Bullyboy 4: No Habeus E-Waste Corpus, And curious retraction

Too bad Interpol and the UK authorities didn't consider how easy TV repair was.   Two years after Export-Hoax-gate (see BAN's Night of Breaking CRT glass, Environmental Malpractice, and Clubbed to Death Blogs), Intercon police are still seizing African's containers, presuming the electronics were waste.  Like a parent taking toys out of a crib, the paternalism of the "Project Eden" (putting Africa back the way it was?) stands opposing the African Revolution, the Arab Spring, the democratization which flows directly through used display devices like twitter to teenagers.

The two "root causes"?  BAN made up a fake number, and rich countries know so little about electronics repair that we make museums about it.  "Once upon a time, we replaced capacitors too, honey".  Fixing things is so "hunter gatherer", it seems to belong in a stoneage village.

Meet the other side of the table.  If you live in a place, like Lagos, that still does a lot of electronics repair, you wonder why people don't ask you how to repair the TV they seized.  That's what the UNEP study finally did - and discovered 91% repair and reuse in Lagos.  But it was too late for Joe Benson.

Here is a minute of Joseph Benson, describing Bullyboys in his own words.



This is about power.  It's about BAN and Greenpeace showing they are watchdogs.  They follow Saul Insky's model, enforcing their vision of segregation of trade, in a weird money-making way.  This is about paternalistic decisions about who Nigeria or Ghana, Africa is allowed to trade with.  Is Africa to be denied the path of development followed by South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia?   Or is Africa going to be relegated to mining raw materials for our new electronics, a resource-curse economy?  After Indonesia, Africa is the next battleground for Good Enough Markets, Tinkerer Blessing, and Resource Curse.

Puckett told me that - even if his math was wrong (It's 91% reuse, NOT 80-90% dumping)-  that the "law" was violated ("a technicality" he says justifies Benson's arrest).   What, exactly, is the crime the Africans are accused of?   Dumping?  Or like the Michigan case, is there some other technicality?  The facts of the case are like background music playing over a slide show of Pieter Hugo exotic photos.  The audio doesn't fit the video.

More cross examination:



Now, had Sky News or BBC or PBS or CBS etc asked Joseph Benson some questions, would they have still had a story?   Or would they have a lot more work?   Would Green and Thompson E-Waste Export Bill have been drafted?   It would have at least been Jim Puckett's word that the exports were 80% bad, vs. Joe Bensons.  Now they have the UNEP studies... but don't seem to be revisiting the story.

And they don't seem to have noticed the stealthy retraction two months ago, BAN back-stepping away from the initial accusation.

"Despite your reading diligence however, it is unfortunate that you did not start by questioning the baseless assertions made by Adam Minter in his reckless article.   Never has BAN ever stated that 80% of US e-waste is exported." 

http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2013/05/basel-action-network-explains-80-or.html

Bullyboy III: Meet The Real Environmental Criminals

"The Perfect should not be the Enemy of the Good."   My first face-to-face with Donald Summers (the guy who told reporters I lie through my teeth), ended on that note, and Donald said it first.  We must prioritize our environmental issues, not based on the money and attention they bring our environmental organizations, but on the risk and harm.

When I met the head of Interpol's "Project Eden" in Lyon, France, last Monday, he had just returned from a trip to Sri Lanka, where 300 elephant tusks were seized.  Cees described his feelings, seeing the tusks there, and imagining the scale of the slaughter.

And toxic waste dumping in Africa is real, too.   Here is a 2006 story about a Dutch shipping company which dumped tons of highly toxic waste (from the cleaning of sea ship gasoline tanks) - the Transfigura Ivory Coast case was settled for $45M, thanks to a Dutch Court.  Amnesty Inernational and Greenpeace did important work.  The money is actually being distributed in Africa, not used to fund NGO offices in Seattle.  WR3A's attorney/stagaire, Fred Somda of Burkina Faso, was the first to make the point that planned obsolescence campaigns by OEMs should not distract from serious need for enforcement of the Basel Convention.

From Wikipedia 2013.07.28:

"The 2006 Côte d'Ivoire toxic waste dump was a health crisis in Côte d'Ivoire in which a ship registered in Panama, the Probo Koala, chartered by the Dutch-based oil and commodity shipping company Trafigura Beheer BV, offloaded toxic waste at the Ivorian port of Abidjan. The waste was then dumped by a local contractor at as many as 12 sites in and around the city of Abidjan in August 2006.

Ivory Coast kid poisoned by Trafigura - photo Al Jazeera

The gas caused by the release of these chemicals is blamed by the UN and the government of Côte d'Ivoire for the deaths of 17 and the injury of over 30,000 Ivorians, with injuries that ranged from mild headaches to severe burns of skin and lungs. Almost 100,000 Ivorians sought medical attention for the effects of these chemicals.^[1]

The substance was claimed by Trafigura to have been "slops", or waste water from the washing of the Probo Koala's tanks. An inquiry in the Netherlands, in late 2006, revealed the substance was more than 500 tonnes of a mixture of fuel, caustic soda, and hydrogen sulfide for which Trafigura chose not to pay a €1,000 per cubic metre disposal charge at the port of Amsterdam. The Probo Koala was turned away by several countries before offloading the toxic waste at the Port of Abidjan.^[2][3]

Fifteen people died, and thousands were treated.   We don't want to forget how important it is to truly enforce the Basel Convention, when someone is avoiding the true cost of disposing toxics by dumping it in sacks on African shores.  We do not want to label environmental watchdogs and enforcement agencies as "bullyboys".

At the Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit, Frederic Fahiri Somda made a clear case for the risk and danger of dumping toxic waste in Africa.  But he also said it's absurd to compare TV repair to Tranfsigura.

Bullyboy II: Meet an Innocent Man HR2284

At the Las Vegas E-Waste Summit last November, Jim Puckett of BAN and I each gave presentations on the export of used electronics for reuse and repair.  Jim's powerpoint had a slide showing this UK Independent journalist's (Cahal Milmo) 2009 article on the arrest of "Nigerian Exporters".

Milmo took a 2013 victory lap recently, alluding to his role in the 2009 seizures of Benson's electronics.

"Owners and employees of a string of waste disposal companies have been fined more than £200,000 following Britain's largest investigation into the illegal export of toxic dumped electronics to the developing world.

"The eight men, whose firm’s operated across the country, were found to have been at the heart of a lucrative trade which sends tonnes of waste computers and other consumer durables to west Africa and Asia every year to be stripped of valuable metals in grim conditions, often by children.

"One of the company owners, Joseph Benson, whose BJ Electronics toured civic waste sites picking up electronic goods to be sent illegally to Nigeria from east London, was convicted following an investigation by The Independent, Sky News and Greenpeace."

Puckett (a former employee of Greenpeace in Europe) showed the article in his slide show between photos of kids at dumps.   I raised my hand and asked him why he was applauding the arrest of Joseph Benson, when the UNEP found Benson's containers to be 91% working?  Puckett said "I don't know that name".   I referred him to his own slide.  And reminded him afterwards.  People have names.

The Independent and Sky News coverage would have been ludicrous, except for the pictures of children burning scrap in horrid conditions. The NGOs said that "80%" of the imports of used electronics in Africa were dumped, burned by "scrap boy" children, in primitive circumstances.  (Sky News is owned by Rupert Murdoch... they cut a copper wire in a TV, gave it to Benson, and tracked it to Lagos, then bought it for 70 British pounds, and showed the cut wire.  My 11 year old could fix that TV.  If they think there is $107 in copper in a junk TV, have I got a deal for them).  (Correction:  I confused the Sky News TV with the BBC Track My Trash TV.  Sky News removed a part and bought the TV back for 40 British Pounds, about $62.  BBC cut the wire and bought their TV back in Lagos for 70 Pounds or $107).

The UNEP study showed that most of what the kids were burning was sourced from waste generated in Lagos.  Nigeria had 6,900,000 households with tellies in 2007 (World Bank).  The used electronics trade was already decades old, and was responsible for the development of communications infrastructure in Africa.   70% of all purchase of electronics in Nigeria, a nation of 170M, are used goods sold by people like Benson.

My first meeting with Joe Benson (Environmental Malpractice 6.1) in London was just a few days ago.  Unlike other factories and traders I've written about, I had never met, never sold to, bought from, or spoken with Benson.  This was a cold call.

Like the character Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, Benson was at first awkward and not very talkative.   Like Robinson, Benson seemed overwhelmed by the system of accusations leading to seizures and fines, without assessment of the veracity of the allegation.  Another recycler, clubbed to death in 2010.

My pidgin English is very very rusty, but I opened with a few words in pidgin just to hopefully make Benson and his three friends know I was a different kind of environmentalist.  That got a chuckle, but fell a bit flat, and we resumed the conversation in Queens English.