Fishing for Swordfish at E-Waste World: The Negro Leagues of Electronics Recycling

The Curse of the Bambino and the Basel Convention

The Blessing of Big Papi: Why Basel Needs Jackie Robinson

What Jim Puckett Can Learn from the Red Sox
(Three alternate titles)

The 2026 E-Waste World Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, had free attendance. That was a major draw for members of the World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association (WR3A), which had at least 4 attendees.  Of course, we originally had 3 attendees coming to rival E-Waste conference ICM in Valencia, Spain in January 2026.  I even bought my plane ticket to that much older conference, because it had initially accepted my proposal - Let Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network debate live on stage with two African Tech Sector geeks...

In this sports analogy blog, as we discuss Major League Baseball's integration of the "Negro League", and WSJ points out 25% of the USA FIFA Soccer Team are immigrants, we take a look at when the old oveweight player has to give up his seat on the team bench. Jim Puckett's opening statement, in his curious role as "Expert on E-Waste in Africa", was to state on the record that "First and foremost, Africa is the same as it was 20 years ago. Nothing has changed."

🤢🤐🙄

So, ICM initially invited Jim to speak alongside just one of those Geeks, Nana Yaw Konodu, a German who came from Ghana about 40 years ago, but who 5 years ago opened a remanufacturing factory in Accra, Ghana. (We introduced him to Recycling International editors at the E-Waste World Conference in 2025, and he made their list of Top 100 important recyclers that year). But Nana got disinvited on very short notice....

Why is Jim's opening statement so ... weird?  Twenty years ago, he and I were quoted in Charles Schmidt's NIH article on Africa's importation of used electronics, and I was already wrong (way behind) then - but was farther ahead than Jim was. Charles Schmidt needed to interview an African who is there right now, not parse between Jim who's 20 years behind, and me who's at least ten behind.

Here's the thing: For the Basel Convention to remain in force, OECD has to be kept in a separate league from Non-OECD.  About 35% of the World's industrial economies have to be kept separate from the other 65%.  It's about protecting the job of the overweight aging baseball or football player, already sitting on the bench. if Jackie Robinson, Bob Gibson, Willie Mays, and Lou Brock are allowed to play. It's white ownership of white teams arguing about how to integrate the two leagues.

So it was "Mysteriously" that Nana Yaw Konadu was "de-invited" to ICM conference at the last possible minute (I have preserved emails). Afterwards, Nana and I canceled our trips rather than pay a thousand plus Euros to sit in the audience and listen to "Expert" Jim Puckett tell us about Africa.  Afterwards, with a little maneuvering, E-Waste World Conference in Frankfurt made hay out of that, jumping on the invitation to invite Jim Puckett, Nana Yaw Konadu and Emmanuel Nyaletey (BridgeSolarPower.com, who helped WR3A with the 2015 tours of Agbogbloshie and the 2015 Clean Hands Teaser - Hurricane Benson interview minidocumentary).

Sorry for "weaving" here. But there's a point. Conferences deciding on speakers, League owners deciding on players, International Conventions deciding upon leagues... People are setting rules, and setting them out of sight of the players and the spectators enjoying the game. ICM, E-Waste World, SERI, E-Stewards, and Basel Convention are deciding who can speak against each other, who can play against each other, and who can trade between each other. But none of the "rules" are obvious to anyone outside of their smoke-filled rooms.

This morning's Wall Street Journal Opinion Page (my comment spun into this post) is titled "America's Immigrant Soccer Team", and centers on how much of its success owes to 25% of the roster being "birthright" citizens. It's about rules set for who can play on teams based on their "nationalities", and how nationality rules are being decided by courts or Executive Orders. Like ICM and E-Waste World choosing "African Expert" Speakers, or MLB deciding who can play in each league, a "conference of parties" at Basel Secretariat are defering to OECD how to divide economies, and entire conferences are planned based on those rather random decisions.

The comment section I waded into divides MAGA Trump Support commenters from Free Market business owners (who benefit from talent in any labor situation). And as my comment calls it, the line is over what should be "legal" immigration.  Calling balls and strikes, where is that line? And how does it compare to these lines we've drawn in the past?

Immigration and talent in sports.

Baseball integration and the Negro Leagues.

OECD/non-OECD segregation in the Basel Convention debate.

3 Minute Middlebury College Blog

Yesterday we presented - in Espanol (I'm enrolled in a 7 week Escuela de Espanol) at Middlebury College.

There were four of us. Me, Kennii from Nigeria (and Stanford University), Bob from Brazil, and Jo - all Spanish 1.5 students presenting on environmental subjects to the students of Middlbury's prestigious summer language college (my wife is Director of the School of French).

Here is a link to my 5 minute presentation on "fotos falsas" and collateral damage.  I was joined by Technico Rudy of Queztatenaga Guatemala.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1drREMgKyYxSNks2prc0SutacLbUAAF5l/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108266863784829595501&rtpof=true&sd=true

It went over very well. 

People can tell the difference between photos taken in professional refurbishing and recycling factories, and poverty porn pictures of random children placed atop of home-generated junk.

Kehinde “Kennii” Ekundayo has become a friend in the class.  Her presentation was about use of art to draw attention to global warming etc.  Bob and Jo also spoke about warming.  

I spoke about NGOs creating an atmosphere to arrest smart technicians in poor countries doing what my grandfather taught me about - fixing a rich person's broken thing.

80% Ewaste Hoax is dead.

https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2024/05/sdsu-international-student-secures-coveted-spot-in-stanfords-art-history-doctoral-program

UNITAR Global E-Waste "Monitor" 2024: Better, but still kinda cringy?

I have yet to read more than the Executive Summary and Table of Contents of the new UNEP Global E-Waste Monitor report, but I can already see that it's being mis-reported.  The "hook" is an emergency, that only 22.3% of e-waste is "documented", and the rest (the Executive Summary implies), is presumed to be "improperly" managed or "lost" to the so-called "informal sector".

Readers may remember this blog previously defined "informal sector" as "a white person didn't enter it into a spreadsheet"... in response to the "Criminal Negligence" 2015 Report.

UNITAR (another UN agency) describes the reports findings as follows:

"Meanwhile, less than one quarter (22.3%) of the year’s e-waste mass was documented as having been properly collected and recycled in 2022, leaving US $62 billion worth of recoverable natural resources unaccounted for and increasing pollution risks to communities worldwide. "

The "five fold growth" in "e-waste" is describing worldwide generation, not just wealthy countries.  This raises questions about the measurement of "undocumented" used electronics... but lets list a few obvious premises.

1.  The size of electronics PER CAPITA is declining due to the miniaturization effect.  In 1992 it peaked because we needed a desk phone, an answering machine, a fax machine, a camera, a radio, etc.... all of which now fit inside the smart phone in my front pocket.  

2. The export market, which the previous 2015 UNEP Report described as "primitive", is mostly for reuse.  So if there was less e-waste generated in the past compared to the future, that can only be explained by the continuous reuse of past devices which continue to be reused and maintained in places like Ghana, Nigeria, Angola, etc.  

3. The UNEP reports conflate the end of first consumer use with "waste generated", as if reuse and repair, if not "documented", is in the "ewaste" volume assesssed.  That would mean that if a white person owns a TV for ten years, and it's purchased and reused by an African for another 40 years, that the "waste" is counted twice - the first time it was "generated" and the actual "end of life" of the TV.

Photo of TV Repairman Ibrahim Alhassan in Savelugu, Ghana, who we introduced to author Adam Minter, who wrote about Ibrahim in the seminal reuse non-fiction book "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale".  Ibrahim was repairing a 1970 Japanese CRT television, or rather improving it by addint a remote control function absent in the original knob-tuned TV.  This TV certainly would have been destroyed by "Big Shred" in Europe decades ago... but hard to describe the African's continuous use and extended life as "primitive"... unless you are a wee bit racially-profilly.

Einstein's Amygdala Part Four: "None of this is on the Front Page"

From our care-giving, nurturing, fear-projecting feelings - as kids have for baby rabbits.

To Rule-making - as regulators do, to make us feel like it won't happen again.

To Manipulating - Insiders using the rule-making to hobble competitors.

The people with money know how to rub our amygdalas, and we purr like cats. What we value could be the cat, could be the baby bunnies, might be the childrens' reaction to kitties and bunnies. What we need to do is realize how much is at risk in the looming great extinction.

As Twitter climate philosopher & cat-shoulder-perching specialist Ben See @ClimateBen puts it

Remember:

1. The oceans are being killed.

2. Forests will soon be gone.

3. Fertile soil is disappearing.

4. Megafauna risk extermination.

5. Insects are vanishing.

6. Climate chaos is inevitable.

7. Extinction is now.

8. Plastic is in our blood.

None of this is front page news.

Ben See's point is that what SHOULD BE front page news is NOT being covered on the front page.

What does make it to the front page is seldom-enough related to environmental protection. When we do get the attention of reader amygdalas, the story is often "gotcha'. Pollution regulation and enforcement is priotized to real estate value, and increasingly used to shore up stockholder value. (I re-read upon Keynes vs Friedman over the weekend, suffice to say both mens' concentric circles of caring gravitate towards living humans rather than those yet to be born)

In Einstein's Amygdala Part 3, the ways for-profit businesses manipulate Regulations to the detriment of competitors was portrayed as a way to massage the fear instincts which our brains have developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. As noted in Part 1, the list of things that might kill us was exponentially longer a mere 500 years ago, but our brains remain as hair-triggered as when we were running away from tigers, lions and bears.

Today in Part 4, I'm looking at how the finite potential we have to focus our attention is being squandered by the masturbating NGOs like Basel Action Network, those who produce ads and policies and laws and rules and outrage off of #POVERTYPORN and #POLLUTIONPORN that has ZERO association with the causes they attribute the Earth's real problems to. THIS IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF A FINITE AMOUNT OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS TIME AND ENERGY. AS MUCH AS I AM FOCUSED WITH ALL MY SOUL UPON MAKING THE PLANET LOVABLE FOR ALL OF OUR GRANDKIDS, I'M GUT PUNCHED BY THE CALLOUS, GREEDY WAY THAT SNAKE OIL SALESMEN ARE TRIGGERING OUR CARING AMYGDALAS WITH ZERO SCIENTIFIC BASIS OR EVEN SCANTEST OF EVIDENCE.

Once again, eye-candy poverty porn non-profit Basel Action Network has a press release this morning (but I'm putting that "below the fold")

Seven Secrets Of SECONDHAND Professionals - A Guide thru Adam Minter's Dilemmas

Blog 1,430. Fresh on the media blitz of author/journalist Adam Minter's second blockbuster - Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale - there are a lot of questions about how to deal with the growing mountains of secondhand stuff.

First, a shameless self-promoting plug. Based on my experiences - Africa Peace Corps volunteer 1980s, grandson of Ozark hillbilly families with no electricity or running water, tales-of-the-Depression-dinnertable-correspondent, used electronics recycling company entrepreneur, and former state Recycling division director (MA DEP) - I've had a chance to answer more than a few dozen of Adam Minter's questions over the years.

In fact (shameless plug), we met ten years ago next month. December 1, 2010, kicked off a period of "dueling banjo blogs", when Adam was writing about secondhand and scrap markets from Shanghai (ShanghaiScrap.com).  Here in Vermont, I was writing blog about my heroes in emerging markets, telling positive stories about differently abled poor people ingloriously described as "primitives" by white savior barbies who insist all used electronics be shredded rather than traded, and who described the purchases of secondhand stuff "illegal dumping".

[The concluding 2 chapters of his book are a distillation of ten years of correspondence between me and Adam, including his 8 trips with me to Ghana, Vermont, Boston, and the Bronx NY.]

Yesterday, before going on air (NPR On Point), Adam sent me an email reminding me of that inspiration. We met when he had just given a shoutout to the Best Recycling Blog in the World. Shameless plug, but I'll take it again, because the blogs he was attracted to were about racial profiling of secondhand reuse markets as "primitives". I'm proud that he has carried that message forward in Secondhand, and has joined the fight for Right To Repair, and against shaming secondhand trade with poverty porn.

Meet Adam in Person Thursday Nov 14 at University of Vermont Davis Center.


SEVEN SECRETS OF SECONDHAND PROFESSIONALS
A Guide Through Adam Minter's Dilemmas

Triage.  At Good Point Recycling in Middlebury, Vermont and Brockton, Massachusetts, our 40 staff have to manage up to 500,000 pounds per month of used electronics. A few of those devices are recently "electively upgraded", with a good resale value. But alas, like by Minter's other Secondhand firehose drinkers (Goodwill, Salvation Army, Japan's BookOff) we find that the vast majority has been in a closet for way too long. We send very little (5%) to the dump - mostly Ikea-grade wood from older electronics. But most of the items are going to be de-manufactured or shredded into little pieces of copper, aluminum, glass, black plastic, white plastic, circuit boards, etc.

There is a lot of value, a lot of waste, and a lot of emotional baggage. Fortunately, some things are easier than we make them out to be.

So there's a training program for the staff, based on the concept of "TRIAGE". There's a first sort, to get stuff to the department where there's an expert in that stuff (usually, de-manufacturing). Then there's a "second sort", which may mean testing the electronics to see if they work, looking up demand for them online, or removing 36 screws with 8 different screwheads using power drills. Sometimes, with things like "vintage" or antique electronics, or items that might have a hazard like lithium battery, there's a third sort, or reason to ship the third sort equipment to a different electronic specialist.

And also this hits home... All of us eventually are called to sort and settle our loved ones possessions.  Last month I flew to my 77 year old mother's home in very rural Marshal Arkansas. 29 years before my dad passed away in 2017, he had moved his own mothers STUFF from his super revered grandfather's home in Taney County Missouri. I wish I'd had 40 employee company when he did that, a lot of valuable antiques were lost, and dad  tried to save a lot of things that had only sentimental value.

Dad moved a few tons of those things to an abandoned house on their new property in Marshall, down the hill from mom's.  As giant oak trees are wont to do in Arkansas wind storms, one had sliced the abandoned house practically in half, and by the time I got there several rains (and a couple of meth-heads) had been through the place (one methhead kindly forgot all the silverware in a cottage cheese bucket near the door, probably set it down and couldn't find it again).  Anyway, I came down as a professional to "TRIAGE" the damage, and cherry pick the 20% of non- ruined stuff worth saving.

The thing I'm most grateful for finding in the destroyed home was a wood carving by my grandfather, Clarence Fisher of Ridgedale, Missouri. He taught me early on about quality, repair, and the good-enough market. He was probably born to the poorest hillbilly family in the county (his father did not read or write, signed his name with an "x"). A self-taught carpenter and subsistence farmer, he left a deep imprint on me. Adam Minter had a similar relationship with his own grandfather.

The carving I salvaged from the house is the lower one (the top carving Pa gave us as a gift, it was his last carving). He told me he was worried he might not be able to do one for everyone in the family. But later it turned out he had an idea, to make a wood carving template, so he could "mass produce" them, or some other carpenter could.  That lower one I found on the floor of his daughter (my mom in Arkansas) in the house the tree destroyed.

Adam is going to get a lot more coverage this month - C-SPAN, NPR Marketplace, and Fresh Air. And check the reviews so far in Nature, Publishers Weekly, Waste Dive, Recycling International, and NPR to name a few.  It's a great read, and if you want to hear some secret advice on the dilemmas he addresses, directly from a Reuse Pro, read on.

Nuance Delivery 2: Awal is BlackboxMedia's Tire Burning Boy

Well, I was working on a different Nuance #2 - the upcoming release of Juan Solera / Palm and Play's documentary "Blame Game" (former working title Clean Hands).

But before I could make an announcement, another German White Savior documentary has just been released!  "Welcome to Sodom" makes Awal Muhammed (and perhaps fellow Musketeers Yaro and Razak? Didn't see them in the trailer) return for another one of his tire-burning-circus acts.

In fairness, I have only been able to see the trailer.  But hey, here's the same theme.  Agbogbloshie in Ghana is presented as "Europe's Ewaste Dump". Shots of girls with water baskets on their heads. Shots of garbage being dumped (not even electronics) through a frame of a 1970 television husk.  But if the trailer and website is any indication, our hero is, once again, Awal Muhammed of Savelugu (north of Tamale) Ghana.

Here he is with his gasoline-filled-tire-burning-act (previously seen on Placebo's MTV video last year).  This is not something they do - use this much fuel to make this big a fire - except when European camerapeople are present. Awal is credited with figuring out that it's the fire that brings the cameras for your close up (a hint for Hollywood Extra Wannabees, perhaps).

Q and A: The Bitter End of UK's E-Waste Safari Exploitation

More information turned up on the Band Placebo and how the Agbogbloshie dump kids were chosen to launch the Band's Australia tour.  

The band's reps are researching us.  And we are researching the filmmaker and the band.  Feelings of saviorism and feelings of exploitation are both valid, and both come from good hearts.  We are all running uphill, fighting for higher moral ground.

Here is "Running Up That Hill", a song about trading places.  It is one of the band's hits from the past that got USA airplay, at least on college radio.  ... I remember this.




There's no direct communication between us (yet?), but a lot of evidence people are reading the blog and adjusting their message.  For example, the OfficialPlacebo Facebook page no longer ID's Abgo as "the largest e-waste dump in the world", and reciprocally, I can state this headline was also fake news ("Brian Molko highest paid singer on earth")

"The ‘People’ section is a humorous parody of Gossip magazines, all stories are obviously not true."

This is NOT TRUE, the lead singer of Placebo does not out-rank Mick Jagger, Beyonce, Eminem, etc.  But the fact that it shows up as the top Google listing for "net worth Brian Molko" shows that Brian has something in common with Wahab, Chendiba, Joe Benson, and other Tech Sector entrepreneurs in Ghana - who do NOT import 80% waste to what is NOT the "biggest e-waste dump on earth".  More in common than he ever knew.

Since my earlier blog and tweets, Placebo has taken down this claim on Facebook - that Agbo is the "world's largest e-waste dump".

Now watch out for someone simply swapping the words "in Africa" for "on Earth".  Some people imply that sounds like a small mistake.  But is is quite a correction. "The Tallest Man in the NBA" and "The Tallest Man on North Korea's High School Basketball Team" are two very different "Tallest Men". Because fewer Africans owned TVs and computers decades ago, their junkyards have fewer of them than ours do. Here's a photo of a pile in Addison County Vermont...

Seriously - we got WAAAAAAY more e-waste in Middlebury Vermont (pop 10k) than Accra has in Agbogbloshie.  Maybe I can pay Michael Anane to tell people he played mini-golf here as a boy, and we'll get some MTV screen time.

The photo of Agbogbloshie is, to us, even funnier and more obviously a joke than the MediaMass (Onionish) fake news.  The kid is standing on a single TV, on a barren landscape, carring a bag (no doubt on his way on some errand) and a Alsdair Mitchell pulled a McElvaney and said "kid, jump up on here a second".  Using it under the headline "the world's largest e-waste dump" a single kid standing on a single TV in a city of 3M is rather hilarious (and I'm not the one that choose that screenshot for that headline - Placebo's Facebook manager did).

Look, Brian Molko is closer to being the richest rock star than Agbogbloshie is to being the largest e-waste dump, but that's irrelevant.  My point is that good people - Ghana's Tech Sector and Brian Molko - can get thrust into conflict through misinformation and misunderstanding, and no one has to get bent out of shape.   It's dialectic. I know more about the band, and at the end they'll know more about Ghana, and the UK Press portrayal of its slums (no chaps, t'isn't about you).

So for the benefit of Placebo fans, it's ok to enjoy the video.  The camerawork is some of the best I've seen there (a little cheating with extra gasoline of the fires).  But below is a quick Q and A about Agbogbloshie, the myths and the facts.  Everything stated below has been the subject of many blogs.

Breaking News: As HK WEEETRF, So Follows Accra's "Ewaste" Moon Shot?

Another logical conclusion to all the research into NGO's proposed bans on E-Waste Exprot Trade.

"Hey, we can do it right.  We can repair and recycle better than you can"

As goes Hong Kong, so goes Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana.  A $30M State of the Art E-Scrap Recycling Plant is breaking ground in Ghana.   In January, I'll be there.

The Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation in partnership with the Environmental Protection Agency are set to commission the construction of a recycling facility at Agbogbloshie in the Greater Accra Region. 

Estimated at $30 million for the first phase, the facility is expected to recycle all waste electrical and electronic equipment to final products in an environmentally sound manner, relieving the people of Accra and its environs, specifically Agbogbloshie community of toxic pollutants generated from the burning of e-waste. - See more at: http://citifmonline.com/2016/11/23/govt-to-construct-30m-e-waste-facility-at-agbogbloshie/#sthash.EpjnrmbK.dpuf

Once again, the solution to "sweatshops" is found to be "air conditioners".  Given the choice between moving business back to "Big Shred" in Europe and the USA, the Tech Sector in Emerging Markets says "Thanks but we like managing this, and by the way we're really, really good at it".

Finally the End of Ewastegate?

Collateral Damage 3: Sensationalism vs. Science

In a recent correspondence, the Executive Director of the Seattle NGO made a comment about our long history trying to work with or around each other on the subject of "e-waste" regulation.  He summed it up by saying "We have a disagreement about international law and policy".

Fundamentally, perhaps not really.  We agree on what the Basel Convention says about trade between OECD and non-OECD countries.  We agree on what the Basel Ban AMENDMENT says, which would change the rules in the Convention (which covered disposal) to cover recycling and repair.  We agree the second, the Amendment, has not been ratified.  We agree that his organization has been successful in getting several European countries to substantially adapt rules on scrap recycling, repair and reuse to match the language in the Basel Ban Amendment.  And we agree that we strongly disagree whether that is the right direction for "international law and policy".

Although I'm certainly more comfortable around international law discussions than your average junkyard recycler, I would not attribute the disagreement, at least primarily, to interpretation of international treaties.  Here's my problem.

1) OECD is a bizarre basis for determination of "waste crime".   The Basel Convention uses "OECD" to make a binary distinction, drawing a line between Brazil (non-OECD) and Mexico (OECD) that "waste" shall  not cross.  The line is based on a bizarre "club membership" standard. It is not based on any science, whatsoever.  Rather, its entire basis is a rather quaint 1970's "third world" idea correlation.  Places like Singapore and Hong Kong, have higher average per capita incomes than the USA. They are not OECD, but are clearly in the business of electronics manufacture, warranty returns, refurbishment and recycling.  "OECD-Non-OECD" makes as much sense as dividing people by race, by religion, or as "cowboys and indians".

2) Sensationalism and generalizations about e-waste appeal to implicit racism.  The stories are easy to write, and create wealth for the Seattle NGO, jobs for EU and USA regulators, and trade barrier leverage for "Big Shred" recyclers.  Sensationalism makes cheap, plentiful, disposable articles, creating the collateral damage of Joe Benson, Net Peripheral, and Las Chicas Bravas.

It's really the second - the sensationalism ("poverty porn") of Asian, African, and Latino reuse markets - which drives emotions.  Emotionalizations are attractive to journalists this time of year.  I didn't introduce those to the debate.  At the beginning, my blogs and correspondence with Basel Action Network were an attempt to de-emotionalize the subject of trade, to reduce the use of photos of kids at dumps, and to reduce the prosecution and impugnment of refurbishing factories, even (or especially) those in emerging markets.

"Bad Science in the Headlines" has been a subject of research for some time, and there is nothing in e-Waste coverage to distinguish it.   Sensationalism in journalism is a human health risk.  Racially profiling geeks of color is not only morally toxic, it can produce actual risks to human health.

But if BAN brought emotion-guns to the policy fight, I can't fight with a scalpel.  And so we had little recourse but to focus on the accidental racism, the collateral damage, and false stereotypes which the sensational "e-waste" journalism brought down upon the Geeks of Color.

Stereotype Souveniers: What Pokemon Go Tells us about Poverty Porn

SOUVENIERS! (snobbish for souvenirs)

If you are going to spend money and time to fly someplace, you want a "souvenier".  You want something of value that represents the fruit of your hunting and foraging.  It's probably evolved, like necklaces made of feathers or teeth of wild beasts we've conquered.

Pokemon Go gives people exotic looking cartoons when they walk about outside (or let's not kid ourselves, I'm sure people are driving as much as they are walking).  It's like a gold star or sticker on your 1st Grade homework assignment.

And if you are going to fly to an "exotic" place like Africa, or have recently, I'd challenge you to go back through your "chips of film" and see what you took photos of.  How many were people you know?  Of those people you don't know, what were you taking pictures of them doing?

If you have a time machine, and can go back to the 1960s and 70s in the Ozarks, people wanted pictures of "Hillbillies".  They had read about them, seen comics about them, and having made the trek and spent the vacation hours and bucks, they wanted pictures of hillbillies, dammit.

And before you could spell "cultural appropriation", underemployed actors from Chicago, St. Louis and "Hollywood" came and erected Vaudeville shows in Branson to meet demand...

Ozark hillbilly cultural appropriation?  Agbogbloshie's predecessors

Pikachus, Agbogbloshies, Child Labor, Elephants, Buddhist Monks.  If there is something like a flame or a sunset or something to add color to the photo, it's more post-worthy.  Among Pikachus, the cartoon colors are part of the attraction.

We don't need to be snobby about it.  It's too easy to juxtapose the tourist and the brown child and infer racism, tsk-tsk.  To be honest, if I deep sea dive, I sure want a photo of a lionfish or octopus, but if there's nothing but bare dusty sand I'll take a picture of a lost shoe.  We want to validate our steps, and it's natural, and there's genuinely good things to say about caring about wherever we go.

Another photojournalist portrays muddy Agbogbloshie.

Our Agbogbloshie gangleader Awal Muhammed Basit has arrived back to homeland capital Tamale this week, where he called Techician Kamaldeen Abdusalaam of Chendiba Enterprises.  They are both in their early 20s.  What they know about Western photographers is that if Awal shows how to remove screws, it attracts far fewer shots and film than if he sets a fire.  If Agence Presse (Montreal) is there, Awal quadruples the amount of lighter fluid for the fires.

Photography just can't become the basis of public policy if we don't understand what attracts our gaze.  We are all fish, pursuing fireworks and other shiny objects, or emotional ones.  Making up fake statistics about shiny fires can result in African TV repairpeople going to jail, and that should burn our eyebrows off.

Making a documentary about Mike Anane's propaganda to evict slum dwellers in Accra for an urban development, enlisting Western journalists with BAN.org's false claims of "80% recently dumped from your recycling program" is the worst form of journalism.  Trying to validate it because you feel like a sucker for flying down there isn't worthy of a trophy. #EwasteRepublic got credit just for leavening the fake story with some truth, taking pictures of normal African lives to go along with the 10 or 25 guys who burn wires in Ghana's version of the Baldknobber Show.

LaPresse hopefully paid Awal (left in Manchester United jersey) enough to compensate for the extremely extra amount of gasoline or lighter fluid he's using. The wires themselves don't emit enough "high flame" for photographers.  A tire with gasoline adds a little extra zest, more photojournalist "points".

The Baldknobbers - before the cartoon stereotype cultural appropriation - were an actual "thing".  It was a hooded vigilante group in Taney County Missouri, which would have quickly gone into the dustbin of history (along with the "anti-BaldKnobbers" which is actually a historical "thing" too) except for a 1919 Film about the "Shepherd of the Hills", which helped bring Ozarks Exoticness to USA City Theaters.  And the book by great uncle Elmo Ingenthron.

The truckdriver terrorism in #Nice06 is playing non-stop.  What I see is that crowds came to Nice to see the Bastille Day fireworks.  And an asshole in a truck killed about 85 people (out of several hundred thousands), effectively inserting himself into the shiny objects, potentially driving public policy, Scott Adams (blog) says, by causing a reaction to elect a "strongman" father figure.

The similarity between the redneck Ozark baldknobber masks and the traditional African Bamileke or Mankon masks I saw in Cameroon is probably appreciated by an incredibly small audience.  I'm enjoying the comparison.

"E-Waste Crime in Ghana": Part 5: Huck Picks a Side

"It was a close place. I took . . . up [the letter I’d written to Miss Watson], and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming." 

- Huckleberry Finn

One of the most powerful paragraphs written in the English language.   Mark Twain (like Dickens in 'Great Expectations' before him, and Harper Lee's character Scout in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' after him) uses the voice of a child to focus on a point in time when the majority of "respected" people were wrong.

Missing Poverty: Poverty Comedy to Clear the Air

“Best way to clear the air is to have it all out in the open.” - Atticus Finch  To Kill a Mockingbird

Thinking today of walking a mile in another man's shoes.   And soon I'll be walking where, according to the press, "hundreds of millions of tons" are dumped in "the most toxic place on earth".

Every summer in the Ozarks, I sat in the back seat on a regular drive back and forth between my dad's mother's house in Forsyth (Taney County seat) and my mothers parents home in Ridgedale (Arkansas line).  US Highway 65 was one lane each direction.

migrant family of Arkansas - wikipedia hillbilly

My Grandpa, when he drove, told me about how it was one lane, and unpaved, not too long ago.   By the time I was a teenager, a four lane highway had split his farm in two.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, as now, most of the signs were aimed at tourists.   Branson Missouri would go on to become a top USA tourist destination in the 1990s.

Many of the signs were about hillbillies.

It was the place to see American poverty... Poverty comedy is the place you land when Poverty Porn loses its shock value.

Hillbilly (for internetional readers, and those under 40) was a very popular term in the 1900s, to describe backwards, unwashed, ignorant, and happy Americans who lived in exotic places, like the Ozarks and Appalachia.  Snuffy Smith, Lil' Abner, and Pogo were popular Sunday morning comic strips.   The Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, Petitcoat Junction, and Green Acres were popular comedies.   Soon the movies Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes would appear to make it scary.   Silver Dollar City was the county's #1 draw, and hillbilly music shows would grow to line the strip between it and Branson.  It was about the same time that Sanford and Sons, and Good Times, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby were making fun of urban African American poverty.

I started to ask why we never went to one of those shows.

My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and great cousins had the same answer.   There wasn't a single true "hillbilly" in one of them shows.   Nobody in the USA knew anything about the people who lived here.   The whole thing was a Hollywood exaggeration... exaggerated to such a grand proportion that it became an embarrassment.

"A tourist came up to me the other day and asked me where they could see a real hillbilly!  I said 'you're lookin' at one right now!"

I never heard a tourist ask anyone that, but I heard the claim from many friends and relatives over the years.  Usually it was about a tourist with a camera, who wanted to take a picture of a "real hillbilly".

Poverty Comedy isn't as funny when an outsider makes the joke.   It's a shade of poverty porn.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.” Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

How to Use Twitter in E-Waste Research (Fatty Fatty Boom Boom style)

I was a huge skeptic of Twitter when microblogging first came out.  Reading page after page of what people I was "following" were "doing" at that minute?  Writing back what I'm "doing"?   Seemed like a South Park episode waiting to happen (and it was).

Within about 6 months, however, I found out how to use Twitter.   Simple.

Twitter is about its SEARCH BOX.

In the search box, you use keywords, and it greatly multiplies the number of experts and opinions and views that you are exposed to.  And increasingly, you can find the words of African TEchs talking about their own view of the "E-Waste Poster Child From Disney" debates.

Just this week alone:   "The Gaze On Agbogbloshie, Misrepresentation At Ghana's E-Waste Dumpsite" by Heather Agyepong.   Heather is also covered here at Carbon Creative Arts.

“My initial intention was to understand how waste could still be illegally dumped in Ghana and understand the conditions about how people felt. However when I arrived it was nothing of what I had read about the place. It was just super organised and not as dystopic as I thought. From the month I spent with the boys who live and work in Agbogbloshie, I wanted the images to represent that distortion. The images have that cross process look which leaves the images looking apocalyptic. I wanted this to exemplify how the western gaze effects our understanding, not just in Africa but how we can see other issues.”

Through Twitter, you find what Interpol is doing ("Project Eden" seems de-emphasized in this months Interpol Africa newsletter, in favor of wildlife crime... a welcome turn if it's sustained).   More emphasis on putting Elephant Poachers in jail, rather than Nigerian TV repairmen.

Game Theory 3: Monopoly Itch Mite Cure

Part of what makes game theory interesting is the use of analogies to analyze rules.   Gedankenexperiment (Thought experiment) is a game theory approach to philosophy and ethics.   And for an Ethical E-Waste blog, its a way to view a situation from 20,000 feet.

Wikipedia - Schrödinger coined the term Verschränkung (entanglement).

What if one player uses a different set of dice than another player?  If that player won 60% of 1,000 games, you'd want to control for imbalanced dice... but you'd have spent a lot of time playing in order to prove it, so it seems better if both players have to use the same die without the effort to prove one set of dice is faulty.  That requires an umpire, an authority, an NFL, and NBA, a regulator.

In non-democratic communist governments, the authority is itself a monopoly.  Regulators can be paid off, and you can't go to court to appeal weighted the dice.  In capitalism, the use of patents and trademarks create temporary, time-sensitiv,e monopolies... the authorities enforce your monopoly for a limited amount of time, which does promote research and invention.  The use of a combination of government regulators and capitalist corporations is a horrible system, the worst, except for all the other ones.

As this week's thought experiment, lets look at a theoretical entanglement of ethics and patent law.

What about... PermaChiggerInc?

What if a corporation - PermaChigger - cross bred some kind of chigger and itch mite to develop a type of scabies resistant to sulfur, to permathrin, and neem  oil.. resistant to every treatment except their trademarked GMO petrochemical?  The entire world is scratching its collective butt off, and the money rolls in.   The GMO treatment can be manufactured at scale, cheaper to produce and more profitable.  Empty bottles of PermaChigger become as common as litter from bottled water.

That's about the worst capitalist system I can think of.  It's similar to AIDS conspiracy theories of a decade ago, but the AIDS conspiracy doesn't make sense because it kills the clients.  Mite management might make more sense.

Short of being caught contaminating people on purpose, the corporation has engineered itself a guaranteed profit.  They don't even need to do the dirty work of enforcing it, they have government trade commissions and international police to stop the sale of counterfeit and copied product.  I'm not anti-capitalist, and the system here is the one which AIDS and Ebola have the highest chance of being brought under control.

Profit ensues.

Now imagine a Nigerian man, Benson, who has never been to school, from a pidgin speaking corner of an inner city Lagos slum, has the itch.  A six foot six man weighing 260 pounds, he's black as they come and looks scary as all hell when he gets mad.  He has the genetically modified mites, his wife has it, his kids have it, all their neighbors in Lagos are scratching their thighs off.  But they can't afford the Capitalist GMO treatement.  It's not a fatal condition, but life would be a lot better if he thought of a solution.

The Guardian E-Waste Shoot: 3 Facts Behind "Poverty Porn"

It's the mining stupid.

The Guardian is actually a pretty excellent journal, compared to much of London's Yellow Press.  So when it "recycled" some photos of scrappers in Agbogbloshie this week, actually calling it "the largest e-waste dump in the world", it got a lot of 're-tweets'.

I called them out earlier, and a journalist at Fox News called to quote my reaction.  Read to the bottom of Jeremy Kaplan's piece on the "Ghana's E-waste Nightmare" to see "poverty porn" in a quotation in major news media, a possible first.

It's the mining stupid.

 Six pieces of WEE sited at African city dump!!    OOOGA BOOGA OOOGA BOOGA

Here are the facts:

1) None of the vintage electronics in those photos is typically purchased by African traders today.   Agbogbloshie is the "end of pipe" for Accra's piping hot interenet, which grew ten-fold in the past decade (see 2 blogs back).  (Eric Prempeh, Good Point's head tech, is over there now, measuring demand).

2) The article distracts from actual environmental nightmares, including those the Guardian has covered.
-  Tin mining on coral islands of Indonesia (The Guardian hits the spot)
-  Gold mining in Ghana (The Atlantic)
-  Kabwe, Zambia, lead mine, the MOST TOXIC PLACE ON EARTH...
-  Today on VOA, Gold Mining in Uganda

- We could go on and on here, OK Tedi Mine in Borneo, Zinc smelter spills in Guangdong, smelter spills in the Danube, lead mining in the Andes, 14 of the 15 largest Superfund sites in the USA, conflict metal mining for tantalum in Congo's river basin, zinc mines of Kunming....

It's the mining stupid.

3) Had the devices at Agbogbloshie, imported ten years ago, been shredded, African cities would still have e-waste at dumps.   Had the devices, imported for reuse ten years ago, been shredded, MORE MINING would have taken place, more carbon spilled, unless you want to assume Africans never got electronic media.

"Using a used CRT for 10 years is better than mining for a flat screen" 
- Captain Obvious.

Monkey Zoo Math: Reprint of Basel Action Network Fingerprints

In July of 2010, I wrote the post with the most reads to date.  Some have suggested that it was too long and buried the lead, but the people I met after writing it encouraged me to write more, and not to be afraid to write longer.

Below (more:) is the bottom third of the blog "Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo".  The math has now been corroborated by USITC, by MIT, by World Bank, by the ASU Williams/Kahhat study, the Nigeria and Ghana E-Waste Assessment (studies of 279 actual containers, seized at ports in Lagos, based on reporter Cahal Milmo's and Greenpeace's "investigation" of naughty, naughty African television repairmen).

I will re-link all of those studies this week.   But as a reminder, Basel Action Network knew this in 2006, when they provided guidance to Kenyan researchers Kiaka and Kamande.

PRELIMINARY STUDY ON THE IMPORTED SECOND HAND COMPUTERS IN KENYA - THE CASE OF NAIROBI by Richard Kiaka and Rachel Kamande (2007) "with guidance from Puckett James, Basel Action Network"

The 2010 math has been completely borne out.  All you had to do was listen to the African, Latin American, and Taiwanese refurbishers, and take a pen and the back of an envelope.  It has always been obvious. Toxics are a problem, pollution is serious business... but Racial profiling doesn't look good dressed in green.   There are real victims of Environmental Malpractice, and the time has come to clean our "stewardship" programs of the vestiges of accidental racism and poverty porn.

Whose fingerprints are on the "e-waste" monitors at Agbogbloshie?   African cities.  The "80% export" figure was not just a mistake... it was mathematically impossible, and disproven by BAN's own 2007 study.  

From 2010 Blog:

Q:  How do bad monitors get overseas?