STORY: Africa turns imported electronics into hundreds of millions of dollars in jobs.
BLACK HISTORY MONTH.... The point has been made. The anti-export, e-waste watchdog organizations were fueled by an intoxicating certainty that globalization was "externalization", and that world trade is inherently suspect.
They created a fake statistic, out of very thin air, that 80% of the "ewaste" in the USA is exported, and that 80% of the imports into places like Africa were junk. The math failed on face value, but the images of "scrap boys" banging metals apart carried the day. Splitting copper from steel in motors was mysteriously labelled "toxic".
Despite my best efforts, in posts like "E-Waste Madness 2010", "We Shouldn't Have to Make That Choice 2009", and Motherboard in 2011, the "Ewaste police" gathered steam. I took arguments I'd made in trade print in 2002 (Recycling Today, "Setting a Higher Standard") and used the pulp blogging to document the innocence of the Geeks of Color. Sometimes I wrote with facts and statistics, sometimes with reason, sometimes with literary allusions aimed at the higher education field, sometimes in other languages. Sometimes I really stuck my neck out and named influential people who should know better, like Donald Summers, Josh Mailman, Solly Granatstein, and Terri Gross. Sometimes, I use video and tweets. But perhaps the most important efforts have been to document the actual trade, and fight the fraudulent statistics with real numbers, examined by grad students and professors in several continents.
E-Scrap News is the first major newspaper to call a duck a duck. The stats on imports into Africa were fake. Basel Secretariat believed them, and sent researchers, and found ... exactly what I've been describing, in posts like Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo. The UN found several hundred scrap boys in dumps. But they also found, shocker of shockers, 30,000 repair and reuse techs, producing value and internet, the exact same way as Singapore, South Korea, and Benjamin Franklin got started. Buying surplus media production (display units or printing presses), and making them "good enough" for the "good enough market", creating sustainable jobs with added value. Had CBS 60 Minutes spent one more day in China, and followed the film I'd given them, they would have seen the same thing.
So now what? Will the E-Waste Madness now end?
BLACK HISTORY MONTH.... The point has been made. The anti-export, e-waste watchdog organizations were fueled by an intoxicating certainty that globalization was "externalization", and that world trade is inherently suspect.
They created a fake statistic, out of very thin air, that 80% of the "ewaste" in the USA is exported, and that 80% of the imports into places like Africa were junk. The math failed on face value, but the images of "scrap boys" banging metals apart carried the day. Splitting copper from steel in motors was mysteriously labelled "toxic".
Despite my best efforts, in posts like "E-Waste Madness 2010", "We Shouldn't Have to Make That Choice 2009", and Motherboard in 2011, the "Ewaste police" gathered steam. I took arguments I'd made in trade print in 2002 (Recycling Today, "Setting a Higher Standard") and used the pulp blogging to document the innocence of the Geeks of Color. Sometimes I wrote with facts and statistics, sometimes with reason, sometimes with literary allusions aimed at the higher education field, sometimes in other languages. Sometimes I really stuck my neck out and named influential people who should know better, like Donald Summers, Josh Mailman, Solly Granatstein, and Terri Gross. Sometimes, I use video and tweets. But perhaps the most important efforts have been to document the actual trade, and fight the fraudulent statistics with real numbers, examined by grad students and professors in several continents.
E-Scrap News is the first major newspaper to call a duck a duck. The stats on imports into Africa were fake. Basel Secretariat believed them, and sent researchers, and found ... exactly what I've been describing, in posts like Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo. The UN found several hundred scrap boys in dumps. But they also found, shocker of shockers, 30,000 repair and reuse techs, producing value and internet, the exact same way as Singapore, South Korea, and Benjamin Franklin got started. Buying surplus media production (display units or printing presses), and making them "good enough" for the "good enough market", creating sustainable jobs with added value. Had CBS 60 Minutes spent one more day in China, and followed the film I'd given them, they would have seen the same thing.
So now what? Will the E-Waste Madness now end?
