Ghana Connected Photos by Robin Ingenthron

While getting news when we can from Accra's terrible flood and fires of the past 24 hours, I'm uploading photos through National Geographic.  175 dead, we pray for the families and friends of our friends in Ghana.  We are connected.

Here are 15 Photos from our Agbogbloshie trip which try to connect the dots of the "ewaste" story... the villages young men leave for the "big city". The Tech Sector which imports used electronics, connecting us, creating sustainable jobs. The cities which eventually upgrade and produce overflow "e-waste". And the young men who break motors and burn wires to pay rent in the city.

Ghana Connected:  Photos by Robin Ingenthron (National Geographic website)

This is a Slide Show with 15 of the best photos from the trip to Ghana.   Need at least 15 more, to cover the trip to Tema for example, to the shopping malls, and to the homes (and children) of the technicians who hosted me.

If you want to read more, go here.   Two more reporters confirm the "Millions of Tons" Hoax.

This place I'm standing on is now under water.  While I was there, they told me it would be under water in another month or two. It's a flood plain.  It happens every year.

Bullyboys 12: George Wallace and Collateral Damage

How We Rationalize False Arrests and Misused Authority

You might feel better that some of the men hanging from the trees were no angels.   You might take consolation in the bribes and forged dates and mislabeled bill of ladings on some of the 91% reused and repaired equipment.   But there's not much "pollution crime" to see  here.   I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of men and women who were accused, some of whom lost their businesses.

They were arrested thanks to one gnome-like dude in Seattle, who enlisted an exotic photographer, and made up a strange, bizarre, unsupported statistic, framed with words like "ghoulish" and "macabre", "skeletons" and "witches brew".   E-Stewards ran and got the rope, tied affordable internet to a wooden stake, and applauded while dictators lit the match.   It was a witch hunt, charged with racial exoticism, misleading photography, water samples from downstreams of textile mills, rumors and hyperbole.

It's all recorded on my hard drive.  I have a suspicion, they will get me next, somehow.  Three years ago an E-Steward company came and offered virtually every one of my Vermont clients to collect their junk TVs for a penny a pound.   It was predatory pricing, and the sole purpose was to put me out of business.   And they probably justified it to themselves by calling me an "exporter-lover".  I see them circling around a CRT glass recycler who refused to join E-Stewards, refused to pay for "certification".  With the  foreign market now better researched, they will turn on the domestic recyclers, and manufacturers.

To Kill a Mockingbird.  That accuser made the story up.  There were no facts to support the accusations against Tom Robinson.   And there are no facts about Benson, or Semarang, or Penang factories.

The 80% "statistic" is a lie, it's a fabrication.  It comes from a single source, a man so certain of his mission that he calls the very people targeted "collateral damage".   Personally, I don't think that definition works when you declare someone guilty, aim your gun, and shoot them.

Marketing Confirmation Bias for E-Waste

Here's the simple thing about electronics recycling.  If you are an electronics recycler, which would you rather unload into your building today?

1)  Two trailers of gently used rich people stuff (high repair and reuse value)
2)  One trailer of gently used rich people stuff, and one trailer of obsolete "ewaste"
3)  Two trailers of obsolete "ewaste"?

Does the answer to this question depend on your race, your language, or your identity?  Or is it a universal obvious fact that we prefer items of more value?

No tech or geek I know cares about the "nationality" of a device.  A Chinese geek will prefer a P4 to a P2.  An African geek, working diligently on repairing a P3 for hours, will quickly abandon his invested time if a newer laptop is set on the desk.   Everyone prefers gently used rich people stuff.

If this is boring and obvious, then why is 100% of the dialog about banning poor people from importing rich peoples stuff?  Why are the African e-waste PACE project assuming "no imports"?

Dictators and Planned Obsolescence.

It's normal that BAN has a confirmation bias about the plight of poor kids who have toxics in their blood.  Even if the toxics from leaded gasoline or gold mining accounts for far more poisoning, any poisoning of any child seems unacceptable.  And if something is completely unacceptable, we will have a confirmation bias (ban exports) towards anything that appears to move the other direction.  They see the import glass as 20% empty.

But those of us who have lived in the developing world and have friends there see that geekdom is the opposite of the "resource curse", and that the jobs creasted overseas by the trailerloads of gently used rich people stuff are far better for Africans than other jobs available.  So our bias is that the import glass is 80% full.

I'm as guilty of confirmation bias as any human, I'm going to get a high from UNEP studies which confirm my 2005 hypothesis.   But I have no source of funding to promote my bias.

BAN got another rich company, Sims, to join their E-Steward campaign.   The origin is California, where counties were disqualifying Sims bids, and in particular, California Universities... which are the biggest source of trailerloads of gently used rich people tech there are.

Running rich people tech through a shredder means that the African and Asian and South American e-waste recyclers will get more trailers of obsolete junk, low profit material, as a percentage.  We have demonstrated in Retroworks de Mexico that they are able to do that work, that it's possible to do by hand.  But if they can do it for the domestic junk, why can't they do it for the 20% of bad stuff in the export trailer?  If they can buy tested working, and then properly recycle the unit 5 years later when it stops working, why can't they properly recycle it if they cannot repair it, and keep the money - the big money - they would make on it if they can?

Banning exports of used electronics is a marketing campaign which touches on the basest biases that Europeans and Americans have.   Finding a small piece of electronics, upgraded from a working unit or replaced from a unit sent for repair, is an obvious example of confirmation bias.  If you have set up an E-Stewards program based on no exports, or you've built a shredder to manage California material, or you are selling brand new product and don't want "market cannibalization" competition with your own used product, or you are a dictator who doesn't want tweets and youtube to be widely accessible, then you can all agree, can't you, that the tiny capacitor replaced by a geek of color makes the entire trailerload illegal waste?

And you can pool your resources to market over and over again, pictures of dirty, poor, sad children... whose parents will unload two trailerloads of material today at their African e-waste processing plant.

THIS IS MY CRACK: Internet Printing Press in "Good Enough" Markets

Is it possible that Guiyu, China, has just as many noble reuse jobs (reuse of boards at the chip level) as it does "primitive wire burning" jobs?


Is it possible that more of the -e-scrap in Guiyu comes from huge cities than from imports? (metro Shenzhen-Guangzhou-HongKong has the population of JAPAN)


Is it possible that most of the scrap in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, comes from twice-reused goods, and not straight out of sea containers?


Is it possible that the Basel Convention, in Annex IX B1110, explicitly makes import of display devices for re-manufacturing and reuse legal?


Is it possible that Indonesia has huge, contract-manufacturing factories with hundreds of employees refurbishing PCs and displays for white-box sales to places like India and Egypt?


Is it possible that the Arab Spring or green revolution would never have happened without USA and European exports of cell phones and monitors for repair and reuse?


Is it possible that none of the E-Stewards recyclers is even coming close to the NGO's goals of supplying those markets with "fully functional, tested working" equipment?


Is it possible that innocent Geeks of Color, techs in Jakarta, Cairo, Lima and Nairobi, are being racially profiled as "criminal enterprises" because they prefer to work on Stuff thrown out by rich neighborhoods, rather than poor?

A journalist like Michael Rey, Nichole Young, Solly Granatstein, Ben Elgin, Brian Grow, Terri Gross, Scott Pelley, or John Stossel (all of whom have done "gotcha" stories on e-waste recycling) hasn't really done their job if they don't check these boxes, i.e., at least ASK the questions.  When they do visit the alleged ewaste import sites and ask these questions of the alleged "criminals", reporters tend produce more nuanced stories, like those written by Ingrid Lobet, Tom Knudson, Adam Minter, Klaus Neimann and Brian X. Chen.

Journalists aren't experts, and they cannot succumb to the temptation of posing as experts.  What they can do is apply Socratic Method to a dispute or exaggerated claim.  The latter, claims by "recyclers" who were actually exporting most of their equipment, seemed like an easy thing to test without going very deep into the developing world.  But they should have found one of the 3 billion people earning $3K per year, and asked them more questions.  Like, how they are getting online and communicating, when they can't afford a new PC?  Then they should ask them where the good ones went (to doctors offices, internet cafes, and college dorms) before photographing leftovers on the ground, and printing "80% waste" baloney.

Black Leg Mining Song

The recyclers in poor nations today seem to have inherited the untouchable qualities, distain and attitude of consumers, of the miners that preceded them.  These "black leg" miners were white.