BREAKING: Exploited Europeans Found Dumped in Florida!

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PRESS RELEASE Middlebury, VT April 1 2026

For twenty-five years we’ve been told that technicians in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are victims when they buy used electronics, ship them home, repair them, and sell them.

This phenomenon has been described as “waste dumping.”

Apparently the act of paying for something yourself is strong evidence that you are being exploited.

Today we announce a shocking discovery.

Using the same methodology, we have uncovered a far larger global dumping scandal.

Europeans are being dumped in Florida.

Tourist Exploitation At Disney World...!

Electricity Stupid.

For 25 years, since I left MA DEP to start my own used electronics repair, export, and recycling company, there has been a blind spot in the entire environmental movement.

It has not been about waste.

It has not been about externalization.

It has been about electricity.

The growth in access to and consumption of electricity worldwide has been extremely well documented by GapMinder (Hans Rosling), the international monetary fund, carbon monitoring / clean energy, big petroleum, the airlines, USA AID, the State Department, and every industry that manufactures anything that consumes electricity. 

The screenshot above, from the World Bank Data page, is remarkable for two reasons. 

Einstein's Amygdala Part 3: The Predatory Business of Labelling Competitors as Predators

To reiterate the below-the-fold conclusion of Part 2:

Today, in most of the world, the highest risks to our health are affluence-related.

Over-eating. Driving cars too fast. Ingesting newly developed drugs. New inventions like handguns. But as compared to the highest risk of death a mere fractional 200 years ago, the biggest risk today is having lived twice as long as the average human 1% of evolution ago. The entire list of these affluence-related risks and outside risks today is a lower risk than faced by 30 year olds, centuries (seconds in evolution relativity) ago.

Einstein's theory of relativity places the fully formed amygdala in a perspective setting, similar to the relative speeds of sounds from trains, speed of light, all the great Einstein thought experiments explaining relativity. 

The press and social media constantly portray business and trade as if it takes place between predatory cats and baby rabbits. And it is natural for humans to give equal weight to every new fear.

Photo by me 2021. Lots of people photograph this cat in San Juan. Some of my

own photos over the years have been flagged by Google as unattributed, fodder for

another blog someday

Einstein's Amygdala Part Two: Creating Popular Regulations

So all of the wild baby rabbits lasted 5 days, seemingly content to feed on pieces of bread soaked in milk and eggs.  Then they got sluggish. Then they suddenly seemed wide awake and active, and we kids were elated. This is what some animals do just before they die. We buried the baby cottontail rabbits in the woods. My mom, raised on a farm, said it was par for the course.

So from a child's perspective, our amygdalas had been yanked around, rewarded and punished, over 5 days falling in love with wild baby rabbits that your mom says probably won't survive the initial cat bite.

Deceased. late, extinguished, Monty Python "no more" baby rabbits is a headline we don't like, so it's easy to write a story... to imagine a reporter covers our dead bunnies, and the press demands a solution.

So what lessons would we expect innocent, naive, emotional children to learn? If they were in charge of regulating cats and rabbits, what rules might the children create which an experienced, educated, creative, thoughtful, highly intelligent person would not? Even though the Einstein does have an amygdala, we imagine that the higher power of intelligence would design a better rule - or not try to design one - rather than let emotional bunny-centric kids rule the roost.

Or what if the Rabbits were Super Intelligent, and could Propose Their Own Rules?

Bugs Bunny Square Dance from Loony Toons "Hillbilly Hare" (set in my home state of Arkansas)

Help Us Update Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of Retroworks Mining Factsheet

I could use some help updating this 2003 Retroworks Mining Factsheet.

Circular Economy of Digital Reference Cycles

While the fundamentals of the Retroworks Mining Factsheet remain in place, it has not been updated since 2003. For example, it needs carbon emission reference points (a great grad school paper next semester? I promise to review it).

Here is a link to the "American Retroworks Mining Factsheet", first published 1995, and last updated 2003. Needs help.

10 Years Of Good Point Recycling Blogs: What's Been Learned?

Ten years ago, most of the mainstream press in Europe and the USA had accepted the cartoon thesis that if electronic waste is expensive to recycle, that shipments of used electronics to Asia, Africa and South America were to avoid those expenses. At least, 80% of the time.

We took that on here, before anyone else would touch the controversy with a 10 meter pole. Here's a retrospective on what was, and still is, relevant in the Good Point Recycling Blog.

When poor people are paying for something (including transportation), it is not "because" the rich are willing to ship it.

We demonstrated that with the "Big Secret Factories" and 60 Wasted Minutes blogs. The sea containers of CRT monitors headed for Asia were never, ever full of large CRT televisions, even though large CRT TVs had more copper and costed more to recycle. In fact, the purchase orders did even accept Sony Trinitron 17" desktop monitors or screen-burned desktop CRTs or pre-VGA.  When someone is paying you $10 each for something specific, and refusing to accept other similar CRTs even if you pay them, it probably has nothing to do with (ahem) "rice paddies".

Brad Collis [CC BY 2.0]

Right To Repair in Nashville: Red Light, Green Light, Purple Light

Here in Nashville for Electronics Reuse Conference.  Formerly the TechSoup conference, which had mostly NGOs engaged in the Digital Divide, the conference is now managed by a private Chicago company. I was proud to receive a "Jim Lynch Lifetime Achievement Award" last year, when the conference was in New Orleans. Jim Lynch himself nominated me - and said he had done so every year since the award was established in his name, a something that really touches me.

Jim and I shared a 5 hour drive from the Retroworks de Mexico plant in Fronteras, Sonora, a few years ago. We shared a rather romanticized concept of India in our youth.  I didn't go there to meditate, as Jim did for a year.  Perhaps because when I said I intended to, my chum Sri Chatrathi from Fayetteville High School remarked "Go smoke pot in your own country, we don't need any more white hippies in India."

This week, Nashville is about the Right to Repair. A lot has been happening, and more of us are realizing that a Right To Repair is simply an invitation to Manufacturers to restrain their own speed. Once the government has a chair at the table, look what happens.

Feds say Hacking DRM to fix your owned phone is LEGAL.

Consumer Reports Magazine covers this as well.

Defending the 20 Percent: LET'S INTEGRATE RECYCLING

American Retroworks Inc. is a USA corporation based in Middlebury, Vermont. Established as a consulting company in 2001, ARI developed one of the first electronics take back and recycling ventures in the USA (Good Point Recycling), which now employs 30 staff. ARI has recycled, or diverted for reuse, over 20M kilos of “e-waste” over the decade plus we have collected in New England.  We create blue collar jobs in Addison County, we train our staff to meet new opportunities, and almost all of the $40M we have brought into the county came not just from out of state, but from big manufacturing companies - OEMs, steel and copper smelters, plastics molders - in other countries.

This blog is about the 20%.  Of people, partners, and product. 

The Fireworks Economy, Part 1: Burning Wire Adds No Value

European and American NGOs and Regulators who are entranced by the flames at Old Fadama's "Agbogbloshie" scrapyard have three main boogeymen.  Many argue that sales of used goods should be banned to Africa based on public concern over three "questionable" practices:

1) Burning Wire
2) Breaking CRT Tubes
3) Circuit Boards

So many documentaries have now been filmed with close up camera shots of each of these, that we receive RFPs that ban our company from doing work unless we promise not to do business with Africans.  As someone who lived in Cameroon for 30 months in the 1980s - and is still in touch via Facebook with my landlord from the small town of Ngaoundal there after 30 years - this "segregation" of business distresses me greatly.

Jujitsu Lesson: Toxic Culture of Victim Identity

Over the decades, this poverty identity has grown from subconscious awareness to thematic.

A few weeks ago, Awal Basit [E-waste Scrapper, Dying for Attention, 1/16], one of the leaders of the "Scrap Men" (rather than "scrap boys", cred to Lalouschek/Wondergem) was calling my cell phone a ridiculous number of times per day.  I try to keep relationships with people I spent weeks with in Ghana.  Drive by saviorism isn't sustainability.

The technicians - Kamaldeen, whose dad made me the fairtraderecycling,com bracelet, Elvis, Yussif, Kamal and his wife, etc [all from Chendiba Enterprises]- might call occasionally, and we chat by Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp at least a few times per week.


How's it going?  How's the family?  Hey, it's national service day.  yeah? what's that?  You know, it's good to stay acquainted.

Awal and the scrappers are the Ghanaians of the north who never went to school.  He struggles even with Pidgin English.  Awal's text messages, outside of a few platitudes, are a mystery.  He's from the other side of Tamale's tracks.

The young men burning wires in Agbogbloshie typically don't have the parenting or resources of Chendiba dudes.  Geeks of color are typically valedictorians. Awal and his crew are not just "out of Africa", they are out of an unpenned Soukous Hilife William Faulkner novel.  They all live in a poor country, they all come from the same tribe and language and region.  But the Chendiba Techs are using downloaded schematics to fix TV tunerboards. They feel somewhat awkward around the guys who took the bus to the big city and live in a lean-to on Agbogbloshie's skid row.

In the Simpsons, the Chendiba techs are Lisa, and Awal is ("ha-ha") Nelson.  Awal is on the streets and he has to show he's tough.  He calls me whenever he feels like, having evolved far afield of pleasantry and shyness.  When I get perturbed and stop taking his calls (usually when I've forgotten to turn on airplane mode and my phone goes off at 3AM with the whispering distinctive ring I've applied), he starts sending photos on whatsapp.  Photos of burning wire.

"Your guilt gives me leverage!"

As I said before, he wants attention.  He's alone.  He sees an opportunity but doesn't understand what to do with it  Like the proverbial dog who caught the bus, Awal has a personal relationship with someone he may imagine to be as rich as Donald.  And what got him that attention, and the interviews with Justin Weinrich and other photojournalists, is burning wires.

When someone begins to feel that their disadvantage is their attraction, it can become toxic in a whole new sense.  As in toxic employee, toxic manager.  I'm important because of my gripe.  My victimhood, my lack of privilege, is the only currency I have.  Your guilt gives me leverage.

Ewaste Witch Hunt #6: Portrait of African Scrapper, Dying for Attention

If you've been following the last 8 blogs about Agbogbloshie in Ghana, you see the tricky place we are approaching.  If the slum dwellers in Accra are burning wire for less than $3 per day, does chasing away the photojournalists do more harm than good?

There's this sense that photos have value, and a sense that some kind of exploitation is going on.  But it travels like a rumor, and the Africans are conflicted in whether to participate or boycott the photojournalists.  It's part of the #charitableindustrialcomplex that they know is "happening" but don't really understand how to monetize.

If the hyperbole about the  "largest e-waste dump on earth" goes away, if the source of the scrap in Agbogbloshie is not "hundreds of containers from sham recyclers" but just pushcarts collecting junk from a city that had 20 TV stations 20 years ago, where does that leave Razak, Awal, and Rachid, the scrappers we did Q-method interview with on film last spring?

Are they still "important"? 

It's a tricky thing.  They have no problem at all "outing" Mike Anane.  The scrappers clearly can't stand the guy. Every time Anane's name or picture came up, Awal's crew would begin talking over each other, standing and yelling.  That didn't come from me.  "HE DEY LIE!" [he lies] It was cried with emotion because they knew what Anane charges for his "photojournalism tours", they know his bogus relationship with the idealist young journalists like Kevin McElvaney, or "BitRot" Bellini, and with Jim Puckett and Lord Chris Smith etc... and they suspected it was part of the "Sodom and Gomorrah" propaganda campaign to evict them from their homes for the Accra Metropolitan Association could take the land over and develop it with hotels, malls, and office complexes.

My Blog 10 Years Ago: 2005 Letter to Iraqi People

Realized this morning the tenth anniversary of the blog had recently passed.  Because of a platform switch to google blogspot, I don't have direct links to the 2005 posts, but I did transfer them with original dates.  The first few were on mining (alluding to the Lynn Scarlett and John Tierney anti-recycling first posts of the 90s), extinction, being an "Agent of Conscience" (AoC), and this one on the Iraq Invasion.  It was written a bit after my dad's cousin, Jack Hensley (a contractor CNN), was beheaded on film by Sunni insurgents who went on to found ISIS / ISIL etc. in 2004.

It was interesting to re-read ten years later.  I was 43.  Maybe someday I can edit these things, if I trust myself to not rewrite my history in the process.

December 17, 2005

Letter to the Iraqi People:

May God bring each of you peace and justice, health and sustenance to you and your families.
My name is Robin, and I am a father of three, and I run a small recycling and parts company in the state of Vermont. It is a cold winter here, but the people are used to the ice and snow, as fathers and mothers have taught the kids how to live in peace with it for many generations. I can imagine, for your children, the desert sun must be less of a burden than it would be for me, but they would not enjoy playing in the ice and snow as much as my children do. Both the sun and the ice must be enjoyed but treated with respect.

continued...

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.

European Police Arrest Africans for Environmental Racism

"African On African Externalization Matrix" 
Compounds Harm, Confounding Pollution Watchdogs

Interpol vs. Reuse Matrix

[Lyons, France April 1, 2013]  Multiple European and American Police forces converged on African used computer businesses in Egypt, Nigeria and Ghana today, seizing equipment destined for reuse in the growing cities of Cairo, Accra and Lagos.   The Africans were called part of an extremely organized syndicate which imported used "e-waste" from Europe and the USA, and laundered it for two decades, through a matrix of African "middlemen" at hospitals and internet cafes.  Eventually, the importers planned to turn it in for disposal at African dumps and junkyards, many years later.


The sting on trans-boundary and trans-neighborhood movement of used goods was described by International Police and EPA as a complex system, or "e-waste matrix".  The trans-boundary movement had not been apparent, and therefore hidden.  According to the agencies, African buyers based in the UK, USA, and EU have cleverly avoided used electronics which were obsolete, in order to "bide their time" in a network of African-on-African reuse, planning eventually to burn the computers in a fire.

Acceptable

"The buyers are organized, and therefore we can call them 'organized crime'," said Emile Lundermiller, author of Interpol's 2009 Report on E-Waste Export Crime.   "It's ingenious.   They can apparently hide the computers, monitors, and televisions in plain sight for decades, in living rooms and offices."

Lundemiller continued, "Africans pay for it with African money, and distribute it into the cities before we can even catch it."  He cited the PIOOA statistic, that up to 79.5% percent of Africans are actively involved in the purchase, sale, repair, use, and reuse of electronics which ultimately victimizes Africans.   "It's environmental racism of the worst kind, African against African," said Lundemiller. "Africans routinely externalize waste to other Africans, exploiting each other, using more Africans as the middlemen, in a cross-fire of repurposed gear."

A Matrix of Self-inflicted racism:

As profiled in Lundemiller's 2009 Interpol Report on E-Waste Crime, the initial e-waste transaction is initiated by Africans, based in Europe, who cleverly test equipment prior to export.   By avoiding very old and obviously obsolete equipment, the African buyers make the equipment pass as working and repairable, exempt from European E-Waste shredding laws.  "They cleverly avoided the older, larger TVs.   This would have been difficult to track if their inter-African system of trade hadn't tipped us off," said the enforcement agency's undercover spokesperson, wearing a grass skirt, and carrying a canvas drum.

E-waste repaired to disguise its waste-ness

As documented in studies and audits from the Basel Convention Secretariat, African buyers showed a strong preference for newer-looking, black plastic, major brand name, and working equipment.  Usually the ones rejected had more copper and precious metals, but the patient importers forgo the cash in order to stymie investigators.

Between 85% and 90% of the e-waste the Africans received in Lagos was made to function to such a high level that the e-waste could be passed along, for years, hidden through normal retail channels.  After decades of reuse "laundering", the copper and other raw materials were to be harvested at African scrapyards.

Link to studies:
- USITC Estmates 88% of USA electronics are reused prior to disposal
- Arizona State University study documents 87% reuse prior to disposal
- Basel Secretariat studies (Ghana, Nigeria) find 85-90% of imports repaired or directly reused.
- BAN Kenya study estimates 90% reuse, 10% disposal

You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, er, Eden

In the latest break-up of the Egyptian "E-waste Cartel", the Cairo importer paid (according to EPA) $21 per CRT monitor, enough to ensure bad ones were removed and good ones relabelled.  Once the Egyptian government spotted the use of the monitors in internet cafes, prior to the revolution, it reacted by decree. Any CRT, working or not, is defined to be "waste" if it came off an assembly line more than 5 years ago (a time few CRT monitors were being made).

Once the Egyptian government dictated the working equipment to be "#ewaste", and seized them to halt "use", EPA was able launch its arrests of Americans selling working monitors into that market.  (China announced a similar move, labeling books with images of the Dali Llama to be "e-waste like").

Lecturing a room of confused police and detained Africans, Jim Puckett, Executive Director of Basel Action Network in Seattle, Washington, described the Reuse Matrix as a kind of internet "Rabbit Hole". "The African Reuse Matrix is a system. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see?  African Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

"Ultimately, we were correct about exports of intact units being dumped and burned," said Jim Puckett.  "It may take decades, but we are now tracking the disposal of televisions purchased by Africans as long ago as 1978.  What hath we wrought??"

What's Your Worst Ebay Feedback Ever?

We are the 99%.  That is, the 99% Positive Feedback on Ebay.

Good Point Recycling / American Retroworks Inc. was a pioneer on ebay.   I sold a lot of sewing machines "as is for repair" back in 2001, and got our first "delighted!" feedback from a sewing machine conaiseuse who was looking for several of these and found them good homes and loved that we had scavenged them from the scrap metal bin for reuse.  Later I learned that certain very long monitor cords and cables were hard-to-find, and selling the longest ones out of the scrap copper proved appreciated by ebay buyers worldwide.

Ebay Buyer's Remorse Quotes Wanted

But you can't please all the people all the time.   From time to time we are with 100% positive feedback, but eventually someone doesn't like something in the used, as-is, for-repair market.  Even full refund policies are no guarantee to please the most picky ebay bidders.

This year, my favorite bad feedback was for a sale of scrap gold to an international bidder in Eastern Europe.  The negative feedback arrived in Spanish (?).  Evidently, the delay from shipping time caused the scrap value to decline on world gold markets.  Since the value of the gold scrap was worth less on the day they got it in Eastern Europe than it was on the day they bid, they wanted a full refund.  Without returning the gold.    


Hmmmmmm.   Refund?  Or live without 100% feedback?

Recycled Content Ju-ju Words

Recycling causes tuberculosis, and other nasty reporting...

The Independent, a reputable UK Newspaper, reports with fanfare how nations are a step closer to banning the trade of used electronics to "non-OECD" nations.  In the future, western nations will still be able to mine their coral islands and rain forests for the hard rock raw and rare earth materials rich nations need to manufacture electronics.  But the emerging markets will not be able repair, knock off, refurbish or remarket our used goods... the truth about what happens to exported cell phones, as reported by The Atlantic in an article with IFIXIT.

It's not about pollution.  We know that metal mining and refining, raw materials industries, produce 45% of all toxic pollution released by all industry.  We know that the coltan mining and gold mining bring the mercury and toxics, and creates the trafficked paths to bushmeat and rare species exploitation.  We know that recycling jobs are sustainable, lasting forever, but that veins of ores become dead ends and are abandoned to become the most toxic places on earth.

It's obvious that the free market prefers reuse and recycling.   If we are to maintain the marketing campaign of planned obsolescence, we need to convince these lesser developed nations that computer repair is bad.  We need to cover up the detailed data that shows 85% of the used electronics imported are reused and refurbished.  We need to convince them that they are hazardous waste.  The Independent Article takes a step in this direction, informing us that "tuberculosis" comes from "recycling".  I had always thought it was a contagious disease associated with poverty.  If poor people recycle, and poor people are more likely to have tuberculosis, that is "just enough information" to create an impression.

From the article, one would assume it's legal for Africans to stay barefoot and pregnant, mining coltan in rain forests for us to make brand new cell phones to sell them, but NOT to fix them for revolutions in Cairo.

How does our society, whose manufacturing system is sustained by exploiting rain forests, for metal for us to make into gadgets, market the word "Recycled"?  How do we let them manage the toxics from getting raw material, without letting them fix up our old product ("market cannabalization", another nasty term I learned for "reuse and repair", from the Obsolescence Class)?  We need a system to shred product prior to shipping it for recycling (shredded goods go to China), and to mine rare earths... something that doesn't get in the way of new product sales.   We find that dictators, afraid of the access to information the internet brings, and wealthy from sale of their nations raw material resources, are happy to classify used computers as "hazardous wastes", and bring the Basel Ban Amendment closer to passage.

Does it make any sense to define secondary material (reuse, repair, recycle) as a "waste"?  Waste is excrement... we have a natural revulsion...  good.  goooood.