Social Strata Recycling: It's the Recycling Economy Stupid

 While I'm certainly not a fan of communism or any system that concentrates authority in a smaller number of bullyboy hands, I do respect Karl Marx's economic theories. Compound interest rewards those who save - who tend to be those ABLE to save.  If you are born to slaves or paupers, and have no choice but to lift your bucket where it is and lift as you climb, you are extremely unlikely to become self-made in a single generation.

It's the Recycling Economy Stupid.

That said, teaching people that it is hopeless to lift their buckets as they climb is cruel and unusual, historically speaking. The empowerment of resentment - Marx's elixer for proletariat revolution - has little evidence of building wealth in society at large. Most people benefit from a smaller slice of a bigger pie than taking away another person's piece and re-distributing it among sharp elbowed bullies.

Do Packaging Bans Make Sense on an Island? It's the Metal Stupid

The past few years, the Recycling Community made a lot of progress on a couple of fronts. Mainly, the decade-long furvent conviction that "environmental justice" meant boycotts - and arrests - of geeks of color in Emerging Market Tech Sectors has been recognized as an #OwnGoal.  Last month's post of the Recycling Today podcast, and this month's recognition in Recycling International's Top 100, mostly paid tribute to a cold revenge against the 80% Waste Hoax.  He who shall not be named has disappeared from the Top 100 list.

This weekend I'll try to use a common challenge - recycling on an island - to explore how my recycling philosophy can bubble-sort ethical dilemmas using logic and statistical likely outcomes. I can already see some prospect for "long-form blogging". But it's the only December blog, and there are still people discovering the evolution of recycling ethics.

My takeaway: Ptolemy is the perspective of gravity around one's own ego.  Like "Spiritual Materialism", wanting to do the right thing is necessary - but by no means sufficient - to having the most sustainable impact. Too often we view our environmental efforts from within our own silo - or on our own island - relative to other humans acting for other various reasons.  In a karma-Judeo-Islam-Christian morality, God is going to grade on the curve. My moral licensing is measured by my effort to excercise on my care for the planet, etc. Better than nothing. A Ptolemy map of the cosmos is better than no record at all.  We'll test that out today.

Michael Shellenberger's Mad at Solar Panels. Too Cute Substack Fallacy.

SEE VIDEO: WHY DECOMMISSIONED SOLAR PANELS ARE NOT DEAD YET.  

Like flip phones, CRT monitors, hotel TVs, ex-boyfriends, and used cars, your decision to electively upgrade to a newer solar panel does not mean the ex-panel's life won't go on.

I was coached that people don't have time to read everything, so here's the jist... Shellenberger's thesis is that solar panels are being upgraded far sooner than their 30 year warranty or 40 year estimated lifespan would have buyers assume. That's true, I just gave a presentation on that at NERC.org.  But the reason for the upgrades is not that the used panels are failing or are waste... It's because 

• the price and efficiency are falling, 
• the number of roofs is finite, 
• the cost of siting big solar fields near populated areas is skyrocketing
• early adapters like to upgrade to something new
• AND by 2028, virtually every older working will panel be cost-driven to replace

I have a whole presentation explaining this (Start at 2h 30min, NERC.org recorded session). Like desktop CRTs and Pentium 4 laptops, the solar panels are all going to get electively upgraded.

BUT  like those other items, the secondhand market is gobbling up replaced solar panels. And here's where the circular economy doesn't revolve around you, Michael Shellenberger - a 50% efficient panel replaced by a 100% efficient panel in Vermont GENERATES MORE KW IN AFRICA THAN THE NEW ONE DOES IN VERMONT.

Check out @AdamMinter's Twitter reply string to @ShellenbergerMD (he's not an MD, btw, he uses his first and middle initial).

MORE >

Patent Law Gambits For Simpletons: Patent Exhaustion Remedies

* Note - this turned out not to be as simple as I imagined at 4 AM this morning.  But I'll revisit to plug in stick figure cartoons to make the wire analogy easier to follow.

Metal Wire manufacturing was patented in England in 1565, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

It marks one of the very first uses of patents, as understood by the founding fathers of the United States. This 1909 historical text explaining the history of the 1565 patent is past its copyright and may be freely copied and pasted.  By contrast, for some reason the image of the painting of Queen Elizabeth is listed as a modern copyright on Wikipedia... that's obviously an erroneous claim, you cannot take a photo of a portrait long past copyright and claim that anyone using the image of Queen Elizabeth is infringing on your photo copyright.  But I digress.

What's useful to understand about the difference in copyright and patent law is how much of the precedent involves the science and applied engineering of metal refining. Mining metal ores, and refining them in furnaces, was long established (think of the Iron Age and Bronze Age), and no one could successfully patent the extraction of ore and manufacture of metal. 

They could, however, patent unique methods and improvements in furnaces... one of which resulted in the 16th century in making metal so refined that it remained useful even when it was made very, very thin. Wire was very high tech, back in Queen 'Liz's period. The Tech Sector of the middle ages - that era's valedictorians - were adept at making metal into weapons and useful items in commerce. It also establishes an interesting string to follow for electric appliances, electronics, internet cable, etc. But I digress into the present.

Author: Viscount James Bryce
Author: Frederic William Maitland

Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, by various authors, compiled and edited by a committee of the Association of American Law Schools, in three volumes (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1909). Vol. 3.

Nos. XIII, XIV. 1565. Sept. 17. Two licenses to Wm. Humfry and Christopher Shutz to dig (1) for the Lapis Calaminaris, the manufacture of brass and iron wire and battery wares, (2) for tin, lead, and other ores. These grants covered geographically those parts of England not included in Houghstetter’s patents and the Alum patent of De Vos. Calamine or zinc carbonate is an essential in the manufacture of latten or brass, which it was proposed to use in casting ordnance (S. P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 8, No. 14). The mineral was discovered in Somersetshire in 1566, and the first true brass made by the new process was exhibited in 1568. The patentees also erected at Tintern the first mill for drawing wire for use in wool-carding. In 1568 the Company was incorporated by Charter as the ‘Company of the Mineral and Battery Works,’ and remained under practically the same management as that of the Society of the Mines Royal (Stringer, Opera Mineralia Explicata). In 1574, and again in 1581, the assignees of the patent obtained an injunction against several owners of lead mines in Derbyshire for using certain methods of roasting lead ores in a furnace worked by the foot blast and other instruments invented by Humphrey after the date of his patent. The Court of Exchequer ordered models to be made, and after repeated adjournments a Commission was appointed to investigate ‘the using of furnaces and syves for the getting, cleansing, and melting of leade Ower at Mendype, and the usage and manner of the syve’ (Exchequer Decrees and Orders). The depositions in this case are still preserved, but it is impossible to trace the history of the case to its completion. Coke informs us that as regards the use of the sieve, the patent was not upheld on the ground of prior user at Mendip. It is a peculiarity of the grant that it covered all subsequent inventions of the patentees in this particular branch of metallurgy. The hearth was invented after the date of the patent, and one of the questions to be decided was whether a subsequent invention could be covered by letters patent or no. See also Hyde Price, pp. 55-60.

The Privilege of Recycling Righteousness

 Waste Hierarchy vs. Litter.  Keep Atlantic Beautiful.

There is a privileged disconnect between weathy nations' obsession with recycling rate of plastic, when the emergency is ocean-bound litter in emerging markets. I don't care if it's recycled, I want to see litter collected before monsoons send it to sea.

Visit WasteAid.org 

Over the past two decades, I've been delighted to see hunger decline globally, disease vaccination rates gain, mass communications tech spread across the poorest nations, and, quite significantly, the income per capita in so-called "third world" nations triple. Most scholars now refer to developing countries as "Emerging Markets" based on double-digit annual per income growth and spending.

Still, they have a ways to go. And environmentally speaking, many African, Asian and South American Communities are at the awkward stage of environmental regulation the USA saw in the 1950s and 1960s, when cars were dumped in American Rivers, and bottle bills were driven by LITTER, not by a heartfelt need to recycle.

There is a reverse normal curve when it comes to recycling and growth of income. Very poor nations recycle the most, because the value of the material is a high wage, they cannot afford to throw it away. In places like Kumasi, Ghana, the metals from cars are segregated into far more categories than an American recycler would ever bother to. 

But when the income of a nation doubles or triples, from very poor to modestly lower class, you start to see disposables being consumed - bottled water in Africa (or plastic bagged) - but not collected. The awkward period when - like my grandparents farm in the 1960s - garbage is being produced by higher and higher levels of packaging, but at best being burned in barrels, and at worst, dumped on roadsides.

And that's what is going on in Emerging Cities, many of which are on the coast, or along one of 7 rivers that dump into the 5 oceans.

Can You Lose 50 Pounds In 12 Months? The Hot New #Clickbait #EWaste Diet!

 Can You Lose 50 Pounds In 12 Months?

Shameless promotion of "e-waist"

Technically, I'm not sure I make it. I've only lost 46 pounds, to be honest (that's strictly going by my physical medical exam, not home scales).

The Editor of Resource Recycling Magazine, Dan Lief*, told me that the staff (Cara Bergeson, Bobby Elliot, Colin Staub, Rick Downing,  Jared Paben, Jef Drawbaugh...) had assigned me a nickname of "Clickbait Robin".  That was a gentle chiding, suggesting that some of my stories - like Retroworks de Mexico, perhaps - were more fluff than substance. Low-calorie fare.

Coming from a journalism family (Dad was Mass Communications Professor at U of Arkansas, his parent and grandparents worked at / owned a County newspaper), I don't take it as an insult that I get my point of view out there any way that I can. Chaz Miller, Jim O'Keefe, Brian Taylor, DeAnne Toto, Rachel H. Pollack, Dan Sandoval, and even Cole Rosengren know that I can be tongue-in-cheek, and deadly serious, at the same time. If you are going to use a weight-loss, or journo name-drop, as your clickbait, you better have really lost the weight, and be truthful if it's 46 (this AM, seems 47 lbs) and not 50 pounds you've lost.

(Mark Hickey at Waste360... have not met anyone there yet, and the trade paper's silence on the controversy over racial profiling of used electronics traders really should be addressed)

#OwnVoices 1: Ten Years of Video of Firsthand Accounts of Secondhand Trade

For over Ten Years, WR3A has been collecting video interviews, showing firsthand accounts by both the Second-hand tech sector and recycling (scrap) sector in places like Ghana, Senegal, China, Cameroon, Egypt, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, etc etc.  There is a new hashtag for this. 

#OWNVOICES. It's  about marginalized people telling their own story, especially when it differs from - or opposes - "their" story as told by big money and charity industrial complex "saviors". 

It is Overdue.  Marginalized reuse techs - labelled "collateral damage" (2013) by Jim Puckett of BAN.org - have to to take the mic.

One huge takeaway from author Adam Minter's visit (his 3rd) to Middlebury last week was his ability to transition the story of Secondhand to "OWN VOICES". Google search top result for definition is a good start:

Open Letter to WR3A / Fair Trade Recycling Interns 2007-2019

Hello summer 2019 team, and past WR3A interns

Thought you'd appreciate this coverage of Adam Minter's new book, Secondhand.  He has already been interviewed by NPR OnPoint and Marketplace, and will be on Fresh Air on Cyber Monday.  The concluding chapters of his book focus on our work, at Good Point, and in Ghana, on Fair Trade Recycling.

This has been a long and steady slog. Adam's research was enormously supported by interns from 2007 thru 2019.  Adam was inspired to write this book at the 2013 Middlebury College Fair Trade Recycling Summit, and the research by interns at Memorial University, Univesidad Pontifica Catholica (Peru), USC, MIT, Middlebury, U of Amsterdam, U de Paul Cezanne, Univ Monterrey de Guadalajara, developed a tome of documentation and research (much of which was consolidated in the excellent 2018 MIT Press publication Reassembling Rubbish by Dr. Josh Lepawsky).

On Adam Minter's second trip to Ghana, he followed up on the fate of the laptop "Junkyard Planet" was written on

Jaleel of Chendiba Enterprises identified a bad video chip, 

Africa is not a Leak in Your #CircularEconomy

The Twittersphere continues to post drama documentaries about Agbogbloshie, illegal dumping, largest e-waste dump on earth, etc.  Just 12 months ago, another European documentary was produced which tries to out-do the outlandish racial profiling that already put Joseph "Hurricane" Benson in prison.  It now has over 1M views.

But there's no title.  No filmmaker.  Narrarator is unnamed. There are no credits. No funding source. No one to ask questions of.  It's an anonymous hit job on Africa's Tech Sector, doing the business of Planned Obsolescence, Big Shred, and Charity Industrial Complex.

Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics, Olu Orga, and the Tech Sector in Ghana still face a European lynch mob... but now the journalists may as well be wearing hoods.  Learning from the retorts to #SashaRainbow and #BaselActionNetwork, the propaganda now seeps through social media without anyone to confront or trace it back to.

Bombshell Interview with Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network - leaked!

Let's start the 2019 Blog off with a BANG.

I have gotten a copy of the ~10 minute interview Jim Puckett did with a documentary filmmaker from Spain, on the subject of Agbogbloshie, Ghana. At the end of the video, Jim evidently didn't like his answers, whips off the mic, and leaves, saying he refused to authorize the use of his video.

He repeatedly used the term "biased questions". As is, is the percentage of bad material imported to Africa 15% or 80%? But my favorite "biased question" is...

"Do you know the name Joe Benson?"

No. That is a biased question....?

????

Someone asks you the name (John Smith, Mary Johnson?) and if you don't know them, is it a "biased question"?

Jim got his wish, and none of his interview made it to the documentary. But I have managed to get a very bad raw copy of it from an online upload site. The clips were uploaded in the USA (en route to Europe), and I have a copy of what the European documentary maker received (but did not use). If anyone is sued, I can testify that I obtained this directly from a third party cameraman hired from Florida, and not from the Europeans.

I will try to get some of this video out this weekend.

Cross Cultural Training in Ewaste #2: IRS FORM 13909

Two NGOs take opposing positions on trade w/ "Third world" aka "emerging markets". What's Tech? What's Scrap? Who decides? Which is a "watchdog"? Which is registered as a "charity"? Who beats up other non-profits?


Ten years ago, the mission of WR3A.org dba Fair Trade Recycling was to vet exporters. And by that we meant to identify USA companies it was safe to export FROM, and not foreign companies it was safe to export TO.

To me, it's an amazingly simple explanation, but it takes weeks sometimes to get it through to journalists and documentary makers.

If you begin with the assumption that the Tech Sector in an emerging market enlists the very best and brightest, the valedictorians, and assume they are flying to purchase something from the Scrap Sector in the wealthy nation - as I did - then the purpose of a civil contract between the two parties is to increase efficient and fair trade.

Earlier this decade [post WR3A California Compromise] we realized that before we could broker loads, we had to first serve the Tech Sector by advocating on their behalf against a very strongly funded defamation campaign. To complicate matters, that campaign was being promoted by "the Left", people who were quite self-certain that they didn't have a single racist idea in their minds.  People who championed "environmental justice" were in fact committing "environmental malpractice", but that was a hard message to deliver.



If I can't fundraise to pay the WR3A credit card bills, maybe we can do the next best thing and "level the playing field". Basel Action Network is registered as a 501-c(3) charity - an organization that attests it does not advocate for legislation, does not perform work to benefit any private business or organization, and provides charitable services.  If reporters are looking for a story, we got another one for you....

Regulatory Gymnastics: Officials' Time Out for Recycling Waste Offset

Hey, just a quick note to those of you who have been asking what the latest is with the Fair Trade Recycling Offsets.  I remain really excited about this.  But we had a little setback which has stalled the project.

Here's the history, the latest roadblock in RED.

1. Fair Trade Recycling started with Purchase Orders and Fair Trade Contracts.  When we wrote down what overseas buyers DID NOT ACCEPT, it became pretty clear very quickly that they were not buying stuff to burn it or to operate a "Pollution Haven".  Someone paying us 10 times more for a CRT than it's worth in scrap, but paying ZERO for the same make and model which has damage (disqualifying it from the purchase order) is presumed to be a good actor.

regulatory gymnastics (Labadi Beach Accra, Ghana)

Everyone Misunderstands China / Global Recycling Chains (#WSJ)

Wall Street Journal and others are running stories about the crash in recycling prices due to China's new import restrictions.  There is a grain of truth to the story, but there is so much more going on that I have to issue a quick explanation [US Recycling Companies Face Upheaval from China Scrap Ban].

It has little to do with the sentiment in China over "western garbage". That trite little meme is everywhere on Twitter.  It's something else entirely.

"IT'S THE MINING STUPID"

(AND FORESTRY, OCEAN BED EXTRACTION, AND CRUDE OIL REFINING)

Nuance Delivery 3: Eyewitnesses To Hell - Oluu Orga

The Agbogbloshie waste site has really become a crucible for examination of the charitable industrial complex. The richer the African city, the more consumer electronic waste it generates.  When I go to Agbogbloshie, I don't see anything I didn't see in Mobile, Alabama.

But once, I thought did.  When Westerners go to unfamiliar places, something happens. We photograph something that seems exotic, and the more shocking and unfamiliar, the more valuable the photo.  It's interesting to contrast our Western photos of Agbogbloshie to those taken by an African who lived and worked at the place. Western photojournalists (e.g. Kevin McElvaney) earn a better living selling their photos if there's a nice Biblical Halloween Titled Hyperbole around them.

In Nuance 1 and 2, we focused again on Awal Muhammed of Savelugu, Ghana, the guy in his mid-20s who figured out that adding more gasoline - literally - to the ewaste (and tires, mostly) burning fire was a recipe for handouts. On my first visit to Agbo in 2015, he certainly stood out. (And he video calls me too often ever since, see last night).

Today, let's focus on an authority, Oluu Orga, who is everything Awal is not. He also came to Agbogbloshie from the North, he also pushed a cart around the city, but he didn't ever learn to perform fire tricks for the Photojournalist convention (which started in earnest a year after Oluu left).

Oluu Orga didn't have much to spend on film, but he took pictures of his friends doing different jobs.

In the mid 1980s, I returned from 30 months in Africa with 7 undeveloped rolls of film. When they were all developed at once, I could see where my priorities had been.  Excited to be in remote Africa, the place I had heard about as primitive and natural and exotic.. many photos apparently were intended to "validate" my time there. More shots of grass roofs than corrugated steel, no pictures of paved roads.  When I went through Oluu's photos of his time there, Agbogbloshie finally got real.

Grasping At Straws: The Net Liability of Extraction

Let's assume that people without a sense of environmental conscience don't spend time on this blog. Longtime readers know that I'm in recycling because of "religious" or "philosophical" experiences I had in the 1970s. In distilling the ethos of hippies and hillbillies (elderly god-fearing folks I also admire), I might have coined a term "Agent of Conscience".

Time to "recalculate the route" of environmental strategy. We know that we need people who care, and we know that it needs to be science based. We hope to develop cures for planet health the way western medicine cured smallpox and polio. And borrowing from the March of Dimes polio strategy, we aren't above using poster children if the timing is right.

First, we need a personal end point or destination, a true north. At least, that's where I started. Without history and accountability and scientific method, Environmentalists will be left Grasping for Straws.  In the big math, the net cost of extraction vs. reuse/repair/recycling, finding novel things to make people to feel guilty about isn't going to get us to our sustainable destination.

Grasping at Straws.... 

CryptoCurrencyBall: Tinkerer's Blessing Moneyball Takes on E-Waste

The previous post basically took MIT SustainAble City Labs and E-Stewards to task for the ill-conceived GPS tracking study that succeeded, mostly, in elevating negative stereotypes about both scrappers and tech sector workers in emerging markets. 

Basel Action Network is trying to monetize tracking of unwitting, unwilling subjects.  I just hope MIT will eventually do the right thing and apologize for its role in using undergraduate students to place tracked devices, disguised as repairable (and in some cases WERE repaired), and associating legitimate overseas technicians with "rice paddies" and "shantytowns".

Now for the positive, forward looking alternative, the Fair Trade Recycling vision.

"Your goal shouldn't be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins... I believe there is a championship team that we can afford, because everyone else undervalues them." Peter Brand, Moneyball

We are working to fly 2 of the brightest LED/LCD/Plasma display techincians I have met in Ghana over the past 4 years to Middlebury, Vermont, to train and interract with Good Point Recycling staff. We sent 2 student interns to work with one of those technicians under the Fair Trade Recycling "e-Waste Ambassadors" program last summer (Middlebury College and U of Florida).

We are going to be card counters at the blackjack table...

And here is a paid Fair Trade Recycling Internship post to bring us there (please repost).

I call it CryptoCurrencyBall...

Reversing ER#3: J-School Background Checks on E-Waste - Benson Released, Rowe Fired?

Here's an interesting statistic on "e-waste" (like most, made up on the spot).  Four out of five journalists who contact me beforehand decide not to run the story on "e-waste" at all.

Reporters are initially attracted to the Basel Action Network's press release or photo opportunity (exotic brown child perched on familiar looking old electronics).  That BAN press release has, for 15 years, triggered interest in reporters and college researchers. An easy story to write, as BAN served "facts" up on a platter.

But Jim Puckett is no Upton Sinclair. He wrote about Agbogbloshie in chilling text - before admitting to me he had never been there at all. He had never even read a peer reviewed article.

The "ewastehoax" says junk in cities across the globe is the fault of "sham recyclers"... if only we use a USA recycling company that pays dividends to Jim Puckett, we will quickly clean these places up.

The Ewastehoax promises a moral lesson of "environmental injustice", and triggers three Steven Pinker-esque cognitive biases:

1. Nurture. We actually care about the poor child.
2. Greed. We suspect someone else's actions were driven by it.
3. Fear.  We are afraid of our own liability for our "stuff".

It's an easy recipe.  BAN isn't the only organization to use it. Annie Leonard, Blacksmith Institute, StEP, R2 (SERI), E-Stewards, CBS 60 Minutes, The Guardian, etc. all followed the trail on these instincts.

If you are a good photographer, that is all you need to put some guy like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson of BJ Electronics behind prison bars.  You can be the reporter that made him sell his house, that cost him his business and his retirement.

You are so cool.  You no doubt picked up all kinds of dates interested in your brave reporting.  Did you tell them about Joe Benson, the Nigerian TV repairman who shipped a TV with a GPS tracker to Ghana? Did you describe the satisfaction of Benson going to jail, like Raphael Rowe of BBC's Panorama did?

Oh, wait.  News flash.  Raphael Rowe got fired? (According to this article, "Pushed Out", but there's still some uncertainty as I research this, he's still on BBC 2 local).  And Interpol has pulled the plug on Project Eden.  All since Fair Trade Recycling's 2015 trip to Agbogbloshie, where we saw a city slum near a dump full of tires, cars, and junk appliances - all once owned by Africans, from a thriving city of millions of consumers.  Even the dozens (not thousands) of (adult) orphans there all carry cell phones, and can send photos of where they collected the scrap... at Accra homes and businesses, which had millions of TVs in the mid 1990s.

Benson may have the last laugh on Raphael Rowe. Though he has suffered, journalism students once attracted to "environmental justice" stories are increasingly documenting "environmental malpractice", "friendly fire", and "collateral damage" to Africa's Tech Sector.

Whether or not Raphael Rowe stays on at BBC, he's still know for having been racially profiled.  As will be Joseph "Hurricane" Benson.  As Rowe said in an interview "bitterness never leaves you".

Reversing Environmental Racism: Owning Your Stereotypes and Profiles

We are on the verge of turning the page on EuroCentric #CircularEconomy.  Several professionals in the European Union (and UK) have understood that Copernicus and Galileo were right, and the sustainable economy does not "revolve around" the OECD.

Five years after the IERC conference gave an Award to Jim Puckett of BAN for his "pioneering and breathless work to prevent the globalization" of used electronics management, the conference has invited Emmanuel Eric Nyalete - a native Ghanaian, Georgia Tech Coder, and former reuse department head at Good Point Recycling - to address the conference and tell them about Ghana's imports from the Tech Sector's point of view.



How did we get here?  And why did it take ten years (since publication of Greenpeace's report on Agbogbloshie) to get experts like Emmanuel, Grace Akese (of MUN), Jenna Burrell, Josh Lepawsky, and others to the podium?  And is it possible that Europe will actually contribute financially to welcome Africa's Tech Sector back to the table, and partner with them to make the world better for future generations of all races, languages, and creeds?

The Fireworks Economy of Agbogbloshie, Part 2

Fire is the dynamic that attracts teenagers and young men to a wire burning site.  Fireworks economy.  Build a bonfire, attract a crowd.  The wages at the wire burning site on the Odaw River are so low because 1) the youth suffer chronic unemployment and, 2) burning wire adds very little value. There less plastic on the wire, which makes it worth a little more, but the clump of wire weighs less, because the plastic is gone.

Who else is attracted to fires?  You got it, photojournalists.

Enter photojournalist #10.

Shin Woong-jae

Shin is from South Korea and came to NYC to study photography, according to his bio.  His instagram and twitter feed was all about wire burning, and I'm sure he's the "China Man" the Musketeers told me about a little while ago.  He seems like a nice guy.  Not a credible scrapyard expert (see Adam Minter or Jon Spaull's reporting for that), but at least gets the jist of the philosophical question of whether photojournalists wars can create "collateral damage".  Seems sincere in understanding the pitfalls of "photographer protagonist".

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.