UK's African #eWaste Witch Hunt 5: Environmental Munchausen Syndrome?

While travelling to visit family members for Christmas holiday, I listened to an NPR story on "Munchausen Syndrome by Internet", which interviewed bloggist Taryn Harper, keeper of the #WarriorEliHoax blog.

Munchausen Syndrome is basically an addiction to getting attention by malingering or outright faking danger or illness.  It has reached the popular media in cases of "Munchausen by Proxy" - cases where a parent (usually a mom) endangers or imperils her children to "earn" sympathy and attention. The NPR study was about "Munchausen by Internet".  In MbI, sympathy whores (to coin an ugly phrase) create multiple fake online personas and histories which pose heartbreaking problems for public "Hashtag" sympathy.  The hashtag is the attention getting device on twitter, the heart wrenching or guilt-inducing story is the honeypot.

Per NHS.UK:

"Munchausen's syndrome is a psychological and behavioural condition where someone pretends to be ill or induces symptoms of illness in themselves. It is also sometimes known as factitious disorder.  People with the condition intentionally produce or pretend to have physical or psychological symptoms of illness.  Their main intention is to assume the "sick role" to have people care for them and be the centre of attention."

The Africans with roles in the #ewastehoax of Agbogbloshie aren't throwing the pity party.  But when they find themselves profiled by Western media, or as an NGO's "A Place Called Away," they have something... attention.  Ozark natives invested in New York City's fascination with poverty through Barney Google, Snuffy Smith, Little Abner, and Hollywood's fixation on Beverley Hillbillies and Green Acres;  So too, Africans can't help but try to turn the sour story into lemonade.

Accusations of Denial, Hoax, and Racism Haunt Agbogbloshie Ghana

 
Yesterday I mentioned Mr. Jim Puckett's Op Editorial in Resource Recycling - Exporting Deception: The Disturbing Trend of Waste Trade Denial. I will have a chance to respond in Resource Recycling next week, in simpler terms than I traditionally write by blog.  The blog is directed at the best and brightest in our field.

The masthead photo of Agbogbloshie, by Amaia Benito, shows three young men, standing near the side of the Odaw River Lagoon, burning auto harness wire.  A 1990s CRT monitor case, used to carry the wire after burning, implies that there is e-waste, too.

No doubt.  When Wahab and Emmanuel and I interviewed the wire burners (27 at the site) last April, they estimated that 20-50 pieces of electronics arrived there each day.

That is in the largest slum of a city of more than 3 million people.

• The hard working, poor men are not a hoax.
• The "e-waste" is not a hoax.
• The toxics are not a hoax.
• The import of second-hand devices isn't a hoax.

These are specifically what Jim rebuts, and it appears he purposefully misses the point. I have never claimed the Odaw River is clean, or that we should ignore the environment in African cities, nor that Africans import second hand goods.

• What is a hoax is that 400-600 sea containers full of western waste is dumped at the site each month. 
• It is a hoax that the goods that Africans pay to import are quickly dumped 80-90% of the time.
• It is a hoax that the Basel Convention has been amended and the trade in repair is illegal.  
• It is a hoax that Agbogbloshie's a very large dump, much less one of the largest in the world for "ewaste".

And it's a hoax that "e-waste" ruined a pristine, lush, Odaw River. The exaggerations of Agbogbloshie trump the reality.  I objected to the exaggeration of African import crime in an interview with Jim Puckett in 2005, but no one had yet studied his claims of "75%-80% dumping" (and he had then as yet to later deny his claim).  Finding something I didn't say and responding to that, instead of what I did say, will fool some of the people, some of the time.

Extensive peer-reviewed studies and World Bank reports on teledensity in Africa can't simply be labelled "denial" and "associated" with tobacco and climate change skepticism.  And citing news sources that cited your own *claims* hardly matches wits with extensive research by Memorial U, ASU, MIT, and the UN.

In his editorial, Jim Puckett has repeatedly accused me of "ad hominem" attacks.  The claims he makes about Josh Lepawsky of Memorial University, Reed Miller of MIT, and researchers from US International Trade Commission aside... Jim would have a legitimate complaint if I have, as he implies in the article, called him a racist.

If Jim has really misunderstood me, my apologies and condolences.  But as likely he hasn't.

"eWaste Crimes in Ghana" Part 8: BAN, Blacksmith Hoax Costs EU $1,200,000

In case you missed it, here was the "good news" headline from 6 months ago (August 2014)

The purple text is my addition, by the way.

More purple underlines (article continues below)

On Monday or Tuesday, Emmanuel Nyaletey, Wahab Odoi, Wahab's cousin Peter and I will head back again to Agbogbloshie just to make sure we got this straight.   What we photographed 10 days ago is supposedly the site which has received $1.2M in EU funds.

Below is my amateur film of the place where the 20-50 units (monitors, TVs, PCs) per day were getting their wires removed. (199 view limit on Youtube until I have to black out unpermissionedfaces).

I address the purple underlined "great white savior hoax" in the article above.  It's the most ridiculous thing ever seen on planet earth.



I'll be back there this week, if you have questions for the 27 people in Agbogbloshie who carry 446,000 pounds, minimum (2M tons for "millions" of tons) every day to burn it.   That's per person, per day.  With unpowered hand-carts.

Truly the most outrageously exotic site BAN.org has ever "uncovered".

The video is not complete, it is a preview, I have to edit out faces I don't have permission from after 199 views.  Though its quite ironic the people who didn't give permission...

Sincerest Form of Blog Hijack? Damageethical Zelig (Poonam Verma)

Sincerest Form of Blog Hijack?  Damageethical Zelig (Not_by Poonam Verma)

Mirror Effect Photo Screenshot

Well... my search box widget in Blogspot keeps breaking down (known issue at google forums) and I have been using Google Search to find references to old blogs.

How's this for a doppleganger?   Damageethical Blog, "by Poonam Verma".  He may be from India, or from Sri Lanka, I see 22 pages accessed from Sri Lanka this morning.

It's registered as retroworksa.blogspot.com (notice the letter "a" affixed to retroworks).  And it's a complete reposting of my work in this blog.

Except every post has a crap link advertisement in front.  I haven't found any malware.

Not that Indian

So... since I'm a mission oriented dude, do I see this as "getting the word out?"   Or should I be outraged at the paid ads for water removal, sewage, etc. he's selling?  It's like running into a cyber-Leonard Zelig from India.

"The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely extremely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. ... his feelings were really not all that different from the normal, what one would call the well-adjusted, normal person, only carried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist." - character Bruno Bettelheim, Zelig (1983, Woody Allen film)

The ultimate conformist copies a blogger who has been labelled, by many in the "E-Waste" industry, as a non-conformist. It's copycatting of a defender of tinkerers, knock-offs, shanzai, good-enough markets...  He's probably making a lot more money on the blog than I am.

FIREHOSE BLOG: Africans, Malaysians, Middle Eastern Technicians - Run for cover

The firehose of disinformation about our Fixer brethren continues.

There is a war against the "Good Enough Market".  CAER, Greenpeace, and Basel Action Network have refused to withdraw the falsified and disproven statistic that 80% of used electronics exports are primitively burned in a horrible toxic process.  Interpol in Europe, acting on the fake, discredited, false, made-up statistic, has arrested 40 African export businesses.  USA EPA has publicly accused an Egyptian man of primitive ape-like processes for 100,000 computer monitors for which he paid $28 each ($21 per monitor plus approximately $7 in shipping).

You think the USA had a problem in the deep south in the 1960s?  Look at how we are treating the Deep South of the world.  Firehose of false, fake, brutally dishonest allegations against technicians in developing world.  And it's "environmentalists" holding the firehose.

Emerging markets (3 billion people with per capita income ~$3k/year) online more hours than West

Greenpeace Europe video accuses these men of burning these TVs.  Interpol arrested their boss.

Malaysia has now taken away the permit from this factory, written about by Shanghai reporter Adam Minter.

I got out of the Egypt business just before the crackdown by shipping monitors to the Malaysia company, which refurbished them to new-in-box warranty for my old Egyptian partner.  Now, the Environmental Malpractice is making them the fourth victim.

How China Kicked Our Asses in Africa

Photo and post inspired from London School of Economics Africa Blog, 
Africa and China: How it all began

Syerramia Willoughby  Jan 2012

What I'm doing with Fair Trade Recycling is perfect.  It's appropriate technology, it gives Africans affordable internet, and the repair jobs which pay too little to do in the USA create 10 times the per hour wages for Africa.  It's the "tinkerer blessing", the opposite of the Resource Curse.

Thanks for the Business, Uncle Sam

It seeds and creates and pays for an appropriate technology recycling system.  While only 15% of imports of used equipment are bad (Wal-Mart returns are 11%), paying for the proper disassembly and recycling of incidental breakage, elective upgraded parts, etc. creates a recycling infrastructure.

In Retroworks de Mexico, that creates a "computers for clunkers" trade in program where the ones they refurbish for resale can be exchanged for the domestic-generated e-waste.  That's the system already in Africa, people trade in the ten year old ones for more recently imported and upgraded, which is the link between the importers and Agbogbloshie.  BAN and Greenpeace and Interpol would have known this if they'd given Souleymane, Wahab, Hamdy, Somda or Miguel the courtesy of a discussion rather than just profile them as "waste tourists".

USA would be smart to be selling the repair and working display devices etc. to Africa.  We create more income and more jobs through reuse.  We cannot afford to have an idiotic 48 cent per pound California-destroy-all SB20 system.

USA has former Peace Corps volunteers like me, African immigrants like Wahab and Souleymane, and a history as a melting pot which our biggest competitors - China, Japan and South Korea - didn't have.