Recycling Is NOT a "LIE" Part 2. Alexander Clapp Fails Math On Plastic Recycling

Plastic recycling is not a lie. It's not perfect, but if you have to choose how your fresh spinach leaves are sold to people who live in Vermont, steel cans, copper, glass and paper may be easier to recycle at the end of package life... but lifecycle analysis of mining and refining and transportation also count for the environment. We need to keep working to fix the parts of plastic recycling that are not working, but attacking the plastic recyclers who ARE WORKING is shameful. Lying about PETE bottle bill plastic recycling will not fix the recycling prospects for a microgram of toothbrush at its end of life.

In part 1 of "Recycling is not a Lie" we shared just how aggravating it is to have African Geeks in the Tech Sector profiled as landfill scavengers. Yes they are both black, and yes they both make less money that the white guy running mobile phones through a shredder while wearing a white lab coat.  In the same kind of way, successful plastic recycling companies are being cast as failures because the word "plastic recycling" doesn't cover the toothbrush.  In both cases, the arrogant claim that "Recycling Is A Lie" profiles honest, incredible people as shameful.

PETE (#1) and HDPE (#2) Plastics are incredibly successful. They are not subsidized, they are not "a lie", and they are not thrown away at the recycling facilities. People who are telling us that may have a legitimate gripe about the film plastic your spinach leaves were transported in, but they don't have an answer other than "don't eat your spinach".  They might imagine that spinach farmers in Mexico will successfully ship it 3000 miles without most of it spoiling, or being packaged in material far heavier to transport and more harmful in lifecycle analysis (see Oregon DEP study on paper bags vs. single use plastic). But doing so, they imagine they are more truthful than Malaysian Plastic Recycling Factories.

I'll focus on Malaysia, because Malaysia and Indonesia are getting a lot of recycling hate, and I've got experience with successful plastic recyclers - inventors and investors - in both nations. Both nations have been "Asian Tigers", economies who have muslim-majority DEMOCRACIES. There is plenty to criticize (extinction of orangutans for palm oil plantations for starters), but attacking their plastic recyclers is just ignorant.

I have learned the hard way that it is dangerous to single out a single recycler unless they are already (a la Joe "Hurricane" Benson in the UK, or Semarang Indonesia's PT Imtech) falsely accused.  Saying "what is wrong with this factory" has drawn sick attacks, like Jim Puckett's letter shutting down my friends at Net Peripheral in Penang Malaysia after Adam Minter visited them and wrote about them in Recycling International. But let's just look at the largest Malaysia recycler on this list.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis, reporter at The Guardian and author of Wasteland, at least accepted my invitations to meet and speak about the potential for "collateral damage" in Emerging Markets. He visited Evans Quaye's shop in Accra (the smallest electronics refurbished I could risk introducing him to), and as a result wrote a nuanced chapter about his capacity to judge Africa's Tech Sector.  And to his credit, he admitted to me he had not visited a single plastic recycler in Malaysia or Indonesia while writing about their businesses (blamed covid travel restrictions). Oli is honest.  But Alexander Clapp has not responded to any of my twitter or Linkedin invitations.  Alexander Clapp is the one who told the NYTimes that people like me are LYING about recycling.

Here is a plastic recycling plant my Fair Trade Recycling Team visited in Semarang Indonesia about 15 years ago, when the factory was being "outed" by Basel Action Network as a "primitive" operation. We verified their ISO Certifications and photographed their ABS and HiPS plastic recycling lines. Colin Davis, my former VP and Middlebury College Grad (now CEO at Shacksbury Cider) visited in 2009 (I think).

This factory used plastic from used computer monitor housings - removing their paper and foil labels - to peletize them, adding black die, and made brand new computer monitor plastic housings out of 100% recycled plastic.  Was the factory perfect? No, but it made brand new computer monitors as a contract manufacturer to OEMs before converting to a recycling and reuse operation... so making computer monitors out of old computer monitors seems like progress to me. The plastic was just one part of the operation - they reused 4 year old CRTs to make affordable new TVs and monitors as well... while USA companies were grinding those CRTs up to make abandoned piles of toxic dust, and accusing this factory (through BAN.org) of lying.  That was more than 15 years ago... my guess is that Alexander Clapp was in Junior High School at the time. Now he's "recycling" Puckett's stories about these genius entrepreneurs... sigh. Maybe someone in his friends and family circle will read this and suggest he is only "holding up a mirror" to factless journalism.

So back to the present day.  I've posted the image and link to the list of the largest plastic recyclers operating in Malaysia as of 2023.  Clapp and Puckett have accused the largest factory (in that they have accused ALL of them) of operating illegally.

The factory claims to recycle 60,000 tons per year of HDPE (milk jug), LDPE (film), and PP Plastic grades into pellets that can be extruded to make new products.  Putting a photo of domestically generated Indonesia river mixed-plastic litter hardly disqualifies their claims to employe hundreds of staff, or their ISO 14001 certification, or their import permits.  If Alexander Clapp wants to accuse this factory of lying, he has had more than 10 years to visit and show us how they manage to pay for the plastic (PETE and HDPE scrap sell for much more per ton than paper), pay for shipping, employ hundreds, document residuals management, and somehow are "lying" and somehow responsible for plastic litter in an Indonesian river thousands of kilometers away.

Burden of proof much?

The Noble Informal

Today's blog is just a placeholder for another I've been working on for a few days. 

The topic is my invitation to present to a group of African Environmentalists on the Topic of E-Waste Management in Africa. 

Youth in E-Waste and Greentech Summit

The paper introducing the conference quotes Global Transboundary E-Waste Flows Monitor as follows:

"According to the Global Transboundary E-waste Flows Monitor 2022, Africa generates over 2.3 million metric tons of e-waste annually, with only 1.2% of this waste being collected and recycled in an environmentally sound manner in an ecologically sound manner. The informal waste management sector handles a substantial amount of e-waste, collecting and recycling the majority through unsafe treatment methods. These practices harm the environment and pose severe health risks to women, children, workers, and fenceline communities. The informal e-waste sector's low-value recovery methods perpetuate poverty and hinder sustainable development."

I have been invited by Agabas Ayudor of Appcyclers, who spent a week at Good Point in Vermont last month learning about how hand disassembly leads to more reuse and repair than grinding and shredding.

If I'm able to present, my title will be The Noble Informal, and will focus on Retroworks de Mexico, which opened in 2007, and which for 13 years operated an e-waste demanufacturing facility in Sonora which was banned from the Tucson Arizona contract it was awarded based on the exact same made-up narrative. The Arizona companies who impugned Las Chicas Bravas as "Primitives" wound up creating the largest hazardous CRT waste pile in America - possibly the largest on earth.  The women who ran Retroworks de Mexico in fact recycled the only CRT glass from Arizona that came from that pile.

Africans presenting the dystopian rumors about Africa Tech Sector to young Africans is something that should keep European tax payers up at night.  This is 2022, not 2012, when the lid came off of Basel Action Network's 80% false claims, and the re-arrest of Joseph "Hurricane" Benson in the UK was issued based upon that false, faked, statistic.

I don't want to be pidgeonholed into writing about the same thing, but WHO IN ACADEMIA IS HOLDING GLOBAL TRANSBOUNDARY E-WASTE FLOWS MONITOR accountable for this propaganda?  

The Empty Chair: Raise Your Hand If...

Raise Your Hand if you know who STEVE JOBS is.

Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who Jim Puckett or Basel Action Network is.

Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who TERRY GOU is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Simon Lin is.

Keep your hand up if you know Dr. Graham Mytton is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Prince Nico Mbarga is.

Keep your hand up if you know who Awal Muhamed, Yaro Muhammed, or Razak of Savelugu is. 

Keep your hand up if you've ever been to Savelugu.

Now unless you are author Adam Minter... my guess is your arms are back to your side. You'll need both of them when I conclude this talk.

The technology for "touch-screen" information feedback - sending data via touching a display device - was originally developed for cathode ray tube CRTs in Germany in (I think) the 1960s (based on my interview with Allen Liu, retired CEO of Net Peripheral, in 2016).  That patent was either abandoned or purchased by the Taiwanese engineers - graduates from University of Taiwan in Taipei - decades later. These tinkerers* applied to very small handheld touchscreen devices.  The "patent claims" by Apple and Samsung over smartphone touchscreen technology went nowhere 15 years ago (if anyone remembers those court cases, keep your hand raised) because neither invented it. Taiwan was the Cyrano of electronics invention, rising from "contract manufacturing" to schematic design wizards.  Terry Gou is the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, which manufactures most iPhones. Simon Lin is the Taiwanese CEO of Wistron and Acer.

Author, Author!

The seat next to me is empty, because those of you who lowered your hands might think I'm an expert. But everything I'm telling you today is either public data, available from World Bank and IMF loans for electric grid and hydroelectric projects which provide electricity to more than 90% of people in the world.  And if you had not interviewed fake experts like Jim Puckett of BAN, or Sasha Rainbow (Placebo MTV documentary director), or photojournalists like Kevin McElvaney and other "poverty porn purveyors" who got their information from Mike "Fishing as a Boy" Anane - that the center of capital city Accra was a remote fishing village in the 1990s... etc.

For twenty years, what I have learned by listening to the Tech Sector, listening to importers, listening to the founders of great OEMs, was derided by a lot of idiot white people who were given the privilege to sit before conferences in that chair.  People from Greenpeace, from European institutions, people like Interpol's Cornelius... people who probably meant well, but who were completely responsible for the false arrest, denigration, defamation, discrimination, and imprisonment of Tech Sector workers like Joe "Hurricane" Benson, an African who may well have become the "next: Steve Jobs, the "next" Terry Gou, or the "Next" Simon Lin. (Keep your hand raised if you remember Steve Jobs second company, "NEXT").

First "Fan Mail" from Secondhand, Right To Repair in Connecticut

Got a letter from a resident in Connecticut this morning, who had just finished reading Adam Minter's new book "Secondhand".  I won't expect many of them, but figured I could be public in my response as to why Connecticut is the ONLY state in the Northeast we do NOT collect used electronics from.

The history has to do with the regulators who wanted to apply hazardous "Universal Waste Rule" regulations to used electronics, effectively classifying "Secondhand" as "Waste" under RCRA. A regulator once told me he believed he could legally take away my smart phone if it was "non-working".  

Here's the response to our fan in Connecticut...

Hi Chris, 

Thanks so much.  

Ironically, I was Division Director at Massachusetts DEP when Tom Metzner was writing the regs for your Connecticut. We split over the issues (exports, and what I felt was racially profiling the tech sector in emerging markets) that keep my company (established 2001 when I left MA DEP) from doing business in Connecticut (the only state we don't collect in). In Tom's defense, we were both being bombarded with propaganda from the hazardous waste and Big Shred sectors. I was just fortunate to have travelled to meet the people who were trying to buy stuff, and having surveyed 200+ TV and computer repair shops in New England (who explained a TV is a lot more hazardous plugged into a wall and broadcasting ads in your living room than it is in a landfill or recycling yard).
Yep, we accept 1) anything with a cord, and 2) cordless electronics.  

If you want to contribute further, or spread the word, visit WR3A.org or its new website fairtraderecycling.net, a non-profit that acts as an "anti-defamation league" for geeks of color. 

Robin

Racketeering and Certification #3: Targeted Collateral Damage!?

How does Basel Action Network define Africa's Tech Sector, who purchase affordable solid state electronics for import, as a "Problem"?

First, look at their words.

Primitive. Pawing. Ghoulish. Skeletal. Rice Paddy. Shantytown. Swamp. Third World. Orphan. Toxic Soup, Witches' Brew, Cadavres...

Next, look at their claims.

80% of all ewaste is exported... Stuff at dumps imported days before... Children and teenagers... Most die within 5 years... Illegal under Basel Ban Amendment... 

Published in UNU Report 2015

And we can't look away from their photos.

At first glance, these are meant, like a tear-jerking Humane Society sad-dog-trick ad, to appeal to retiree church ladies or college PIRG fundraisers.

That is not who funds these ads. The poor kids herding goats at African landfills do not benefit.

Part II assessed BAN's service technique of selling a sabotaged (but nice looking) computer or TV with a GPS tracker inside to someone who does business with Africa or Asia's Tech Sector. Through a "Tracker" service they sell for money, you can investigate a competitor's sales. To legitimize the spy-ware (literally "ware") they try to make it about pollution and children.  They send reporters, like BBC Raphael Rowe, to a dump in a city that has had TV stations and electricity for a half century, and tell the reporter it used to be a lush paradise until bad, bad African repairmen imported waste to burn on it. But usually, they just send the reporter pictures, fake stats, and halloweeny words.

Racketeering often involves a conspiracy, a complicated system of money laundering, even through charities (USAToday). If the IRS investigates this NGO, through a complaint form 13909, there might be a domino effect. If billionaire corporations are privately benefiting from false claims, they could wind up at the sharp end of the Lanham Act. And million dollar settlements may ensue.

Take a look at the photos (below) Jim is taking now....

Poison Apples 4: BAN Report on Canadian Export - 9% Export Despite Rigged Sampling!

Nine Percent!?!?

Nine Percent is a nine-member Chinese boy group formed by the survival show Idol Producer by iQiyi in 2018.

Nine percent is also the result of BAN's E-Stewards new report  on a rigged process to show illegal ewaste export is still a thing to pay them money about.

Rigged as in 14% of all the devices BAN tracked were sent to one company (which BAN has engaged in a lawsuit against). And BAN didn't track things they knew would not likely be exported.

Basel Action Network, the owner of the "E-Stewards" authority program, is still using GPS trackers to try to ramp up business.  In a new report distributed by email, BAN has given a subject headline that "Canada still Exporting e-Waste to Developing Countries"... Using a clever but well trod journalism trick, "still" is meant to imply something significant is contained in the report.

Let's boil the information down from page 1.

1) Zero CRT televisions tracked, despite being 60% of Canada's e-waste stream.  That's a major sampling bias if your claim is about "Canadian e-Waste".

2) The devices "chosen" for export tracking - LCD monitors, CRT desktop monitors, and printers - were identified in BAN's 2016 report as the most likely items purchased by export markets.

3) BAN "Poisons the Apples" again, claiming to have secretly "rendered the devices economically unrepairable".  Like the 2016 report, the sabotage is not visible, it's hidden (and not competently done - in 2016 several devices were found repaired and in use anyway). Why do that, other than defeat screening and quality control procedures by the accused Canadian exporter?

4) BAN again conflates the Basel Convention - which explicitly allows reuse and repair and even recycling exports to developing countries - with their proposed AMENDMENT, which they admit has not been passed or ratified by either the Convention or Canada. So their claims of "illegal" activity by Canadians are clearly false and defamatory.

Despite all this spin, the result of the GPS study is   9 %

And if CRT TVs had been tracked, it would have been less than 3 percent!!!  This report shows an NGO flailing its fingers on the keyboard!!!

Fifth Week of USA College Students Apprentice Program in Africa Tech Sector

Fair Trade Recycling Update:  How Four USA College Students Will Change The Way You See Africa's E-Waste.

Zacharia is amazing

Fair Trade Recycling has a positive message.  Like the message in Hans Rosling's seminal "chimpanzee test" video - that ignited Gapminder in Sweden - our programs teach more about emerging markets.  The 1960s "Third World" images are, themselves, a form of pollution.

This summer we have 4 USA college interns working across 2 continents - Africa and North America - to create a partnership in parts supply.  Two students (U of Florida and Middlebury College) have been working in an apprentice program for flat screen TV repair in Ghana.  They are not just learning about T-con boards and controllers, or how to spot and replace overheated capacitors.  They are seeing Africa's Tech Sector as equals.

"Karim Zacharia is amazing!!!"

I like getting that message.  These two Americans are not "saving Africans".  They are not introducing a new "less primitive" technique. They are being exposed to Africa's best and brightest, to people who may well have been on scholarship to an engineering program if they'd been born in different circumstances.

Euro Agbo Porno Photo Journos 3: Credits Making Poverty Porn Placebo in Agbogbloshie!

Video Produced by Sasha Rainbow for RiseRecords and Placebo creates more "Collateral Damage".  

"Life is what you make it" music video, filmed at Accra city dump, uses gasoline fueled fire, children, and recycling images.

Well, well, well... it has been a busy week for Agbogbloshie.  We are looking for a release document for one of the "three musketeers" (Awal, Razak, Yahroo), who featured prominently in a new music video released for Placebo by Rise Records.  Not trying to scare them away, but to get them into their role in the dialogue.  They probably meant well, and are "collateral damage" from BAN propaganda... which they append at the video's final seconds, as if spreading fear for Africans victimization is compensation enough for a day of scrap circus performances.

First, some actual journalism happened the same afternoon as the video was released, and from the same state (Oregon).  Resource Recycling magazine had a thoughtful cover article on our Fair Trade Recycling "carbon offset model" waste trading with Ghana.

Same day, Rise Records (Beaverton, OR) released a film by director "Sasha Rainbow".   The music video for glam-punk-rock rerelease UK group Placebo advertises albums and t-Shirts.  The Song is "Life's What You Make It".

The film opens with the line "dedicated to the workers of Agbogbloshie".  Well, that's nice.  What's fascinating is that Sasha Rainbow uses only a handful of the people there, and the most prominently featured is Awal Muhammed of Savelugu (north of Tamale), who I spent several weeks with in January and February.

Here's Awal in the music video.  I am struggling to know how to feel about this.  His name, at a minimum, should be in the credits.  He's not a "nameless faceless worker of Agbogbloshie".

Here's Awal wearing my company T-Shirt (with Yahroo)

So I was kind of mock-exploiting these "most photographed dudes in Africa".  But I don't know if I paid them as much as Placebo or Sasha Rainbow paid them - or far more.  And I very much want to find out.  Because if Sasha Rainbow and Rise Records did compensate these workers, they should proudly name them (like a check would require) and say so in the credits.  Because Bellini, McElvaney, and other Euro Agbo Porno Photo Journos did not.  None of us assumes the scrappers are given more than a thank you, and if that's the case here, the Glam Rockers need to find out, and correct that.  If I see these people in a video that's making money, I want to read that the dudes were paid a fair crew wage.  The ironically titled video "Still Not Sponsored" is perhaps the grossest, most disturbing example, with smarmy ridiculing voice over by Mike Anane, a guy these scrappers detest.

Waste Perception Creates Image Problem

Last spring Resource Recycling published an article following WR3A research into leaded silicate mining.  Long before my days as a regulator (Massachusetts DEP 1992-99) I had noticed how recycling happens in cities where property values (NIMBY) made compliance expensive.  Virgin mining and forestry, while far more damaging and polluting, happened farther away from property values, and was thus less regulated.

Here in Ghana, we are looking at lead and zinc mining streams as a way to "piggy back" CRT glass back to secondary primary ore refiners.  Rather than try to construct a "takeback" program aimed at manufacturers (popular because they are extremely costly, charging high fees in a bargain with Planned Obsolescence to squash the secondary market), merely cite the "circular economy" and toss the CRT tubes back into containers bearing Pb Ores.  Africa mines primary leaded silicates for export to refiners in wealthy - and less wealthy (China, India) - nations.  And some of those ores are chemically identical to CRT glass.

And there is no "EPA-EU" "Waste" "speculative accumulation" paperwork or R2 or E-Steward #bs to make it economically unfeasible.  I keep hearing in the west that CRT glass is "impossible" to recycle in Africa, a continent where primary ores are frequently the number one export.  This is a clear case of the EU and USA shooting itself in the foot, and then demanding Africa, Asia, South America follow "equivalent practices" prior to engaging in strategic metals trade.

The difference between recycling and mining is largely an image problem.  It doesn't take much imagination to solve problems like CRT glass recycling markets.  It means being willing to listen to people outside of your "circular economy" box.

Geography Baiting 6: Granular Images of Recycling in Asia

My response to BAN's report "Scam Recycling" is not a criticism of tracking technology as a methodology.  And I'm not a critic of MIT or the Basel Convention.

Basel Action Network, using funding from The Body Shop Foundation, successfully added a lot of granularity to the discussion about exports of used electronics internationally.  The Data is interesting.   A peer review process, using scientific method, could have produced a great report, and could have protected the privacy of unwitting and unwilling test subjects in all the countries involved.  And to the degree that data is released rather than "obscured", it can be assessed by professionals like myself, and academics, and policy can evolve.

And that's happening. Josh Lepawsky of MUN's Geography department has repopulated many of the data points that were obscured on BAN/Monitour (though not all - Foshan is missing, as is EcoPark).

Is BAN playing games with the data?  If so, MIT Ethics office should recognize that its students (remember we have the names of the ones who placed a device in Somerville) are pawns.

I'm a critic of one thing.  Environmental Malpractice.  For a decade, this blog has attempted to offer an "anti-defamation" defense vs. Basel Action Network's game of tokenism, profiling, geography-baiting, race-baiting, and slander.  The people I'm most concerned about today are the Chinese printer technicians who make repair and reuse of laser printers as commonplace in China as automobile repair in the USA.  Or, put another way, as common as repair of laser printers was in the USA in 1995.  Because of the history economy printer cartridges - which cost as much as ball point pens to make, but sell for over $20 - printers are a specialty business which has been under attack since I first visited China's Nanhai/Foshan district in 2002, the year BAN visited Guiyu and Adam Minter arrived in Shanghai.

It's extremely difficult for Fair Trade Recycling to defend a printer economy which is kept in the "informal" sector by forces which defy Americans understanding of reuse economies.  Fifteen years ago, I assumed that anyone paying double the price of scrap for laser printers, but who refuses to buy inkjet printers, knew what they were doing, and had to be in the reuse parts business.  When I visited those markets, I was uneasy. They were very small, dirty shops.  Sometimes the work was outdoors. But you saw clearly that the sandaled brown and yellow people were sorting the printers by size and brand.  I found out that the reuse markets for certain LaserJet 4s had more to do with industrial machine repair (using the same memory cards) than it had to do with Laser printing.  And I found out about EFF.org, and Arizona Cartridge Manufacturers, and Jazz Camera.

I also found out that these markets are virtually untraceable and impossibly unaccountable. If I met a printer scrap buyer in person, and managed to communicate in Chinese, I learned that from his perspective scrap was "liquid". If he found the same printer I sold him closer to him, he felt he'd fulfilled his obligations and what happened to my physical printer was irrelevant.  From his perspective, it was as if I was trying to track the serial numbers on a hundred dollar bill I'd used to transfer money by Paypal.