history books - not that there are books - taken for granted by children of earth. The year is 2521.

 Let's call her Salli. 

Had Sally been conceived 504 years in the past, reaching this age in AD 1521, it's unlikely she'd have been aware of what we now call the Renaissance. The great artists, Raphael, da Vinci, and others would not have been recognized by the average European, let alone a child, or anyone in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Even if she had the fortune to be born in a European city - Athens, Florence, Berlin, London, Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen - she would statistically have been extremely poor. Over 12% of children born died in their first year. 

Five hundred years later, in present day 2021, it's easy for us to recall (or google, or Wikipedia) the great philosophers and artists of 500 years ago. The Renaissance or "Rebirth" period of history centers on humans who re-discovered ancient wisdom, re-appreciated Greek and Roman philosophy, and set the stage for founding fathers of democratic constitutions. Those constitutions eventually led to generations of oppressed, indentured, enslaved genders and races to aspire, and achieve promises of equality. Whether that equality status has been "achieved" as of today might be perilous to debate before the woke. But from the position of Salli in 2521 AD, a lot of progress was made by women and the colonized nations (absurdly referred to as "minorities" so often in western-centric writings) between 1521 and 2021.

The question today is what about her?

The Ptolemy-Liability Trap: Simplified Recycling Lifecycle Narratives Tend to Revolve Around You

The Vermont free-mail, coupon-funded newspaper "Hometown" is published and mailed by the Burlington Free Press - which, with its Headliner newspaper, follows the opposite, paywall approach, online. So I'm in a bit of a quandary in presenting the snapshot, below, of the opening paragraphs of the article. Well, it's a fair use claim, and also it's common practice for newspapers to show the "lede" (opening paragraphs), so here's what catches my attention this morning.

Burlington Free Press Thanksgiving "Hometown" Edition

Joel Banner Baird of Burlington Free Press may well have started a "recycling" story for the same reason that @AdamMinter told me those stories normally appear around holidays.... they are easy to write, require little more than a google page one of research, and seem to appeal to everyone. They are not time sensitive, so a reporter can write it a week ahead, and get home for the holidays faster. But at least in the opening paragraphs, Baird bluntly avoids the normal "gotcha" narratives common in holiday journalism (someone made millions of dollars recycling trash was the go-to in the 1980s, your recyclables didn't really get recycled in the 1990s, lather-rinse-repeat for every buyers-market, sellers-market cycle). It leads, but does not bleed.

The opening interview with Michael Noel (nice holiday namesake) of TOMRA, the master-redemption center recycling provider and owner of most supermarket reverse-vendor container machines, avoids falsely choosing between either "It was the best of times."  

...Or, "It was the worst of times".

Which is the most environmentally sustainable Container for my holiday beer?

Michael Noel tells Joel Banner Baird "The short answer is, it's complicated". That is an honest answer to the decades of environmentalists (spoilt brat) privileged demands to "choose" the "best" beer container, vs. the equally misguided alt-right "recycling is Bulls**t" waste-makers. Both camps are uber-susceptible to cognitive dissonance (or perhaps vice versa, those prone to cognitive dissonance probably lean toward extreme positions). The more they choose one answer (only use this one vs. nothing matters, environmentalists are wrong), the louder they both get. Outrage is not Expertise.

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Ethical Gravity 4: Moral Moving Targets, Beautiful Gray Markets

Is an "illegal" market, or a "black market", unethical?

It is illegal to sell the Holy Bible in many nations, but who would consider it unethical?  It is important to distinguish ethics from laws passed by authorities to grant - well, more and more authority.

Beautiful, beautiful gray.

Why No Place's Industrialization Looks Like Any Other Place

Corporate conquests, raw materials, industrialization and economic development... I'm beginning to think that African classrooms should be receiving USA 1970s high school history textbooks.

Histories differ, context differs, trade relationships differ, languages differ, currency differs.  The development of Western Guangdong Province looks nothing like the development of coastal Shenzhen. The WSJ reported last week that Viet Nam would not instantly replace China as an outsource.  In Harvard Business Review this month, author Ndubuisi Ekekwe of the African Institution of Technology and Fasmicro Group published an essay with the headline "Why Africa's Industrialization Won't Look Like China's".

It's not a bad short essay, but it could have been even shorter. If the western edge of one Chinese Province looks nothing like the eastern edge, why on earth would we expect a whole continent to develop by the pattern of eastern Shenzhen?

A Word from The Recycling Industry that Sponsors Us

This blog is supported by international trade and recycling markets, which for centuries saved forests  and canyons and coral islands from the mining and forestry it takes to produce consumer goods from virgin material.

An excellent framing of today's so-called 'recycling crisis' is available today on Twitter. Follow @AdamMinter for decades of perspective.

This isn't to say there are not winners and losers. Buyers and Sellers markets always create those, and we don't want to discount the pain from those who have lost pay, or their recycling jobs. But the only way to truly lose is to stop recycling.

@NewsHour @TheEconomist @WSJTech @WSJ @latimes @USATODAY @BBCWorld @mcclatchy There is still time to report about #Recycling correctly in time for #EarthDay Excellent box of nails by @AdamMinter https://t.co/BWPoyKMk87

— Robin I (@WR3A) March 28, 2019

The Spiraling Economy: Double Regulations of A Circular Economy

Here is the recycler's recurring nightmare...

"We'd love to keep using 1,000 tons per day of your recycled material instead of mining and extracting it from forests and mountains. But EPA says we'd need a Waste Facility Perimit in addition to our clean air and water permits.  If we mine from the mountain, we just need 2 permits, not 3"

No good deed goes unpunished. Regulators of city waste insist on tracking processed recyclables in the industrial mineral market, even when they compete as "furnace ready" feedstocks with materials mined from mountainsides.



The best hard rock mining is worse than the worst recycling. And this week, the Wall Street Journal's reporters Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin and Joe Parkinson show us what some of the worst (gold) mining looks like.

Everyone Misunderstands China / Global Recycling Chains (#WSJ)

Wall Street Journal and others are running stories about the crash in recycling prices due to China's new import restrictions.  There is a grain of truth to the story, but there is so much more going on that I have to issue a quick explanation [US Recycling Companies Face Upheaval from China Scrap Ban].

It has little to do with the sentiment in China over "western garbage". That trite little meme is everywhere on Twitter.  It's something else entirely.

"IT'S THE MINING STUPID"

(AND FORESTRY, OCEAN BED EXTRACTION, AND CRUDE OIL REFINING)

Identity Environmentalism: The Role of Racial Profiling (Otherization) In Start Up Recycling Tech

Three infamous "high tech" and "formalization" of the recycling sector investment schemes - MaSer, CLRR, and EWSI - have come to mind recently, thanks to an irritating article by Peter Holgate of Ronin8.  Like MaSer and EWSI, Ronin8's spokesperson (who writes about his own company) told us this week that the current system of export for reuse is all wrong, and only high technology can save us.  Perhaps his can.

But falsely impugning the repair sector is not the right way to find your investors.  He should just apologize immediately - for his own sake.  Here's why.

(Article by his truly)

The recycling start-ups that rely on impugning the status quo are historically wobbly at best.  The weaker the fundamentals, the more the start-up evangelist points at Guiyu and Agbogbloshie.  The more we are talking about "hundreds if not thousands" of African children Holgate "eyewitnessed" in Agbogbloshie, the less we are addressing questions yet to be solved with his technology. 

This describes a "tell" on new recycling technology. The more page ink their literature spills on "identity environmentalism" and racially profiling their competition, the less they seem to want to talk about their fundamentals.

It's a good sign when a startup honestly devotes time and space to fundamental questions like "what is the energy input into the magic printed circuit board powderization-to-sonic-washing technique?"

The simple answer will be "less than smelting". But the recovered metals at the process, don't they then have to be smelted? Isn't heating something once (smelter temp) better than heating it less once and then re-heating it to smelter temperature afterwards? If the evangelist burns half their presentation talking about "primitive Chinese" and "childish Africans", we have less time to pursue these important fundamentals, lifecycle analysis, carbon impact, etc.

TOP 10 Themes to Ingenthron's Good Point "e-Waste" Blog 2006-2016

If you are going to map this blog to take my insights for a thesis, article, or term paper you are writing, I'd be glad to help though I don't have that much time to insert links below. Let me know whether I've forgotten any.  Because I might be finished.

These ten themes have valuable lessons outside of e-waste policy.  They are examples of examining an electronics recycling problem, and finding a universal that will lead to more environmental justice (and less environmental malpractice) in other trade policies.


1) Mining a ton of material always pollutes more than getting the same ton by recycling.

The hand-wringing about "perverse consequences" of recycling can lead to improvements in the recycling process.  But any "gotcha" or "dirty little secret" stories need to face up to situations like copper mining at the OK Tedi Papua New Guinea, the lead mining at Kabwe, the 14/15 largest USA Superfund sites, etc.  If you dispose of X out of concern over it's recycling process, and the same quantity you disposed of has to be mined from a rain forest, don't pat yourself on the back.

2) Elective Upgrade Decisions are Relative, Tied to Value Added

The second-hand market allows a chain of affordable use.  When a rich person chooses to upgrade to a new device, the environmental costs of production (like mining) remain embodied in the old device, which is now affordable to someone who could not have afforded a new device.

This creates a "critical mass of users" in emerging markets necessary to support investment in cell phone towers, internet cable, satellites, TV stations, etc. You can't raise enough taxes to repave a road if none of your citizens owns/affords a car.  Don't feel guilty about getting something new - so long as your used good gets reused.



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Waste Perception Creates Image Problem

Last spring Resource Recycling published an article following WR3A research into leaded silicate mining.  Long before my days as a regulator (Massachusetts DEP 1992-99) I had noticed how recycling happens in cities where property values (NIMBY) made compliance expensive.  Virgin mining and forestry, while far more damaging and polluting, happened farther away from property values, and was thus less regulated.

Here in Ghana, we are looking at lead and zinc mining streams as a way to "piggy back" CRT glass back to secondary primary ore refiners.  Rather than try to construct a "takeback" program aimed at manufacturers (popular because they are extremely costly, charging high fees in a bargain with Planned Obsolescence to squash the secondary market), merely cite the "circular economy" and toss the CRT tubes back into containers bearing Pb Ores.  Africa mines primary leaded silicates for export to refiners in wealthy - and less wealthy (China, India) - nations.  And some of those ores are chemically identical to CRT glass.

And there is no "EPA-EU" "Waste" "speculative accumulation" paperwork or R2 or E-Steward #bs to make it economically unfeasible.  I keep hearing in the west that CRT glass is "impossible" to recycle in Africa, a continent where primary ores are frequently the number one export.  This is a clear case of the EU and USA shooting itself in the foot, and then demanding Africa, Asia, South America follow "equivalent practices" prior to engaging in strategic metals trade.

The difference between recycling and mining is largely an image problem.  It doesn't take much imagination to solve problems like CRT glass recycling markets.  It means being willing to listen to people outside of your "circular economy" box.

OEM Sponsorship of Electronics Recycling - Enlightened Self Interest

This could have been a chapter 9 in "Collateral Damage" series started in October. Original Equipment Manufacturers have been at ground zero in the "Ewaste" War.

But Original Equipment Manufacturers aren't really collateral. They are are active players, for better and for worse, in the battle over recycling policy.  Their role has been extended to finance recycling of products at end of life.  Or not at end of life.  Product support, software upgrades that turn "obsolete" into a verb, negotiations over broadcast changes (Telecommunications Act of 1996), VHS or Beta, copyright law...

They are targets, and they are targeters.  They are allies and adversaries.  Interested parties with a stake in the game.

It's just business.

Value Added By Reuse, Repair, Recycling and Mining

Not much value added (wikipedia anti-art)

My epiphany came sometime between my experience in Cameroon Peace Corps, my ~5 year term as a truck driver / consultant at Earthworm Recycling, and my MBA at Boston University.

VALUE ADDED

I realized that the recycling I was dedicated to was preserving value once added to rocks by mining and smelting them, value added to trees by cutting and cutting the bark off and bleaching them to fiber.  I realized that the Africans I met who were fixing stuff discarded by others were, with their intellects, capturing added value.  I realized my grandfather in the Ozarks was preserving otherwise depreciating added value by fixing expensive stuff like car engines rather than discarding them.   I realized the "Hillbilly Highway" between poor places and rich cities was a two-way street, with value of labor flowing out and value of devices flowing in.

The dirtiest recycling is cleaner than the cleanest forestry/mining/extraction.
The dirtiest repair is cleaner than the cleanest recycling.

Geographical relocation of devices has to do with the value of the "value added".  In America, I could save $100 by keeping my smart phone or my CRT display just a year longer.  But at a certain point, $100 isn't worth the deferred satisfaction.  That economy is a privilege, which may be earned or may be inherited.

Someone in a poor country may not have that privilege.

The $100 I forgo is 5% of total annual household income for 3 billion people.

Here is what a printer looks like going through a shredder.



Now, the shredding pretty much ruins the plastic.  When the prices of metal is high, that's more than worth the cost of manual disassembly.  When the price of metals falls (as is the case the past 18 months), the value of the plastics becomes relatively important, and the price of labor to hand dismantle the devices becomes more salient.

Liability takes away from added value.  So NGOs are funded by industries that provide less Value Added in order to impugn reuse or recycling industries which have an advantage in adding value.  Effectively, the value of your "stuff" depreciates faster when it crosses a national border.

My Blog 10 Years Ago: 2005 Letter to Iraqi People

Realized this morning the tenth anniversary of the blog had recently passed.  Because of a platform switch to google blogspot, I don't have direct links to the 2005 posts, but I did transfer them with original dates.  The first few were on mining (alluding to the Lynn Scarlett and John Tierney anti-recycling first posts of the 90s), extinction, being an "Agent of Conscience" (AoC), and this one on the Iraq Invasion.  It was written a bit after my dad's cousin, Jack Hensley (a contractor CNN), was beheaded on film by Sunni insurgents who went on to found ISIS / ISIL etc. in 2004.

It was interesting to re-read ten years later.  I was 43.  Maybe someday I can edit these things, if I trust myself to not rewrite my history in the process.

December 17, 2005

Letter to the Iraqi People:

May God bring each of you peace and justice, health and sustenance to you and your families.
My name is Robin, and I am a father of three, and I run a small recycling and parts company in the state of Vermont. It is a cold winter here, but the people are used to the ice and snow, as fathers and mothers have taught the kids how to live in peace with it for many generations. I can imagine, for your children, the desert sun must be less of a burden than it would be for me, but they would not enjoy playing in the ice and snow as much as my children do. Both the sun and the ice must be enjoyed but treated with respect.

continued...

Top Ten Myths about so-called "E-Waste" (Update)

by Robin Ingenthron- (Originally Published on Earth Day 2010 via Greenwala).  Updated May 2014, as a reminder that the "Great E-Waste Hoax" continues to accuse geeks of color in many countries.

'It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain

Ranking the 10 Myths requires a definition of what the term "e-waste" means.   In the dictionary and in the courts, "waste" means the material that is discarded or disposed of… stuff that didn’t get recycled, but was dumped.  If two computers are exported, and one is repaired, and the other is thrown away, only the second one is "ewaste".

Definitions aside, the "E-Waste" scare was probably the biggest environmental hoax of the past decade.  Protectionists, alarmists, and gray market regulators bandied the term loosely.  Two Chinese officials told me that any property once owned by anyone is considered "discarded" if it changes possession... the entire used car economy is "waste" business by that definition.   I asked a Hong Kong regulator at an Interpol conference - what if I used a laptop for a week and then sold it to my friend?  "Definitely e-waste" was his response.  

So I always put the term "e-waste" in quotes. Many myths stem from the confusion between waste, reuse, and scrap commodities (like steel and plastic).  Many Myths also have a kernel of truth.  But too often there is no data to support them.  There may be a photo of a poor child, and a fictitious statistic, or a stereotype.  

Some of Myths amount to "green" propaganda produced to sell "cures" like shredding.

As economist Roger Brinner said, “The sum of anecdotes is not data.”   Myths feed cynicism, which generates reaction AGAINST recycling (see #1).   We need scientists and engineers, economists and lawyers,  more representatives from importing businesses, and fewer megaphones.

 10.  MYTH:  "There is a growing tsunami of ewaste."

The Pitch: "Electronics are more disposable, with shorter useful lives. There is evidence [Franklin Associates] that obsolete electronics are the fastest growing segment of the MSW stream. Changes in analog TV broadcasts make old "rabbit ears" TVs obsolete, unless they are connected to cable or satellite. The pile is just getting bigger and bigger."

These facts are true, but they do not describe production of electronics. 

Generation is faster.  But the units themselves are getting smaller. There is more computing power in a cell phone today than in a living-room-sized computer at NASA in the 1970s. The increasing tonnage is made up of "legacy" equipment.   Most of the products collected at "ewaste recycling" events (think projection and CRT televisions) is coming out after decades of storage. 

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets #6: Nneka Egbuna

Last week, between snow shovelling, I posted a little blog with a video of an interesting cover of Outcast's Hey Ya, by Obidiah Parker.   While shuffling around youtube for the link, I happened upon some African pop videos, and got arrested by Nneka Lucia Egbuna.  According to her Wikipedia biography, Nneka was raised in Warri, a petroleum ("resource curse") pothole turned "cosmopolitan city" of 312,000 in the delta of Southern Nigeria.

Nneka grew up in Nigeria, but went to university in Hamburg at 18... a big cultural gulf.  In the theme of gangstagrass / cultural melting pots and urban music, I listened to several of the songs on her "Soul is Heavy" album last night and this morning.



I'm posting more about Nneka for two reasons.  First, I like a couple of her songs a lot, especially the title track of Soul is Heavy (which I posted below the Outcast cover).   It was only when I listened/watched the video a second time that I realized the background of the chorus "teach me lies" is adorned with old African television sets.

I don't pretend to know Nneka's position on the Interpol crackdown vs. the "geeks of color" whose cause I've embraced, but in a second video, "My Home", she poses as two things - a conflict metal gold mining worker (the place Western mercury from recycling programs gets sold, for alleuvial gold mining) and then a city trash worker (I presume in Lagos, wearing .A.W.M.A- LAGOS STATE WASTE MANAGEMENT AUTHORITY, on an orange PPE - personal protective equipment uniform).  Damn.  Must watch.

Below... at least watch through the coltan mining and public solid waste worker shots.

That's a pretty good snapshot of what's going on in Africa.  Junk televisions rank about as high on Africa's priority list as they did in the USA and Europe in 1990.  The "e-waste export crisis" makes as much sense as the Radiator-Aid humorous videos.  Recycling stereotype after stereotype.

(*Much more to come, in a future blog, about the RustyRadiator.com project).  RustyRadiator project is another northern-Europe / African collaboration, like Nneka, whose moniker reminds me of the #1 hit 30 years ago, when I boarded the flight to Africa to start my Peace Corps career (give up?  Nena - of Germany - 99 Luftballoons but that is a "punctuation level digression", or "third level digression" sorry... I've lost a lot of readers on those turns.... end digression*).

Instead of Reading About E-Waste, Read Something Important

The Price of Precious, by Jeffrey Gettleman, will shock you back to the reality between Tinkerer's Blessing and Curse of Natural Resources.

"The first child soldier pops out of the bush clutching an AK-47 assault rifle..."

The article is about the "wild eastern edge" of the Congo... an area near Bukavu, where I spent my first weeks in Africa in the summer of 1984.   I've been a fan of Gettleman's for several years, ranking him with Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman as mainstream reporters who "get it".

It's the mining, stupid.

Nothing I've written below here is as important or as well written, or as insightful as the National Geographic article.  I urge you not to read further.

The article is profoundly sad.  But its also sad to me that I began this trek into reuse and recycling "e-waste" from the very same ground as Gettleman walks, eastern Congo, Rwanda and Uganda border zones... a frequent theme, and digression, in the blog.

more???...

Environmental Injustice vs. Environmental Malpractice: Planes, Trains, Laptops and Automobiles

Ship, Plane, Automobile and Cell Phone Recycling

From EPA research archives, here's a photo found by author Adam Minter (ShanghaiScrap, Bloomberg).  Minter covers the history of Automobile hammermill-shredders in this month's Foreign Affairs (a serious coup for an international relations cultist like me).

If you want to understand the scrap electronics business, you should study the scrap automobile business.  And the hard rock mining business.

1974 by Bruce McAlister

As Minter points out in a recent blog post,

At the time this public domain image was shot, abandoned cars were among the most serious environmental crises facing the United States. Estimates vary, but in 1970 General Motors – theoretically, a knowledgeable source – estimated that there were at least 40 million cars abandoned in public places across the United States. In 1967, New York City reported 70,000 cars were abandoned on its streets, alone. By scale, and seriousness, abandoned cars exceeded any waste disposal problem before or since (including the so-called “e-waste” crisis).

Rank The Environmental Atrocity: Is Fraud Visible from Outer Space?

Multiple Choice:  If you could correct one thing, to protect the planet, sustainability, endangered species, and the planet, what would you choose?

• Hard rock metal mining?

• Mining Indonesian coral islands for tin (to replace recycled lead batteries in electric solder)?

• Diverting Interpol enforcement from Ivory poaching, to arrest African internet cafe investors?

• A pile of inert silicate leaded flux (slag), sitting by a smelter for 80 years?

• A pile of CRT tubes, diverted from reuse, sitting in a warehouse in Yuma?

To the degree the last one belongs on the list, it's because of fraud.   The first fraud was BAN and SVTC telling California that the CRT monitors being shipped in 2002 were destined for dumps. They were being purchased by SKD factories.

The second fraud was, again, BAN and SVTC telling California that diverting those CRTs to "recycling" companies represented international law or environmental progress.

The third fraud was allegedly committed by the cathode ray tube recycling company ("Dow Management" in Yuma) which evidently took money for the tubes, stuck them in a warehouse, and ran.


Our war should be on fraud.

First do no harm.  Be true to thine own self.  Truth is not conservative or liberal, blue or red or green, truth is transparent, and only environmental and recycling systems based on truth will be sustainable.

(By the way, I had access to other 'close up' photos with children in them, but believe it contributes to poster child exhaustion, we all need to de-escalate the emotional button-pushing)

Memo from Rich: Mine it, Don't Reuse It.

M E M O

3 / 6 / 2013

To:      Third World
From:  Management


Subj:   Reusing "waste" materials from OECD Bosses



Dear Third World:

Your relationship is very important to us.  Please take note of the following memo to reduce need for escalation of conflict resolution in reuse, repair and recycling chains.

It has come to our attention that you are recycling raw materials sourced, as "waste", from our rich nations.  This was acceptable in the past, but we have new management directives for you, based on recent status updates.

Evidently, some nations importing raw materials are salvaging manufactured goods and repairing them for direct reuse and resale.  This began with Japan Victrola Corporation (JVC) ninety years ago, and led to JVC's reuse of victrola systems from RCA, which eventually led to full scale development of the nation of Japan, and eventually, an increased sense of Japanese self-autonomy, descending into World War II.

While we greatly value the mining and refined content of the new products we sell, and accept recycled content as a "green" innovation, we must draw the line at reuse and refurbishment of our product.

Based on past precedents, reuse and repair of products made in first world countries has sometimes led to reduced purchases of our goods in "good enough" markets.  Self sufficiency, through repair and reuse, will break the chain of our relationships with mining and resource rich nations in the third world.

In order to preserve the important relationships rich countries have engendered with consumer nations, we have taken unilateral steps to seize used goods purchased by Africans and other emerging markets, shipped from ports in the European Union and other OECD nations.

Please, respect the relationships we have developed.   The role of the developed nations is to brand and resell to your nations at an added value which allows us to source raw materials from your mines.  Self sufficiency, through reuse and repair, sets a dangerous example which will threaten the growth of our super rich original equipment manufacturing (who outsource assembly to you as well) corporations.

Sincerely,


First World Management