Photo and post inspired from London School of Economics Africa Blog,
Africa and China: How it all began
What I'm doing with Fair Trade Recycling is perfect. It's appropriate technology, it gives Africans affordable internet, and the repair jobs which pay too little to do in the USA create 10 times the per hour wages for Africa. It's the "tinkerer blessing", the opposite of the Resource Curse.
It seeds and creates and pays for an appropriate technology recycling system. While only 15% of imports of used equipment are bad (Wal-Mart returns are 11%), paying for the proper disassembly and recycling of incidental breakage, elective upgraded parts, etc. creates a recycling infrastructure.
In Retroworks de Mexico, that creates a "computers for clunkers" trade in program where the ones they refurbish for resale can be exchanged for the domestic-generated e-waste. That's the system already in Africa, people trade in the ten year old ones for more recently imported and upgraded, which is the link between the importers and Agbogbloshie. BAN and Greenpeace and Interpol would have known this if they'd given Souleymane, Wahab, Hamdy, Somda or Miguel the courtesy of a discussion rather than just profile them as "waste tourists".
USA would be smart to be selling the repair and working display devices etc. to Africa. We create more income and more jobs through reuse. We cannot afford to have an idiotic 48 cent per pound California-destroy-all SB20 system.
USA has former Peace Corps volunteers like me, African immigrants like Wahab and Souleymane, and a history as a melting pot which our biggest competitors - China, Japan and South Korea - didn't have.
Africa and China: How it all began
What I'm doing with Fair Trade Recycling is perfect. It's appropriate technology, it gives Africans affordable internet, and the repair jobs which pay too little to do in the USA create 10 times the per hour wages for Africa. It's the "tinkerer blessing", the opposite of the Resource Curse.
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| Thanks for the Business, Uncle Sam |
In Retroworks de Mexico, that creates a "computers for clunkers" trade in program where the ones they refurbish for resale can be exchanged for the domestic-generated e-waste. That's the system already in Africa, people trade in the ten year old ones for more recently imported and upgraded, which is the link between the importers and Agbogbloshie. BAN and Greenpeace and Interpol would have known this if they'd given Souleymane, Wahab, Hamdy, Somda or Miguel the courtesy of a discussion rather than just profile them as "waste tourists".
USA would be smart to be selling the repair and working display devices etc. to Africa. We create more income and more jobs through reuse. We cannot afford to have an idiotic 48 cent per pound California-destroy-all SB20 system.
USA has former Peace Corps volunteers like me, African immigrants like Wahab and Souleymane, and a history as a melting pot which our biggest competitors - China, Japan and South Korea - didn't have.
