"eWaste Crimes in Ghana" Part 8: BAN, Blacksmith Hoax Costs EU $1,200,000

In case you missed it, here was the "good news" headline from 6 months ago (August 2014)

The purple text is my addition, by the way.

More purple underlines (article continues below)

On Monday or Tuesday, Emmanuel Nyaletey, Wahab Odoi, Wahab's cousin Peter and I will head back again to Agbogbloshie just to make sure we got this straight.   What we photographed 10 days ago is supposedly the site which has received $1.2M in EU funds.

Below is my amateur film of the place where the 20-50 units (monitors, TVs, PCs) per day were getting their wires removed. (199 view limit on Youtube until I have to black out unpermissionedfaces).

I address the purple underlined "great white savior hoax" in the article above.  It's the most ridiculous thing ever seen on planet earth.



I'll be back there this week, if you have questions for the 27 people in Agbogbloshie who carry 446,000 pounds, minimum (2M tons for "millions" of tons) every day to burn it.   That's per person, per day.  With unpowered hand-carts.

Truly the most outrageously exotic site BAN.org has ever "uncovered".

The video is not complete, it is a preview, I have to edit out faces I don't have permission from after 199 views.  Though its quite ironic the people who didn't give permission...

Scrap Boys: Agbogbloshie Ghana Video

A film by Taylor Patrick, Michelle DoCampo, Mary Ellen Skawinski, available on Vimeo.

There are a lot of good film clips in this.  And I'm sure Michelle, Taylor, and Mary Ellen meant well.

But I recommend you watch it first with the sound off.  Now, take a piece of paper.  Make a list of jobs you would NOT want your student from Peace Corps to be doing when you went to visit them in Africa...

1) Child soldier
2) Sex slave
3) Bush meat hunter
4) Robber
5) Cutting down rain forest
6) Conflict metal / tantalum miner
7) Gold, lead, metal mining
8) Oil pipeline tapper
9) Spam writer
10) _________________________________________________________________

Organic cotton farming may or may not be on that list.  Now, take another sheet of paper, and make a list of jobs which you hope your students might have when you go back to visit them.  Doctor, nurse, banker, astronaut, movie star, engineer, software writer....

Now ask how many of the latter jobs your student can achieve without access to a used computer.  The answer is NONE.  Not one of my students could afford a new computer, and none of those jobs are available if you can't get internet in Africa.

After watching the film with the sound off first... play the sound during the interviews of the actual African scrap recyclers.  These are interesting.   Then watch the whole thing.

This is a lot like the Fair Trade Cotton attack (Bloomberg News V. Victoria's Secret) last month.

"It's as if recoiling from images of poverty is becoming equated with compassion." 

After I watched the Scrap Boys video the first time, I watched again, and I followed scene-by-scene by annotating.  You can read what's happening with the sound off, below.  By the way, there's lots of talk about "e-waste", but practically no "e-waste" of any kind visible in the film, or at least not in "imported quantities", and certainly nothing like nice equipment being unloaded from containers in the Greenpeace video.

Dumps at cities in Africa have e-waste, sure.  The same as they have junk cars (prominent in this video).  But there is almost nothing here, no evidence whatsoever, of significant dumping of USA and Europe waste.  They describe how most of the imports are good, but there's no film of that, none of a container being unloaded either.  But there is scrap metal - lots of it.  Car parts, refrigerators, wheels...

Fair Use in responding to claim that Agbogbloshie site is primarily about electronic waste

Scrap Boys from Michelle DoCampo on Vimeo.(For comparison see Fair Trade Recycling To Africa video, made in 2007)