CAER is Wrong About E-Waste. Nice, Just Wrong.

Coalition For American Electronics Recycling (CAER) writes:

"We believe that currently about 80% of electronics claimed to be recycled in the US are really just “packed and stacked” into shipping containers and exported.  Aggregators of used electronics work through brokers to ship equipment overseas and get paid pennies per pound for this mixed assortment of electronics. We see solicitations from these brokers all the time.

"If this bill [HR2284] passes, we don’t expect it will completely shut off improper exports of used electronics, but we contend it will flip the equation so that 80% of electronics are processed in the US. Based on our experience, we create at least 7 jobs in refurbishment, demanufacturing or material processing for every job involved in packing and stacking electronics for export. This would lead to tremendous growth in the American electronics recycling industry through existing and new businesses.

CAER is full of good companies.  I'm not attacking those companies, I'm defending my friends overseas from their defamatory statements.  Just want to explain why these statements, on their website, are mistaken.

Since new e-waste blogger JHop has thrown his hat in the ring (comment on CAER report blog from January), we now have dialog.

The two paragraphs above are full of misinformation.  Perhaps, with the qualifier, "We believe", they can say whatever they want.  But no one in our business can really believe this.  No E-Waste Broker Fairy is transporting 80% of USA's used electronics in "stack and pack through brokers".

Impossible.  Here's why:

What is the #1 component of E-Waste collected in USA Programs?

TVs.  Big CRT TVs.

Show me a "stack and pack" operation exporting a significant number of TVs.   There is NO WAY that you can achieve 80% of USA E-waste "stack and pack" without the massive deportation of used televsions.  EPA says we are generating 50,000 used TVs per day.   That's about 100 containerloads per day... 80% is 80 sea containerloads per day, of JUST TVs.

No one at recycle.net, Alibaba.com, Exporters.com.sg, etc. is "packing or stacking" a significant number of USA's TVs.   I know of 2-3 used television buyers, but they are not buying 80% of USA e-waste, and they are pretty small operations and very particular of the TVs they buy.  The ones in Africa generally want very small TVs only (like the ones in Gentleman Jim's photo of Joseph Benson's containers), or very nice (e.g. hotel-takeout) TVs like the ones shrinkwrapped in the Greenpeace video.   AND NOW THEY CAN BUY THOSE USED CRT TVs FROM ASIA!  The USA isn't even a major export player anymore.

E-Waste Watchdog "Basel Action" Re-Publishes Discredited Data

Basel Action Network publishes another press release that another liberal California city has adapted their "E-Stewards" label, committing to using only companies which pay a percentage of their revenues to the Watchdog.

Notable is the following reprinted statistic:

Placentia, California Joins Effort to Tackle Electronic Waste

E-waste is the world’s fastest growing pollution problem. According to Time Magazine, Americans throw out more than 350,000 cell phones and 130,000 computers every day. Approximately 80% of electronic waste currently delivered to recyclers is actually exported to developing countries. Improperly disposed of, the lead, mercury and other toxic materials inside e-waste can poison workers and pollute communities.

The stastistic in red was challenged in this blog in 2010, and the original source of BAN's statistic came forward (via comments) that the statistic on exports included clean steel, baled plastic, copper and other items - i.e. inert items, and the same materials produced by E-Stewards.

At the time of that blog, the ASU Study (Williams/Kahhat) had been published finding 87% of computers exported to Peru were reused.    Since then, a much larger study by UNEP (2011) found that 85% of the electronics imported into Africa are reused.

BAN also buried its own study from Kenya which estimated that 90% of the material was reused.

What's at the dumps?  According to the United Nations and everyone else, the dumps in Africa are full of e-waste generated by Africans, and the dumps in China are full of e-waste generated by Chinese.

80% of the material at the dumps does NOT come from imported waste.
80% of the material exported is NOT toxic waste (it includes reuse and clean steel).

Cleaning Up #EWaste Madness Mess

STORY:  Africa turns imported electronics into hundreds of millions of dollars in jobs.


BLACK HISTORY MONTH.... The point has been made.   The anti-export, e-waste watchdog organizations were fueled by an intoxicating certainty that globalization was "externalization", and that world trade is inherently suspect.

They created a fake statistic, out of very thin air, that 80% of the "ewaste" in the USA is exported, and that 80% of the imports into places like Africa were junk.   The math failed on face value, but the images of "scrap boys" banging metals apart carried the day.   Splitting copper from steel in motors was mysteriously labelled "toxic".

Despite my best efforts, in posts like "E-Waste Madness 2010", "We Shouldn't Have to Make That Choice 2009",  and Motherboard in 2011, the "Ewaste police" gathered steam.  I took arguments I'd made in trade print in 2002 (Recycling Today, "Setting a Higher Standard") and used the pulp blogging to document the innocence of the Geeks of Color.  Sometimes I wrote with facts and statistics, sometimes with reason, sometimes with literary allusions aimed at the higher education field, sometimes in other languages.  Sometimes I really stuck my neck out and named influential people who should know better, like Donald Summers, Josh Mailman, Solly Granatstein, and Terri Gross.   Sometimes, I use video and tweets.  But perhaps the most important efforts have been to document the actual trade, and fight the fraudulent statistics with real numbers, examined by grad students and professors in several continents.

E-Scrap News is the first major newspaper to call a duck a duck.   The stats on imports into Africa were fake. Basel Secretariat believed them, and sent researchers, and found ... exactly what I've been describing, in posts like Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo.   The UN found several hundred scrap boys in dumps.  But they also found, shocker of shockers, 30,000 repair and reuse techs, producing value and internet, the exact same way as Singapore, South Korea, and Benjamin Franklin got started.  Buying surplus media production (display units or printing presses), and making them "good enough" for the "good enough market", creating sustainable jobs with added value.  Had CBS 60 Minutes spent one more day in China, and followed the film I'd given them, they would have seen the same thing.

So now what?  Will the E-Waste Madness now end?