Once you get the sensationalist headline out of the way, this week's article in The Nation provides stunning contrast with the reporting that began 5 years ago about the so-called "Largest E-Waste Dump On Earth".
The tamer subtitle, "How Dakar’s trash depot became a battleground for Chinese industry, the World Bank, and Senegalese organized labor" reflects a deeper assessment by New Orleans based writer Katie Jane Fernelius
I'll kick off the New Year by posting a few excerpts. But it's better to read the whole article, as it contrasts incredibly sharply with the lazy photojournalism which depicted African scrappers as helpless primitive victims. Fernelius obviously listens, and either wasn't being fed any Mike "Fishing As A Boy" Anane nonsense, or took the time to research and collect the type of data that would prevent the kind of journalism malpractice applauded a decade ago.
Starved of facts and nuance, reports from African city of Accra - found on verge of catastrophe.
[BSNewsire, Accra, Ghana April 1 2015]
Longtime a skeptic of "ewaste" dumping claims, WR3A Founder Robin Ingenthron arrived in Ghana last Sunday, and was shocked to find the situation far graver than he imagined.
"It began when our Delta Airlines flight was unable to land," said Ingenthron. "We could see the junk televisions from 4,000 meters above Accra. They were scattered in stacks, up to 90 feet high, on the runway and tarmac, and along the highway."
The Agbogbloshie dike, which separated greater Accra from the largest collection of electronic waste on the planet, had broken. Teenagers could be seen pouring out of the Agbogbloshie fences, trying to regather the discarded computers and televisions. But as fast as the kids worked to burn them, a tsunami of CRT televisions continued to spout through the gates, covering the streets of Accra and stalling traffic.
Ingenthron and other passengers were dropped via small white parachutes, like baby Dumbos, into the zoo of e-waste. From the ground, the confessed electronics reuse kingpin came face to face with the toxic consequences of his "reuse excuse".
As reported in The Guardian, by Greenpeace, and at weather.com, "millions of tons" of obsolete electronics arrived in Agbobloshie each year. At 34 units per ton, or 102 million TVs and monitors per year, 279,452 pieces had to be burned each day, keeping the 27 scrap boys who work in Abogbloshie on double shifts. American households throwing away an average of 2.8 TVs per day are blamed for the mess. Unfortunately, faced with the relatively small fires and lack of lighter fluid, the scrap boys had allowed a tinderbox of 10 decades of throwaways to amass.
Following twitter (via Adam Minter) I ran across an editorial/blog in my favorite periodical, The Economist. I've linked to some well researched articles in the Economist here in the blog, e.g. about emerging markets and urban development. I continue to subscribe, buy subscriptions as gifts, and hold The Economist in high regard.
But holy cow... what kind of 2008 garbage is this piece by Editorialist Babbage? Where Gadgets Go to Die (7/21/2014). He's repeating statistics disavowed by BAN, referring to Greenpeace's 2009 campaign, and alluding to a vast unknown market for burning computers. In a Sci/Tech Column, for godsake! Oh the humanity?
I do encourage followers of the blog to read the article and to comment, and to refer Babbage and Economist SciTech to BAN's retraction of it's overseas dumping "statistics" and recognition of the UNEP reports from a year ago. Find links at "How the Basel Action Network Saved Africa" posted a year ago last month.
And here's some breaking news about "collateral damage" Hurricane Joe Benson I just received
Just a quick note to let you know that Joe was moved, last Friday, to Maidstone Prison.
Maidstone is an open prison so at least the conditions he is in will be improved.
It should be a lot easier for Juan to get an interview with Joe.
His date of Birth is 15th April 1960. We still don't have a prison Number but give it a try anyway.
This makes me sick. The EU is ruining Africa for everybody.
The cell phone unlocking is an important story. IFIXIT.org has previously sounded the alarm about your right to fiddle around with your used gadgets. And everyone should get to know the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Very smart, following the core (first use doctrine) for longer than anyone.
Most Poor People are not a threat to most Rich People. The two percent get along great with 90% of the 98%. It is the rapidly rising poor, the ones who have figured something out, and are on a trajectory to compete with the rich, that get smacked. And there's no bigger threat than dirt poor geeks reverse-engineering, copying, innovating, and remarketing materials in competition with Big Electronics. This is where Sony meets its Terry Gou, where HP meets its Simon Lin, where IBM meets its Steve Wozniak. The first born of the emerging markets have a pesky way of becoming rivals to capitalist monarchies.
City management or administrators tasked with enforcing municipal laws, regulations, codes, etc. They have a very poor reputation amongst Chinese people as being corrupt and violent brutes, best known for often physically bullying illegal street vendors, hawkers, and peddlers. See examples.
This post is from the ChinaSmack Glossary, which is a collection of current idioms and expressions, like "memes" in China. You've heard of the "green fence" and the crackdown on printer refurbishers in Foshan? This may be the Chinese word for the people Joseph Benson called "bullyboys".
Good news. The number of poor recyclers' defenders has just increased by One.
Pope Francis has made an amateur video praising the world's "cartoneros" — the poor people who pick through garbage to find recyclable and reusable goods. He says their work is dignified and good for the environment. [ABC News]
It is so bloody obvious that an activity, such as recycling, which is praised as good citizenship when performed by rich people, does not deserve less merit when performed by poor people. How often do MIT and the Pope and modern artists in NYC agree?
We now have author Adam Minter, NYC Artist/Oscar Winner Vik Muniz, former Basel Convention Secretary Katharina Kummer Peiry, researchers from Memorial University, USC, PUCP, MIT, Africans and Chinese, all signing the praise of recycling in a fair manner. Where with the backlash be felt?
By Authorities who hitched their wagons to Basel Action Network's campaign of poverty porn photos, false statistics, and halloween rhetoric.
Authority. Bullyboys. 城管
[Pope] Francis, known for his simple habits, has denounced today's "throw-away culture" and said in the video that food that is tossed aside each day could feed all the world's hungry.
Francis has a long relationship with Argentina's "cartoneros" — literally "cardboard people." He would celebrate Mass for them as archbishop and invited them on stage during World Youth Day in July.
Middle managers, the tide has turned. The Vermont E-Waste Massacree will be the Wounded Knee of the battle against good enough markets. When Chinese bloggers are complaining about the same thing as the Pope, African TV repairmen (Joe Benson), and New York professional artists, the Temp Light is on your motorcycle. Ignore it and ruin your vehicle. E-Stewards has to execute Plan B, throw Eric Cartman out of the Executive Director chair. Even Donald Summers, the former BAN.org consultant who (18 months ago) called my views on Fair Trade Recycling "a huge outlier", now works for ISRI.
"Recycling good." say Og, beating a reused mammoth bone against an elk antler.
There are older versions of this song on youtube, and versions I like better.
This is a song about jobs, it romaniticizes hand labor.
Shredding machines have been given a much lighter job than rail setting machines. They don't repair, they don't even set aside repairable items.
And in fact they don't finish the job.
The specifications you see advertised on electronics shredders are real. They really do produce the copper, aluminum, and plastics streams they show. But the trick is this. They produce 80% of the sort in the first 20% of the time and energy they run.
In 20% of the time, the machine owner gets 80% of the benefit. The owner of the machine has to continue to grind, grind, grind, running the shredder 5 times longer, to get the cleanest stream advertised in the shredding magazine.
It's called "diminishing returns".
Adam Minter's book (Junkyard Planet) shows the lines at the back end of the shredders, the people who hand-sort material that has been shredded not-quite-to-spec. As he documents, it's appropriate at some point, when the labor has run into it's own Paretto Principle, when there are diminishing returns for the labor. My company sends a percentage of cleaned e-scrap off to shredders, we are not hand-disassembly "purists".
But even the material we send for shredding doesn't "end of life" there. Most profitable USA shredding companies turn the machines off before 50%, sending the remaining pieces overseas to be hand-sorted. They never run the machines 100%, due to "diminishing returns". It takes as much energy to clean the last 20% of material as it took to clean the first 80%. Sorters do a better job, by hand, in China, and just as much labor is exported as was displaced in the USA.
The irony is that shredding companies advertise themselves as creators of jobs in the USA. That's really not true. The shredders who advertise "USA jobs" are using mechanical means to eliminate labor in the USA, and to eliminate repair and remanufacturing jobs which simultaneously create more employment in both the exporting and importing country.
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).
The comment section of this week's Bloomberg Editorial by Adam Minter is probably a lot of "inside baseball" to a lot of people. But there are a couple of gems. Take this comment by Jim Puckett, Executive Director of Basel Action Network.
"Despite your reading diligence however, it is unfortunate that you did not start by questioning the baseless assertions made by Adam Minter in his reckless article. Never has BAN ever stated that 80% of US e-waste is exported."
(-Bloomberg News)
Well, well, well...
"Never has BAN ever stated that 80% of US e-waste is exported."- Jim Puckett
My, my. That's a bold statement to make on the world wide web. I've taken a few moments to search the term "Puckett" and "80%" and "exports". Jim's paragraph goes on to explain that BAN knew there was no harmonized tariff code, and that BAN relied on experts (surveys?)... really trying to isolate the statistic back to 2002, in his paper "Exporting Harm".
"That expert was cited in our report claiming the 80% estimate. Realize however that we never claimed it was anything other than an informed estimate and we never said it applied to all US e-waste generation but rather the percentage exported of that which was delivered to recyclers. "
That Expert (see bottom) reported on his estimates via the comment field of this blog a few years ago (Adam Minter, a new acquaintance, actually saw this exchange with the expert). And Jim Puckett participated as well. Here is a flashback "Finally! The Source of the "80%" Statistic Steps Forward!" And the expert's talking about baled material, shredded material, tested working material... not just primitively burned material (see the exchange in blue at bottom of this post).
Still, the assertion here is this:
"Never has BAN ever stated that 80% of US e-waste is exported."
Reckless indeed. Do we really have to go all the way back to 2002 to find the statistic Bloomberg's columnist Adam Minter is trying to hold up to the light? Oh, wait! I've got INTERNET!! Let's take a little voyage via Google and Bing's memory lane. Search boxes will help jog our memory for some use of the claim between 2002 and 2013.
Bing! In January 2013, just a few months ago, CAER (a group Jim Puckett cites in his comments, funded by Wendy Neu, a BAN Board member) used the state to promote RERA:
"Webelieve that currently about 80% of electronics claimed to be recycled in the US are really just “packed and stacked” into shipping containers and exported. Aggregators of used electronics work through brokers to ship equipment overseas and get paid pennies per pound for this mixed assortment of electronics. We see solicitations from these brokers all the time.
Boink! Here's another post from less than a year ago... With the following quote from the Press Release (from Placentia, CA), attributed to Jim Puckett, in late 2012:
"Approximately 80% of electronic waste currently delivered to recyclers is actually exported to developing countries."
Pluke! From 2011 in support of RERA legislation banning sale of intact units:
"we estimate that 50-80% of e-waste that gets into recyclers’ hands is exported to developing countries, where it causes great harm."
Now to be fair, the three quotes above do perhaps limit the 80% to that which gets to recyclers, not the entire denominator of used electronics generated. But OOPS... here they go again.
That's a day in the life of reporter Adam Minter (who has recently finished his upcoming book, Wasted, at Bloomsberg Press). The photo below is from one inland city.
Adam verified with me (prior to his post) that this is not a certain inland city I know of (which does import CRTs, via inland routes from Viet Nam). No, these are Chinese brand, Chinese generated televisions from Chinese homes. Which isn't at all surprising when you have been to cities - cities in Asia, South America, and Africa - which are full of millions and millions and millions of people generating their own "e-waste".
Some of you may remember one of my more shocking discoveries from my trip to South America last spring. The old reuse market which used to buy USA used TVs was still selling used TVs - marks from China. By commingling their own used ("waste") televisions in a container, China made the new good-enough LCDs they manufacture affordable in smaller, less-than-load samples. It had nothing to do with China exploiting Peru environmental standards.
I'll stop and let you cruise over to Shanghai Scrap to read Adam's post. His conclusion was that the process he witnessed did a darn fine job of recycling the televisions. China has developed a way to manage it's own e-scrap. That's what we need everywhere that imports, exports, or grows their own electronics. A ban on trade just doesn't make any sense at all.
A couple of weeks ago, I was sent a new set of graphics, in the spirit of "Story of Stuff", by umm... students? activists? artists?... seeking to raise awareness about the IPhone. A woman named J.Rhee sent me an advance copy and asked for my comments. I sent her some, in the spirit of cooperation, but did not hear back.
Elizabeth Chamberlin of IFIXIT (soon to take away the crown for the "Best Scrap Blogger in the World"*) has written about the Apple-criticism piece, and does a good job of examining the case against Apple without taking it hook, line and sinker.
The Anti-IPhone-graphic-activists display a lot of talent, sincere passion, and make some very valid points. They asked my opinion rather nicely, and I'm always looking for mature, grown-up conversations with environmentalists. But I'm disappointed not to have heard back from the authors of the piece. Below is a snippet of the dialogue, followed by my response and comments.
Hi Robin,Thanks for getting back to me. The graphic I was referring to lives here: http://www.mbaonline.com/cost-of-iphone/Let me know what you think. I’d love to get your thoughts, and feel free to use it as you’d like!Thanks again,Jen
Hi Jen,
I really like the lifecycle focus on mining, coltan, etc. I lived in Africa and was in Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo for awhile. The natural resources harvesting business has been a curse. The Worlds Most Polluted Places (TIME) are metal mines, not recycling yards.
With that said, I think your graphic is pretty unfair to Terry Gou and Foxconn (Han Hoi Precision)... The Taiwanese "Geeks of Color" like Gou and Simon Lin (Wistron) and Rowell Yang (Proview) have been "racially profiled" by the left in the USA, I think. All three of those guys began as a "tinkerer" importing and repairing used electronics, then became a contract manufacturer (like Foxconn is for ... um... everyone not just Apple). They have done a pretty good job of learning 100 years of industrial revolution lessons in a decade.
Foxconn is owned by the Taiwanese, managed by Hong Kong, employs labor from Cantonese Guangdong, and is regulated by Mandarin Beijing. It's pretty remarkable. The suicide rate is below that of similar scale operations (yes including the USA), when you have 1.1 million employees living in campuses the size of cities, you see rapes, robberies, and suicides at the same rate as you'd see in Detroit.
Finally, the piece about Guiyu is completely inaccurate. There are no Iphones in Guiyu. Guiyu is almost all scrap generated in China. Shenzhen, Guanzhou and Hong Kong have basically grown into one metropolis which has the population of JAPAN, and Guiyu is the scrapyard.
I'm a socially conscious environmentalist. In my opinion, we don't do ourselves any favors with racist depictions of the Geeks of Color. It is a major embarrassment to the environmental community to have launched this "green scare" campaign against geeks and techs overseas. I urge you to imagine how you would feel if you were Mowgli... when sex worker, coltan mining, child soldiering is 30% of your job market, and you learn to fix a cell phone, creating affordable connections for people in your emerging market, or putting CRTs into internet cafes that become the center of Revolution 2.0, when you are recycling rather than mining, and green Americans portray you as some kind of a primitive, polluting, sorry, toxic victim.
Again, bravo on the first half of your piece. But if I post it on the blog as is, I'm going to make some of the points I made above. If you are interested in really conveying the truth, I'll spend as much time with you as you want.
If you want to see the piece we are both commenting on, find it via Elizabeth's blog... I don't really want to raise its pagerank if they are sending it out "looking for comments" but don't respond to the comments. An MBA is supposed to be a masters degree program, and work is supposed to be subject to peer review, response and debate...
Product Refurbishment and Reuse in the Developing World: What is its Current and Future Role in the CE Industry?
Thursday, January 12, 2012 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
LVCC, North Hall N264
In developing nations, refurbishment and reuse activities are a major part of local CE industries.
How do refurbishment operations meet local consumer demand? How do they affect the environment?
Will new, lower-priced technologies put these operations out of business, or could they become global
go-to locations for operations like warranty repair?
