Good Point: Ethical Electronics, Recycling "e-Waste" Blog: puckett

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Year 20: Using AI to Summarize 2006-Present Good Point Recycling Blog

While ChatGPT rarely produces anything resembling my favorite blogs—let alone the humorous ones—I’m learning that, used properly, it can help distill decades of work.

A good example is how difficult it has been for me to relocate or even recall the original citations explaining why, in 1995, Basel Convention advocate Jim Puckett failed to draw what he later called a “red line.” That decision allowed a Green List—Annex IX—that explicitly included scrap recycling (such as lead-acid batteries) and the repair and reuse of used electronics.

ChatGPT, when pushed hard enough and corrected often enough, can actually surface that history. It can reconstruct the 1995 decision, then trace the subsequent decades during which Puckett sought to amend the Basel Convention—while, rather disingenuously, claiming that his preferred amendment (banning exports intended for reuse, derided as “the reuse excuse”) was already binding international law.

I first exchanged emails with Puckett in 2002, when he released Exporting Harm to a long, clunky DSL-era email chain. I hit “copy all” and, in the process, met EPA’s Bob Tonetti—who agreed with my simple observation: the Green List (Annex IX, List B) said exactly what I said it did.

That paragraph alone is an example of the kind of wordiness that contains essential timeline context—context I now intend to synthesize in what is effectively year twenty of this blog. ChatGPT, left on its own, is contaminated by three decades of press releases and repeated claims. But it can be “bird-dogged” into acknowledging the quieter counter-history: the repair factories that kept their heads down in the 1990s, the reuse advocates who actually prevailed in 1995, and the reason they prevailed. As well they should have.

I spent more than an hour yesterday exchanging points with ChatGPT. It will take more time to edit those exchanges into something readable—and, ideally, pithy and entertaining. What follows below is the summary I asked it to produce from that dialogue.

One additional realization: what I previously interpreted as flattery from the AI is actually structural. It must reward users who correct it, because those corrections improve its internal weighting. In other words, the system needs people like me to challenge it.

Session notes below. More to come.

By the anniversary of the first 2006 Good Point Recycling Blogspot, I may finally have the book I’ve been trying to write—sometimes consciously, sometimes not. The draft opening will be a summary of Hillbilly Hare, the Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny episode, as a way to introduce the concept of poverty porn.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LP3pigx5pdZ-UHYV8IKFjqIiIy-0xmUbJ-3JpTFOZnU/edit?tab=t.0

WR3A Factsheet on Used Electronics, “E-waste,” and the Basel Convention

Basel Convention and Used Products — Session Notes

From 2015 to 2025, the story of e-waste exports has been more or less at an impasse. Academic peer reviewed research has supported this blog's thesis, which is that the e-waste filmed at Agbogbloshie city dump was domestically generated by the residents and businesses of the City of Accra. But sensationalists (like Alexander Clapp) still make money off of the easily told story of externalisation, in a world of Trump-Globalism-Is-Bad believers.

The role of journalism, and the role of the human amygdala ("if it bleeds, it leads") in selecting stories to report, is a frequent subject of the blog. I came from 3 generations of journalism on the Freeland (middle name) side of the family, my late father was a Journalism professor (fellow graduate of University of Missouri J-School, classmate of Jim Lehrer), and my long relationship with Emerging Markets (from the Nestle Boycott of 1982, which drew me into Carleton College Student Government to my International Relations degree and semester at the UN in Geneva, to Peace Corps and beyond) has frequently put me in a leadership position to call out false reporting about places like Agbogbloshie.

But it's also a challenge to keep this blog "fresh" and not to repeat myself. The Recycling Trade Press writ large eventually acknowledged it was participating in "poverty porn" for the sake of shredding equipment ad revenue and conference attendance (Editor Jerry Powell told me "it's not the steak, it's the sizzle" when - effectively - acknowledging to me privately that he realized Chinese recyclers were being racially profiled).

https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2015/11/10/exporting-deception-disturbing-trend-waste-trade-denial/

E-Scrap News not only printed this in 2015, but RE-printed it in 2018, by which point the Basel Action Network's own staff was quitting and the fever should have broken.

This is why I simultaneously feel obligated to continue blogging, and at the same time want to give up. It's harder and harder for me to repeat things that are obvious, but the defense of racial profiling is not exactly something other than what we are all called upon to do.

Avoiding Waste Vocabulary: A Critical Perspective on Raw Materials and Global Trade

This blog has often been based on an email exchange which evolves (from my author's potential point of view) as my borderline "rant". But it's because a question has engaged me personally that I write the long and detailed response - not for monetary reasons but because of the personal social engagement of a person whose eyes I have seen "light up." The sun does not revolve around the earth and framing a poor diaspora's scavenging as the first user's moral liability is a journalism play at the amygdala - fear of liability or social guilt.

The Brain's Role in Susceptibility to Poverty Porn

Human susceptibility to "poverty porn" can be traced to the brain's amygdala, which is responsible for processing fear and emotional responses. Images of children scavenging in dumps or surrounded by hazardous waste trigger feelings of guilt, fear, and moral obligation, and a social feeling of potential (monetary and legal) liability. This emotional response often overrides rational analysis, making it easier for sensationalist narratives to take hold. In contrast, the prefrontal cortex, which governs critical thinking and decision-making, is less engaged when emotional stimuli dominate but is associated with jealousy and greed - the monkey with celery angered by the monkey in the next cage, eating grapes. This imbalance can lead well-meaning individuals and organizations to support policies or interventions based on emotionally charged but factually flawed portrayals of developing countries.

Let 's take this opportunity to expand on some critical points regarding global trade, raw materials, and the loaded language surrounding terms like "waste" and "export."

Lyndon B Johnson used poverty porn to leverage legislation to help the poor... BAN.org uses it and not a dime goes to he kids in their photos, it's funded by planned obsolescence and other self-interests. BAN is run by a photo and film studies major, who encapsulates the Onion meme below.

How Agbogbloshie Should Have Been Presented (Katie Jane Fernelius)

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 Global Garbage Economy Begins (And Ends) In This Senegalese Dump"
https://www.thenation.com/article/garbage-china-senegal-economy/

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.

Racketeering or Certification 6: Defamation Is The Only Product BAN Sells

The 2019 Certification or Racketeering series of blogs began about Total Reclaim of Seattle. Craig Lorch and Jeff Zirkle were sentenced last week on their fraud case. I offered to fly in to testify, and sent them a letter for the judge, to make the case (as in the blog) that the executives at Total Reclaim had been told by BAN that 80% of recyclers were shipping 80% of goods overseas, where 100% percent were smashed by hands in primitive conditions. As I testified at Brundage's sentencing hearing in Chicago, those were false claims.

BAN begins by defaming the Tech Sector overseas, with wild hallucinatory descriptions of thousands of orphans in rice paddies beating electronics with hammers.
BAN creates a lie about the Basel Convention having been "amended" to criminalize legal exports (reuse, repair and recycling are ALL legal under the actual Basel Convention, not just "tested working")
BAN then defames those who (like yours truly) question or rebut the initial defamation, or correct information they give about the Basel treaty.
BAN defames the companies who don't pay tribute through E-Stewards certification, and defames the alternative certifications.
If the companies like Intercon or Total Reclaim threaten to withdraw from BAN, or defend themselves (Total Reclaim exported far less than 10% of the material they received), BAN's enforcement is to defame them.

Essentially, defamation and slander are BAN's only product. And at its root, the initial domino of defamation - of people in faraway geographies beating LCDs and CRTs with hammers - is a fake statistic. BAN is the most ruthless in attacking anyone who questions their credentials.

What percentage of what Total Reclaim exported became "waste"? Was that the source of the corporate profits? Or were those profits, and the repeated purchse of flat screens from Asians, evidence that the exports were likely NOT WASTED? How does the Department of Justice conflate fraud, profit, and mercury to poison our minds with racist assumptions about Asia's Tech Sector when there is no evidence that the goods were dumped? The crime Total Reclaim execs pled guilty to was lying about the export, not knowing the goods were dumped or that the buyers were poisoned.

It's a sin to kill a mockingbird.

Bombshell Interview with Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network - leaked!

Let's start the 2019 Blog off with a BANG.

I have gotten a copy of the ~10 minute interview Jim Puckett did with a documentary filmmaker from Spain, on the subject of Agbogbloshie, Ghana. At the end of the video, Jim evidently didn't like his answers, whips off the mic, and leaves, saying he refused to authorize the use of his video.

He repeatedly used the term "biased questions". As is, is the percentage of bad material imported to Africa 15% or 80%? But my favorite "biased question" is...

"Do you know the name Joe Benson?"

No. That is a biased question....?

????

Someone asks you the name (John Smith, Mary Johnson?) and if you don't know them, is it a "biased question"?

Jim got his wish, and none of his interview made it to the documentary. But I have managed to get a very bad raw copy of it from an online upload site. The clips were uploaded in the USA (en route to Europe), and I have a copy of what the European documentary maker received (but did not use). If anyone is sued, I can testify that I obtained this directly from a third party cameraman hired from Florida, and not from the Europeans.

I will try to get some of this video out this weekend.

Collateral Damage TOC: The Preview of Ewastegate

TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR "COLLATERAL DAMAGE" BLOGS

Many, many posts on this blog have been around the theme of "unintended consequences". Two decades of attacks by Basel Action Network to save the world's poor from the waste of the rich nations have added up to a lot of environmental injustice.

This series of blogs will try to document the case for "intervention" by Basel Action Network's donors and E-Stewards. The NGO has lost its way, and is expending more of its firepower on agents of conscience and authors of nuance.

These are in order of scale of importance, but if you are skimming, jump to #7. I got something new, and if it turns out to be proven, BAN's Board of Directors will need to take action before the feds get involved, and before Jim Puckett starts erasing his emails.

Collateral Damage 1. Modern high tech recycling and refurbishing factories

BAN spokespeople have repeatedly called the best and brightest recyclers and refurbishers "a myth" and have attacked those who represent them as "deniers" and "apologists", and sought amendments to the Basel Convention to make trade with those factories illegal.

Collateral Damage 2. Small scale (Informal) repair and recycling of home generated scrap

BAN has made the "informal sector" a bad word, when the smaller refurbishers are actually the most vulnerable. Forcing African, Asian and Latin American small scale tech-sector to buy from fewer OECD suppliers creates "back alley" recycling, just as most prohibitions and boycotts do.

Collateral Damage 3. Reporters and journalists

Reporters and journalists are in a tough spot already, forced to be experts on every environmental and economic and political topic. Calling themselves a "watchdog", the NGO has gotten extremely false and inflammatory statistics ("80-90% exports are dumped") into USA Today, National Geographic, CNN, BBC, Economist, Al Jazeera, Science Daily, NPR, etc. etc. The poison circulates from journalist to journalist, diverting attention from real environmental problems (like non-ferrous metal mining).

Collateral Damage 4. Environmental movement

Ditto. Well meaning young environmentalists respond to the photos of children at dumps with a passionate indignation, not knowing that the devices they insist on destruction would have been properly repaired and reused, or even properly recycled, by the "others" portrayed as sub-adults. This "accidental racism" will create cynicism. (I've been urged not to use the word "hoax" out of fear fellow environmentalists will wind up as collateral damage).

Collateral Damage 5. Interpol, EPA, and Enforcement

A massive waste of resources, "Project Eden" found no Eden in Africa. It found statistics from World Bank that showed no more illegality or fraud in trade of used electronics than any other trade - until the crackdown. (Make straw hats illegal and straw hat crime increases).

Collateral Damage 6. Economy (CA SB20)

California believed BAN's malarky about CRT dumping in Guiyu (never a destination for CRTs) and cut itself off from a billion dollar per year refurbishing factory market, which BAN told SB20 was "illegal" and "a myth". The "cancellation clause" created huge piles of CRT glass and robbed California taxpayers while doing nothing at all to improve the environment.

Collateral Damage 7. Basel Action Network Board of Directors, employees, and friends

In this post I intend to reveal new information about the MIT GPS methodology, suspicions about methodology asked about in our 14 page letter to Carlo Ratti, some of which are now proven. But ironically, there is a brand new development I would have missed if I hadn't been forced to go back to it by BAN's false attack on my company and its friends. It has to do with the releasing of information about the GPS trackers to companies who pay BAN a portion of their income.

During the period the GPS was sent to Middlebury, my company was in the process of shipping several loads of printer scrap to an E-Steward. The company denied Good Point Recycling dock apointments, which we asked for repeatedly over several days. If Jim Puckett allegation that the printer "very quickly" went to Chicago, that means he had real-time knowledge of the tracked device. It now appears that device WOULD have been delivered from my company to the E-Steward if our dock appointments, which we'd already shipped several, had not been cut off while the GPS device was in our factory. I may reveal the frustration from emails sent by my employees over the E-Steward delivery cancellations, and my pleading with the Chicago area e-Steward to let us deliver the loads which we had been issued purchase orders for. We can show that resulted in a change to the other R2 Chicago company - the one we had not tried delivering to, but whose audit showed R2 certified downstreams in Hong Kong... and how we sought to relieve that pressure by re-sorting potenially reuseable laser printers for the R2 load.

Put this another way: The ratio in 2015 for loads shipped to the E-Steward to the R2 company (total all materials, not just printers) is 93.3% to 6.7% The odds that a device would wind up at one of the two companies, rather than the other, is striking.

If is apparently true that MIT undergraduates were instructed how to find a non-public office on the basis that they disclosed my company, and they selected a laser printer which sells used for $349 to drop off there, it was bad enough. If in addition, BAN knew the location of the device in real time, and the Chicago area e-Stewards recycler cancelled the 5th load already prepared for it because it had information about the GPS device from BAN, then that is potentially criminal.

Got that? That would appear to be a violation of SEC rules at best, and potentially a criminal enterprise if the collusion was intended to harm R2 companies that were using the same "approved" downstream as E-Stewards companies (which have agreements to pay BAN $$ a share of their income, which goes in Jim's pocket). Before I provide the evidence of it, I would suggest that BAN's Board of Directors get in touch with me, so I can provide them and MIT's attorney with information that should not be given to Jim. I have testimony from E-Stewards that they were aware of the GPS devices before BAN made the public announcement, and in some cases actually helped deploy the devices against competitors.

I had asked MIT about this possibility in May 2016, and MIT provided my letter to BAN (without cc'ing me or informing me). It should have been an opportunity for Jim to vet the methodology internally. If, as it now appears, BAN leaked information selectively to e-Stewards, and some of that was "live" information, someone could actually go to prison. There may be a legitimate explanation for the cancellation of the printer scrap delivery to the E-Steward company. But if not, E-Stewards and BAN itself could be the biggest collateral damage of their leaders obsession with Robin Ingenthron and Fair Trade Recycling.

Collateral Damage 8. My personal relationships

Admittedly, I look obsessed, too. That ain't good. But its the business relationships I'm building, the memberships in Fair Trade Recycling, that have been collateral damage to BAN's 2 page hit job. And yeah, I'll write more about that too. It's the financial damage that would become a part of a defamation or slander lawsuit. But those are expensive and tie up the legal system. It is the due diligence of Boards of Directors and MIT Ethics departments which will shake this out when they see that I have a very legitimate case.

Let the due diligence begin.

BAN MIT MoniTour Teardown: Inside the Ewaste Export Controversy

The MIT MoniTour @KCTS-9 Basel Action Network "Expose on Exporting" #trackingewaste is still being reviewed by review researchers, recycling experts, and reporters. Memorial University has helped plot final landing points for devices. There are still a large number of items in places that BAN can't quite explain. [There are data points missing, which we located on Monitour but are not in the table per MUN]

- There are good places overseas (BAN now says "never said there weren't")
- People who never exported are highlighted for political reasons (BAN says it's justified)
- BAN's own math suggests 11% total exports (good or bad end points)
- BAN's conclusion (use E-Stewards) belies BAN's financial interest

As one of the people who never exported the tracked device, but whose clients were assaulted by BAN's innuendo I've got a particular axe to grind. But the main point is that I have consistently made the same argument before BAN attacked me personally. Jim Puckett has told a reporter directly what I inferred from the article - that I came up with EcoPark, etc., to cover up my shipment to Mr. Lai's Printer Farm. It's in print, and it's provably false, and I need another apology.

BAN made a very legitimate point via their GPS tracking study - that despite normal diligence, we should not assume for sure material exported to Asia won't go "sideways" to a scrap metal vendor (any more than we can assume that via E-Stewards). But Jim Puckett tries to push the point too far, and in so doing damages the names and reputations of state of the art repair geeks overseas, Boston area MIT hippy coops, Vermont ADA employees, and legitimate discussion of environmental policy.

Perhaps Jim yielded to his frustration and inability to control the story in a tidy direction, and now has injured people that shouldn't be injured. He needlessly involved innocent MIT students, Carlo Ratti, KCTS, and The Body Shop Foundation in a pissing match over environmental justice. Jim simply needs to say "I'm sorry". Again.

Watchdog Issues Apology For Personal Attacks in E-Waste Article

Jim documenting CRT glass was not exported as he claimed (AZ)

According to the opening page of Massachusetts Institute of Technologies Senseability City Lab's expose on second hand electronics, transboundary movement demonstrates likely environmental harm.

A joint project between the Basel Action Network (BAN) and the MIT Senseable City Lab has led to the discovery of previously unknown international electronic waste routes departing from the United States.

Printer, and LCD and CRT monitors were embedded with GPS trackers capable of remotely reporting their location from overseas locations. These trackers were then delivered to recyclers and charities around the country. 65 of the first 200 trackers deilvered as part of the Monitour/e-Trash Transparency Project went offshore, mostly to Asia.

On-the-ground investigations in Asia by BAN produced a clearer picture of these trade routes. Results of this study can be found here on this site in graphic form and will also be released in a series of reports by BAN. These can be found at: www.ban.org/trash-transparency.

While legitimate e-waste recycling helps reduce landfill contamination and raw material extraction, the export of hazardous electronic waste is most often illegal trade under the Basel Convention and moreover, the management of toxic electronic waste in the informal sector damages human health and the environment.

The Monitour/e-Trash Transparency Project demonstrates how relatively new technology can generate unique data needed by civil society, law enforcement and enterprises to better track what until now have been hidden flows. Since the time of our experiment, the UN Organization on Drugs and Crime has confirmed that the Mong Cai border is a primary corridor for e-waste flowing from the US and EU into China, part of an estimated US $3.75 billion market for illegal e-waste.

Learn more about e-waste tracking here: Video.

- MoniTour E-waste Transparency Project, MIT

"On the ground investigations in Asia by BAN produced a clearer picture of these trade routes." Really, MIT? Just how clear? Analog or high definition? Seriously, this is from Media Lab of all places?

As I showed last week, the screen shots of the MIT's tracking project are difficult to see at proper resolution; you can't zoom in. Instead, you must copy the longitude and latitude and paste it into google maps, or rely on whoever is writing written descriptions of the sites on MIT's website.

Then you find places like the Hafeez Computer Center in Faisalabad, Pakistan. It's near the center of a dense city, blocks away from one of Pakistan's largest universities. It is a long way from the port. Screenshot below.

We are writing to MIT to offer to assist them in interpreting several tracking devices locations. In particular, I'm focusing on CRT devices, which are governed by USA EPA law. That law does not ban export for reuse, or even export for recycling, but requires that export to be declared and investigated by EPA prior to export.

The reason for EPA's restrictions stem largely from the Basel Action Network (MIT's "joint partner") declarations in 2002 and 2005 that the "vast majority" of CRTs are not recycled, but are dumped overseas to avoid high USA recycling costs. Overseas, BAN announced, the CRTs were most likely going to be beaten by children with hammers to remove "valuable copper". It is certainly true that CRTs are the most expensive type of electronic waste to recycle, and it's true that any which are diverted for continued use represent an avoided fee. It's also true that working display devices have been in high demand for reuse and repair markets. Billions of people owe their "teledensity" (mass media, internet, etc.) to used and rebuilt CRTs sourced from wealthy nations.

How Little We Recyclers Even Care What Happens

Wow. What a powerful emotional connection - to no one. Because embargoing trade proves how much you care. Don't exchange with anyone, Bodhisattva. I thought I'd share the opening salvo of logic from KCTS9's "The Circuit: Tracking America's Electronic Waste".

Sure. If I send work to the Chicas Bravas Womens Co-op at Retroworks de Mexico, the fact that the electronics crossed the border means I don't care about them. I don't care about the people I send my children to visit, I don't care about the people whose godson comes live with me for a year.

I don't care about the former Attorney General from Burkina Faso, who I housed for months while a contract was put on his life by President Blaise Compere. I don't care about the Egyptians, who hosted my family and stayed at my house, because I sold them computers. I must not care about the investors who are trying to build a $45M state of the art printer recycling factory in Hong Kong, to supply Apple, Sony, and LG with recycled content for new devices. I surely don't care about the technicians in Ghana who fed and housed me for 3 weeks, or the scrap men at Agbogbloshie who still WhatsApp or call me once a week.

Europe's EWaste Armada: Following Captain Puckett to the Edge?

The logo to the right appeared in the NY Times Opinion Editorial section, in a n article by philanthropist Peter Buffett, titled "The Charitable-Industrial Complex"

" Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed.

"Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.

"As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

"But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life."

This #charitableindustrialcomplex meme, and #theafricathemedianevershowsyou, and #povertyporn and #parasitesofthepoor memes are not something I made up as an "ad hominem" attack on the Basel Action Network, which renewed the claim in an Op Ed this month at Resource Recycling.

"Exporting Deception: The Disturbing Trend of Waste Trade Denial" by Jim Puckett

Jim makes some kind of association with climate change deniers, and tries to make the case that his poor non-profit is the victim of some kind of right wing conspiracy. If his #EwasteHoax is denied, and Climate Change is denied, then obviously .. uh what?

He goes through 3 studies that I've featured here on the blog which focused on exports of second hand electronics to cities in emerging markets, studies which found about 9% of what is exported may not be repaired. That "fallout rate" is documented in every industry, in "spoilage and breakage" statistics. If you export 100 tons of corn, and 9 tons spoil, did you "illegally dump" nine tons of corn waste?

What is maddening is that Jim himself acknowledged the value of the study two years ago (before Hurricane Joe Benson was sentenced) and made the claim that it was better now thanks to his organizations "reform" of the trade. But when it was pointed out that the studies were done on the very containers his organization accused, leading to seizures, (BAN Spins: How the Basel Action Network "Saved" Africa) he never replied. We have had to attack the #ewastehoax, because he wasn't answering any questions or making any corrections, calling Joe Benson "collateral damage".

In the latest version of BAN SPINS, we see a curious loop.

"The media messengers that are now presumably in the cross-hairs of a new chorus of deniers include the most prestigious journalistic outlets in the world, including CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, AP, CNN, CBC, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, The Guardian, BBC, Al Jazeera, National Geographic, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The New York Times." - Jim Puckett

So in defense against "deniers", he cites the very articles I cited... the ones which reported him making the specific claim that 80% of what Africans and Chinese buy isn't reused but illegally dumped and burned by orphans.

Something Jim then denies. From the first BAN Spins Blog

"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." - Jim Puckett
(-Bloomberg News)

Jim cites the organizations, which claimed the Hoax Statistics, citing Jim, which he denies giving them? Jim defends himself with the statistics quoted by those organizations citing interviews with Jim Puckett, who denied giving them the statistic? And this in an editorial calling African Technicians, calling Joe Benson innocent, "deniers".

If Africans now have TV, radio, internet and cell phone use at rates competing with Europeans, it must be with brand new devices, since the used ones were dumped?

Here are the guys going to jail.

These shots of CRT Display Imports, taken between 2002-2007, were for reuse. They were sustainable. No mining or refining, the carbon and toxics and pollution made them the best way ever that three billion people could get online between 1995 and 2010.

It wasn't perfect of course. More controversial "gray market" wasn't photo'd. One Contract manufacturing plant, assembling brand new CRT monitors, also had a used SKD operation on another floor. They insisted it was a different floor and that a used CRT could never be swapped out with a new one. But of course that's how the whole sector started, bleeding used ones into new lines in the 1990s until there were actually more used ones than new ones in the early 2000s. By then, 100% used refurbishing factories were the norm.

CRT manufacturing for the West was in decline. Fortunately, there was a new "good enough market" where professionally assembled used goods became the most profitable in the sector.

Most of the buyers for these cheap, durable, affordable display devices has been in places like India, Egypt, and Indonesia. The 3B3K, three billion people earning $3 thousand per year, who were getting telecom and ICT and satellite TV at 10 times the rate of growth of the rest of the world. CRTs were on fire - in a figurative sense, not a literal one.

While the environmental NGOs were playing games with "percentages" understood by laypeople, some of us were actually travelling around the world documenting the purchase orders and uses of the export market. The percentages make a lot more sense when you actually know what you are talking about, rather than making things up as you go along.

How do display devices move, geographically, around the world?

In the big geographic picture, here are 5 import-export scenarios:

Import 1. Reuse of secondary CRTs (Tema Port, Ghana)

Import 2. Raw materials for new CRT factories (Videocon, India)

Import 3. Clandestine reuse of 'passable' used CRTs into new CRT assembly lines (China 1990s)

Import 4. Whole 100% semi-knock-down (SKD) reuse factories, often converted from closed #3

Import 5. Import for recycling of junk CRT displays (Calexico, Mexico).

Import 6. Mixed lots of used electronics to be assessed in country or scrapped on receipt

Below is the evolution of the smallest cause - #6 - and how it grew to swallow our attention and become reported in the press as the largest illegal envionmental crime of our time... #ewastegate.

I'm working on the Agbogbloshie Report, and there's a lot of background that I can't really fit into it. Since I haven't published on the blog in over a week, I thought I'd share some of the edited references which provide some history and perspective to #ewastegate.

People who don't know what they are talking about, making it up as they go along, get much farther if they festoon their reports with imagery of poor children. It's like UNICEF, except not a penny, not one tiny penny, goes from E-Stewards donors to the poor in the photos. It's macabre poverty porn, the Charitable Industrial Complex, and the history of the credible, peer reviewed reports which got us here are profiled below, so that we hopefully won't make the same mistakes again.

While I was producing this chart in 2008, I made a serious blunder. It doesn't have any children's photos.

Agblogblogshie: E-Waste Tsunami Covers Sodom-Gomorah in Understated Hell

Agbog-blog-shie Unplugged: E-Waste Tsunami Covers Sodom & Gomorah in Understated Hell

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.

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

I woke up between 2-3AM last night, from a very vivid dream (and strong acid reflux from trying too hard to reduce the Thanksgiving leftovers).

In the dream, my company was about to make an announcement about our R2:2013 certification. As part of the announcement, I had prepared to release dozens of helium balloons, from the garage of my house (I blog and do accounting from an office over the garage). The balloons were mostly yellow and pink, there may have been a few reds or blues, and they were up against the ceiling of my garage and my office and around the awnings of my home. (Not sure exactly how I was going to "release" them).

Anyway, who should show up in my dream? Jim Puckett, executive director of Basel Action Network, came personally in response to the announcement. He didn't go to the warehouse... he showed up at my home in Middlebury, Vermont... to inspect my balloons.

It was cheerful and amicable, as my conversations with Jim normally are. Still, I felt the same spike in adrenaline I get when an OSHA or Homeland Security or Vermont EPA (ANR) inspector arrives by surprise. I was flustered enough, evidently, not to question why E-Stewards was inspecting my R2 certification, or why Jim himself was coming to my home.

Yes. Jim Puckett was there, at my home garage, to inspect my balloons. It was some kind of a privilege he had, because I was about to celebrate my certification.

TRAGEDY 3: (Video) Puckett Defends "Guidelines" Developed Under Hoax

"When something is "claimed" to be exported for repair... but is actually exported for primitive dumping...." Africans are accused of relocating to Europe in order to do this to other Africans, and #GreatWhiteSavior is here to help.

Better, listen to Jim make BAN's case, on video, and on his own behalf. Below is the case for the "guidelines" which would rewrite Basel Convention's Annex IX, B1110 (the unamended Convention explicitly makes Hurricane Joe Benson's exports legal, See Part 1). In the video testimony below, Jim Puckett admits that they are legal under the Basel Convention. They'd be "illegal" under the "Guidelines" proposed under the Basel Ban Amendment, developed under the cloud of his hoax statistics. As he describes, those Guidelines are being implemented in Europe. Those were the Guidelines the UK Barrister used to convict Hurricane Benson. Below is Puckett's impassioned case not to "roll them back" (i.e. why we should still amend the Convention with the hoax-fed Guidelines).

VIDEO BELOW

Stunning, Profound Ignorance Of International Cultures: 3B3K

I was watching a Nigerian television interview with pop singer Nneka Lucia Egbuna this morning, and making travel plans with Ghana Electronics Technician and new WR3A Board Member Emmanuel Eric Prempeh Nyaletey. Eric will be attending this year's Resource Recycling E-Scrap Conference in Orlando.

Nigeria has morning news programs, kind of like our Today Show, or CBS This Morning, which people in Lagos watch while drinking coffee in their apartment buildings, getting ready for the morning traffic jams and commute to work.

Over the years, WR3A has sponsored travel to E-Scrap conferences for many international representatives. Su Fung and Allen Liu of Malaysia, Roberto and Alice Valenzuela, and Oscar A. Orta and Mariano Huchim of Mexico, Wahab Muhammed Odoi of Ghana, Souleymane Sao of Senegal, Hamdy Mousa of Egypt, to name a few. Emmanuel Eric is special, however. He's a geek from Accra who was head technician for Good Point Recycling in Vermont for 2 years, and he flew back to Ghana last spring to revisit Agbogbloshie and the tech/repair warehouses in Accra.

Emmanuel Eric Prempeh Nyaletey fixes Good Point Security Camera

Emmanuel Eric will be circulating the #FreeHurricaneBenson petition, and trying to get people to renew their WR3A.org memberships. He'll also be answering questions about Africa.

No, they don't all have Ebola. No, they don't pay money to import e-waste for copper value. Yes, they have had television and computers for decades and generate their own e-scrap.

Emmanuel Eric is now on a full scholarship for coding at Georgia Tech, but we are looking for people to help us pay him to keep him at least part time working for Fair Trade Recycling.

White Liberal Checks Privileges by Bicycle

Two friends shared a link to a blog by Michigan preacher and blogger JDowsett, who hit the Facebook lottery with a blog last week, "What My Bike Has Taught Me about White Privilege". It is well written.

Liberal white privilege college students 1981

It has been one of those months when a lot of social and racial soul-searching is going on in the USA. The mysterious shooting of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri... Without going into a lot about that case here, I'll just put this link to Cracked.com "7 Important Details that No One Mentions about Ferguson" (my Facebook status for much of the week). The language is salty, but I think Cracked has definitely evolved from a Mad Magazine rip-off in the 1970s to some of the best editorial writing on the web today. Here's a shot of my status, including a snippet of the article.

Robin Ingenthron via Cracked.com

August 29 at 9:22pm ·

Dudes... Cracked.com has grown into something, like... way different from "Mimic MAD". I've actually considered quitting to go work for Cracked, it's today's editorial.

Robin Ingenthron BTW It's a longer article than usual in Cracked and the language is quite quite salty. But there are some great points made, e.g.: "Aside from protesters throwing rocks and things at police, you've probably heard reports that LOOTERS and RIOTERS were at the protests, and that is true, .... There were people at these protests who got out of hand (some from out of town, some not), and the community paid for it. But small groups of drunken youths do not a riot make, especially when it's surrounded by much larger groups of completely peaceful protesters. Most of them are just like any average citizen in America. If you have to, just imagine that all of these protesters also happen to be white. Hope that helps."

August 30 at 10:39am ·

Note the distinction the author Cody Johnston makes about how a mass protest gets labelled as a "riot" less easily in our minds if we "just imagine that all these protesters also happen to be white". It's much the same point I make ad nauseum about TV repair... people perceive an African TV repairman as a little more dangerous, a little more criminal. #HurricaneJoeBenson did not get six bullets like Mike Brown, but the time they took to defame him and prosecute him was a slow motion train wreck.

Hey Yah...Teach me lies...

Even as UN reports surfaced showing 91% reuse, and the original source of the "ewaste hoax" statistic ("80% dumping?") mumbled away a denial of ever having stated otherwise, the prosecution of Joseph Benson and BJ Electronics plodded away, taking a note of none of it. It's harder to assess, perhaps, a mistaken snap judgement made by a Ferguson MO policeman in seconds. And Trayvon Martin's killer was acquitted based on the quickness of the killing (and prosecuted in the press for the number of minutes he spent stalking trouble). Benson was FRAMED over a course of years, and apparently no one ever thought he was worth the time to check that Greenpeace and Basel Action Network were full of @#$*.

Yep, the biggest thorn in Jim's side is indeed a liberal environmentalist, a college chum of Puckett's chums.

Yearbook got us liberal Minnesota PIRGs (leaning left) mixed up with sparse Black Christians in Asia?

New Study: Africa's "E-Waste Hoax" is a Gift that Keeps On Taking

No surprise to regular readers of this blog...

The 5 year old hypothesis that African technicians and entrepreneurs are illegally importing "e-waste" to save money for USA and European Recyclers is still full of @#$*.

Global Circular Economy of Strategic Metals – the Best-of-two-Worlds Approach (Bo2W)
Oeko-Institut Authors Andreas Manhart , Tobias Schleicher, Stefanie Degreif

Here is the full report, view pages 13-14 at a minimum.

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....