E-Waste Tragedy 5: The Guideline to Eden

( Alternative title:  The E-Waste Comedy? )

"Hurricane Joe Benson" is locked up in a UK prison, away from his family.  His home is at stake, his retirement at stake, because he pleaded guilty to violating GUIDELINES.   Guidelines designed by policy wonks, in response to lies, to protect Africans (from Africans)...

No offense to E-Stewards... but instead of donating to BAN.org, environmentalists should be contributing to a class action defamation lawsuit.

Here is a link to the "Guidelines", developed in Europe, to save Africans from Africans.  The "Guidelines" are behind "Project Eden", INTERPOL's effort to divert some international police away from ivory, drug, and guns dealers to focus on television repair in Ghana and Nigeria.  Those jobs are documented by UN research to reuse 91% of the material they import, generating 6 times the average wages in those countries, and providing access to mass media without mining, refining, generating carbon, etc.


The whole thing reminds me a bit of "Escape to Chimp Eden", the Animal Planet program hosted by Eugene Cussons.  Cussons rescues poor chimpanzees and brings them safely from bad zoos to good zoos.   Except that the technicians in Africa are by far smarter, and know more, than either the "experts" on "e-waste" in Europe or the chimps.   They could give Kyle Wiens of IFIXIT a run for his money.   This whole idea of guidelines to train Chinese and Africans to properly repair and recycle... is a tragedy in the making.

By far the worst #WhiteSaviorComplex film I have seen is Dannonitzer's "The E-Waste Tragedy".  I don't like to drop the "r" word, but the film takes the word of a bigot who makes money selling shameful images and uses them to raise money for his own salary, and to put technicians in jail.

Alternative title:  The E-Waste Comedy? continued

E-Waste Tragedy 4: The Perils Of Guidelines Drafted from False Perception (Ipsos MORI blog)

Ipsos MORI meets South Park's Satan...

This is the fourth part of a series of blogs following the documentary "The E-Waste Tragedy".  Emceed by Jim Puckett, premiered at the E-Scrap Conference 2014 in Orlando, the film by Cosima Dannonitzer purported to show junk electronics, dumped in Ghana.   They "followed the trail" back to the electronics origins in England.   I viewed the film with Emmanuel Eric Prempeh Nyaletey, who grew up a few blocks from Agbogbloshie, Accra's scrapyard.  He was carrying a petition to #FreeJoeBenson, the Nigerian expat sitting in prison in the UK for "violating e-waste export guidelines", and no one at the conference wanted to sign it.

Ipsos MORI is one of the UK's leading research organizations.   The website describes Ipsos MORI's 16,000 research staff in 84 countries.  Like Q-method, the organization relies on face-to-face interviews.   They get the real data for IMF, World Bank, and UN factbooks.   Last Month, Ipsos MORI published research titled "Perceptions are Not Reality:  Things the World Gets Wrong".

The Perceptions are Not Reality publication focuses on the "top ten" things which the majority of people in a society (14) perceive wrongly about themselves, about their own, local and national, civilization.  The web page starts with statistics, perceived and real, about facts on the ground in Great Britain:

"In Great Britain we get a lot of things very wrong…"

1. Teenage pregnancy: the British think one in six (16%) of all teenage girls aged 15-19 give birth each year, when the actual figure is only 3%.
2. Muslims: we hugely over-estimate the proportion of Muslims in Britain – we think one in five British people are Muslims (21%) when the actual figure is 5% (one in twenty).
3. Christians: in contrast, we underestimate the proportion of Christians - we think 39% of the country identify themselves as Christian compared with the actual figure of 59%.
4. Immigration: we think 24% of the population are immigrants – which is nearly twice the real figure of 13%.
5. Ageing population: we think the British population is much older than it actually is – the average estimate is that 37% of the population are 65+, when it is in fact only 17%.
6. Voting: we underestimate the proportion of the electorate that voted in the last general election - the average guess is 49% when the official turnout was much higher at 66%.
7. Unemployment: we think nearly 24% of the working age population are unemployed when the actual figure is much lower at 7%.
8. Life expectancy: we overestimate our life expectancy by three years, thinking the average for a child born in 2014 will be 83 years, when the actual estimate is 80 years.
9. Murder rates: we are however one of the best informed countries on the murder rate: 49% saying it is falling (which is correct), and only 25% think it is rising

Perils of Perception - Global from Ipsos MORI

Unfortunately if not surprisingly, the USA perceptions aren't even as accurate as the UKs.

The perceptions of risks, and how those (mis-)perceptions are monetized when they go viral, has long been a theme of this blog.   But mis-perception and misconception, by itself, is not a tragedy.

Knowledge of the world around us is increasing, societies are becoming more aware of one another, and if Ipsos MORI continues to survey people over time, I hope they find that the trend in the perceptions will become more accurate.  We are more frightened by ebola than we should be, but 50 years ago, would we have known about ebola at all?

Misperception of facts do not make a "tragedy" unless we gear up to act on those "faux facts".   And what motivates society?

GREED and FEAR.

Got misperception?   Use it to motivate and market to regulators.

Celebrity Expert: Ignorance, the Renewable Resource

Proper management of "e-Waste", WEEE, or scraps from used electronics is a very "niche" environmentalist concern.   When public attention, or a reporter, stumbles on a niche issue, it's hard to know who the "expert" is.   This leads to what I'd describe as "celebrity experts".    We know certain celebrities who are "famous for being famous".

"Even when a person's fame arises from a particular talent or action on their part, the term will sometimes still apply if their fame is perceived as disproportionate to what they earned through their talent or work."  wikipedia

Certain e-waste recycling experts are recognized as such because they've been recognized as such.

Photo owned by whom?

Ten years ago, Jim Puckett announced his organization was an expert.   He may well be an expert in Basel Convention, a truly niche environmental law.  But he got so many things wrong about Guiyu, that he's lucky the place was too obscure to recognize the truth behind.  Here on Columbus Day, we still call American Indians "Indians".  And people still think Guiyu was a resting spot for cathode ray tubes.  There are none there, or what few were photographed were small enough to be generated from homes in Guiyu itself.

But Puckett made Guiyu "about" a Swiss city, Basel, which I drove through last summer.   He did not explain the difference between the Basel Convention ratification by the USA and the ratification of an Amendment to the Basel Convention by everyone else - but he made the city name of "Basel" mean both, to most people in our industry.  His expertise created confusion.  Basel Convention, in Annex IX, allows export not only for reuse and repair, but actually for recycling (so long as no Annex III releases occur... so no burning, but if it's properly accounted for, it's legal.  See B1110).

The Basel Ban Amendment (proposed) was promoted in the mid 1990s as a cure for what Jim claimed was the "recycling loophole".  And this "amendment" has still never been passed by the Convention.  But hang on, derivatives of derivatives approaching...

foreign, mysterious WEEE

Someone suggests that the "export for repair" legality in the Basel Convention should also be included into the proposed Basel Ban Amendment (the one still under "consideration" after 15 years).  That  suggestion was not voted in.   But now our celebrity expert gets National Coverage on not-amending-an-unpassed-amendment (Resource Recycling's E-Scrap News).  The headline becomes that repair is denied at a meeting of the Basel Convention.  

Nothing changed.  Repair is still legal under the Basel Convention (as is recycling).   And the Basel Convention "Amendment" still hasn't passed.  The wording to the 1995 Amendment was "not changed". And the celebrity expert, Jim Puckett, gets that into the national news.

Obscure meeting about 15 year old unpassed amendment generates headline.  See what he did there?  He can make anything a headline, just like Molly Cyrus, Tom Arnold, Kato Kaelin, or Paris Hilton.

BAN's an expert at being an expert.  You do have to grant them that. 

What I do at the Beach: Masters in Capitalism

This doesn't really fit in a blog.   And like many of my college papers, it was written at one sitting (I used a typewriter with white out and being able to re-write a paragraph was rare). Sometimes I do this and park it for months, and eventually publish a "robin masterpiece" like Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo.  Sometimes I do it in one sitting at a place like Motherboard.TV and an editor there helps me to produce "Why We Should Export Our Electronic 'Waste' To China and Africa.", which becomes subject of a documentary on European cable news.

I haven't reread this at all, so buyer beware.  Here's my attempt at relational relativity applied to Marxism and development economics.   It was too windy at the beach. (pun intended).

Cleaning Up in Capitalism:  Relative Aspirational Pyramids
by Robin Ingenthron, July 21 2012.  Written in Le Barcares, France.


In journalism, they say you need to know your audience.  I'm obviously not a journalist, and don't think I'm competing in "free content" for the news writing community.  But I think there are a lot of works I admire where the author (e.g. de Tocqueville) probably didn't exactly "know his (future) audience".


I'm also re-reading Herman Hesse's Siddhartha.  In chapter one, he's an arrogantly admirable son of a brahmin (SOB).

The word Siddhartha is made up of two words in the Sanskrit language, siddha (achieved) + artha (meaning or wealth), which together means "he who has found meaning (of existence)" or "he who has attained his goals".^[3]