De-Friended Moderates: The Collateral Damage of Cancel Culture

How many times this year have I seen a frustrated political post like this one (on Facebook)?

"If you believe X, just de-friend me now!"

Or this?

"I've de-friended people who continue to post about X, and will do so again"

 As someone who loves a good argument (I prefer to lose, as I learn more when I was incorrect to start with), I have enjoyed parrying with old friends over the past decade. My kids grew up as I did - as critical thinkers - thanks to the habit of always checking {"speed bumping"} their convictions. A lot of this goes back further than my high school debate team. My dad would explain what a "fallacy" was starting when I was 4 years old, and I'd hear him explain it again to my younger brother and then younger sister (so I got it 3 times).

Unfortunately, as Socrates learned, the majority of people prefer confirmation bias, and get irritated if they are on the losing side of an argument. This is playing out in social media, and I'm observing a consequence in "cancel culture".

Thesis: As people click to de-friend opposition opinion, they lose antibodies. Like a too-clean floor (no longer recommended for toddlers), they lack exposure to true disagreement. And consequently, they go after moderates.

{Good Essay by Elizabeth Bernstein in WSJ}

Hans Rosling of Gapminder Recognized

A few years ago my son, then a student at United World College, sent me a link to "The Best Statistics You've Never Seen", a TED talk by Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling.  I shared it pretty widely.  In recent years, Dr. Rosling (who still seemed quite young) was increasingly turning over presentations to his own adult son.  Last Friday, we learned Rosling had died of cancer [NYT Obituary]

Over Facebook and Twitter, Rosling has not exactly been a celebrity like Prince or Bowie, but you start to observe really really smart people are all noting his passing.

Here's a short 2015 interview with Rosling with Engish subtitles.   If you haven't seen it yet, go to one of his longer 2006 TED Talk video in English.



It isn't the 1970s.  It has not been the 1970s for over a decade.  The talk about "third world" and "lesser developed nations" and "primtive" and dystopian descriptions are being kept alive by a type of white nostalgia that seeks to leverage exoticism into a kind of nuture-instinct currency.  I do it even now - returning from Africa I find far more photos on my card of grass roofs than of metal ones.  We are attracted to documenting poverty, leveraging schadenfreude, gaining a fantasy of heroicism in the process.

 "Herrschaftskritischer Ansatz" is another good German expression to describe it.

Here is my observation about how Rosling's Gapminder can bring us together.  Yes, this is political.  The wealthier blue state democrat demographic and blue collar red state demographic are both guilty of portraying the rest of the world as seriously far more "other" than it is.

Five Sources of E-Scrap (ewaste) at Agbogbloshie, Ghana, Africa

I keep having to answer this specific question again and again:

"Where does the WEEE / E-Waste photographed in Africa come from? Wasn't it obviously imported?"

Sure, anything not manufactured in Africa was imported, and Africa has even less electronics manufacturing than the USA does.  But beware the "car waste" fallacy.  Junk Volkswagens at a dealership show trade-ins, after decades of use, not "illegal German a-waste dumping".

Retailers we interviewed in Ghana sell mostly used Western electronics.  They often do repairs, not just on what they import, like a car dealership that has a repair shop (most USA dealerships).

With these interviews in the background, here is a list of 5 Sources of E-Scrap at Agbogbloshie.

1. Exhausted product. For example, TVs imported to Ghana in 1970s, 80s,, 90s that are no longer worth repair.
2. Elective upgrade.  For example working VCRs which people choose to replace with DVDs, due to affluence and declining costs of newer technology (DVD players).  
3. Home Breakage.   Product damaged by electric surges (see reports on Ghana electric grid problems. This is more likely to be brand new product, lighter circuits which can't resist power surges.  It explains why Ghana consumers prefer "solid state" 1990s products.
4. Fallout of recent imports (est. 9% of new and used imports).  "Fallout" is called "breakage and spoilage" in tracking commerce.  A percentage of rice, of cars, of books, etc. always finds damage in shipping or human error.  This includes working goods which sit on the shelf too long and don't sell (and are not re-ordered).
5. Working Refrigerators, Air Conditioners, etc.  New electric standards in place in Ghana are designed for energy conservation.  Older white goods are seized by Ghana customs (working ones which are eligible for subsidy to reduce electric grid demand).

Yes.  There is scrap being recycled in ugly ways (See 2012: Ten Most Toxic Africa E-waste Recycling Practices). But the sources of that scrap are not what photojournalists claimed.

Number 1 is blatantly obvious to anyone who lived in Ghana in the 1980s and 1990s.  Ghana has 21 Television stations.  Most households in cities like greater Accra (4M residents) have had electrical appliances, computers, TVs, cell phones, radios, VCRs, etc. for decades.

2015 Imports

Ghana is generating far more "ewaste" than we can see in Agbogbloshie (which is mostly car and appliance scrap metal).  African consumers, like Americans, tend to believe a 1970s television (which they purchased in the 1980s) is more valuable than it is.  No one in Africa wants to buy a VCR, but the consumer remembers how much it costs.  USA car dealers have these discussions all the time... consumers believe their 1980s Volkswagen is worth more than the dealer does.

Number 2 is the devil wrestled with by retailers.   They must place orders now for something consumers will buy 3 months later.  Retailers can't afford to pay reuse price for scrap... no matter what the continent.  As a result, African retailers wind up with stuff "traded in" or abandoned or not picked up after repair.  Sometimes they made a mistake in importing a device... They order 3,000 large 27" CRT televisions, but can only sell 2,000 at the price they predicted.Number 5 was reported as the largest "illegal" percentage by the Ghana customs agents we interviewed, which are included in the 1/3 of randomly intercepted containers Interpol reported contained some illegal goods.  

The "elective upgrade" also impacts #4.  Consumer demand changes, and sometimes Africa's Tech Sector imports too many Pentium 3s, or non-smart-phones, or older displays.  That's the same as Western retailers who must discount stock and sell surplus.  It's not "wastecrime".  The retailer has already been punished by purchasing something, transporting it, and having to mark it down.

Repair Shop receives TVs imported 1990-2005, most by weight are not recent imports

Agblogblogshie: E-Waste Tsunami Covers Sodom-Gomorah in Understated Hell

Agbog-blog-shie Unplugged:  E-Waste Tsunami Covers Sodom & Gomorah in Understated Hell

Starved of facts and nuance, reports from African city of Accra - found on verge of catastrophe.

[BSNewsire, Accra, Ghana  April 1 2015]

Longtime a skeptic of "ewaste" dumping claims, WR3A Founder Robin Ingenthron arrived in Ghana last Sunday, and was shocked to find the situation far graver than he imagined.

"It began when our Delta Airlines flight was unable to land," said Ingenthron.   "We could see the junk televisions from 4,000 meters above Accra.   They were scattered in stacks, up to 90 feet high, on the runway and tarmac, and along the highway."

The Agbogbloshie dike, which separated greater Accra from the largest collection of electronic waste on the planet, had broken.    Teenagers could be seen pouring out of the Agbogbloshie fences, trying to regather the discarded computers and televisions.  But as fast as the kids worked to burn them, a tsunami of CRT televisions continued to spout through the gates, covering the streets of Accra and stalling traffic.

Ingenthron and other passengers were dropped via small white parachutes, like baby Dumbos, into the zoo of e-waste.  From the ground, the confessed electronics reuse kingpin came face to face with the toxic consequences of his "reuse excuse".

As reported in The Guardian, by Greenpeace, and at weather.com, "millions of tons" of obsolete electronics arrived in Agbobloshie each year.  At 34 units per ton, or 102 million TVs and monitors per year, 279,452 pieces had to be burned each day, keeping the 27 scrap boys who work in Abogbloshie on double shifts.  American households throwing away an average of 2.8 TVs per day are blamed for the mess.  Unfortunately, faced with the relatively small fires and lack of lighter fluid, the scrap boys had allowed a tinderbox of 10 decades of throwaways to amass.

7 Steps To Create a Profitable Hoax (#ewastegate)

No one denies that the volume of unwanted electronic scrap is growing.   Gadgets improve lives around the world.   They don't work forever.  But they often have more than one life.

Display devices (more than half of all the e-Scrap) are like used automobiles.  The average life of an automobile (15k miles per year, 200k miles per car) is about 13 years... some last longer, some shorter.   But the average first ownership of cars is less than 50 months, or about 4 years.    

Some people (with means) like to buy new cars every 3-5 years. Same goes for television and video displays.   Just as the cars roll around for twice the number of years they were used by the first owner, there's a secondary market for TVs, PCs, and their display devices.   

How can a do-gooder create a $3M non-profit out of the used appliance (or used car) market? Two parts White Guilt, one part Exotic Locale Photos, one Fake Statistic.  Print millions, move on. 

For more, visit 2010 "Top Ten Myths of #ewastegate"



1.  Create a fake 'e-waste' news crisis  

Tell all the environmentalists that you have a "dirty little secret"... that most of the electronic material they have brought in to recycling centers didn't really get recycled in the USA, or at all.   CBS 60 Minutes, PBS Frontline, NPR, USA Today, BusinessWeek, BBC will come running to you with the microphone.  You are marketing a believable message to people who are already "activated" on the topic (already making the effort to bring old gear for recycling).

This is key, you aren't trying to convince people to care, you are taking people who already care and convincing them of a scandal.   For example:

BAN's Jim Puckett vs. "Hurricane" Joe Benson

Imprisoned based on fake statistic

Thanks to all for the polite applause and pats on the back as I profile the arrest and imprisonment of an African used goods trader from the safety of my Vermont office.

Many people have told me how "brave" I am to risk offending the Senator Joe McCarthy of E-Waste.

" Never has BAN ever stated that 80% of US e-waste is exported." From NPR.org / fair use.   

One year ago, "Hurricane" Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics was involved in our efforts to get Puckett to actively withdraw his accusations against African techs.  I travelled to Interpol, met Benson in London, and engaged with Puckett (via BloombergView) over Basel Action Network's silence about it's "80%" statistic being discredited in major UN funded studies in Nigeria. Jim Puckett tried to spin the story, claiming credit for what he called the vast improvement in standards of imports to Nigeria.

Outrageous.  The study was the same containers seized from Benson's arrest!  Puckett was acknowledging the quality of the studies funded by Basel Convention Secretariat, but implying the quality of the loads was a result of the goods seizure.  Rarely does an expert get caught so bloody red handed.

Unfortunately for Joe Benson, trade of used goods in Africa has already been tried and convicted in the press, based on BAN and Greenpeace's accidental racial profiling of allegedly "primitive" electronics repairers.

Portions of the Hurricane Joe Benson blog, with quotes from Puckett and from the 2011 report on the findings of Benson and others sea containers are reposted below the lyrics of Bob Dylan's song Hurricane.  It includes a link to an academic article reportedly submitted in Benson's trial, from University of Northampton UK, which quotes Puckett estimating only 25% of exports to Nigeria are actually reused...

Recall also, a year ago, that Puckett and BAN refused to come clean about their "statistics" on e-waste.  "Never has BAN ever said..." etc.  Recall as well that Puckett used articles mentioning Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics by name in his powerpoint presentations, taking credit for the crackdown.

Bottom line:  Africa has enough REAL problems, needing real solutions.  They don't need us to manufacture scandals for them.  (See another old blog chestnut, "The finite world", riffing on Economist Paul Krugman).

"Hurricane" Rubin Carter, memorialized in Bob Dylan's song, passed away two months ago, April 20, by the way.

My point is that I told Jim Puckett, to his face at E-Scrap in the fall, that his stats about Africa were resulting in an Innocent Man's arrest and imprisonment.  Jim Puckett said to me that Joe Benson was "collateral damage".  That's the best he could do.   And now Benson is in prison.

Rubin Carter was falsely tried
The crime was murder 'one' guess who testified
Bello and Bradley and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers they all went along for the ride
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool's hand ? 
To see him obviously framed
Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land 
Where justice is a game.

Motherload Blog Alert: Foreshadowing Karma

My next posting is nearly finished, and it's another college-thesis styled attempt to tie together several themes of this Good Point Recycling blog.

- Accidental Racism, Environmental Malpractice, Environmental Injustice
- Cognitive bias, psychological basis for the mis-prescriptions of justice and intolerance
- Facts, statistics, and environmental best practices
- Geographical and social development forces, from urbanization to 'state-hate'

I'm a little bit afraid to hit the "publish" button, I want to reread it again over the next two days.  But as a preview, here are two links, one to a CNN interview of Harvard bio-psychologist Steven Pinker, and the other to an amazing Singapore-based undergraduate's philosophical blog (pen name Laicite).

In the treatise, I confess to waging war on too many battlefronts, and the psychological toll it takes on our loyal clients, staff and supporters of Good Point Recycling.   I read an essay by Alexis de Tocqueville on the weekend, and will use the specifics of the Vermont "state-hate" phenomena to shed light on broader truths for the environmental movement.

The blog begins in Singapore, takes a random wander through Vermont "e-waste", touches Lord Chris Smith (UK Env Minister) and Interpol, and ends in Africa.  Environmentalists and bible belters, regulators and entrepreneurs, can all be excellent people, and still wind up wringing collateral damage out of distrust and shame.   The way out is an exercise in leadership, requiring both humility and certain direction.  We evolve to accept differences, to defuse state-hate, and wind up with fusions and Gangstagrass.  

If you don't want to read Steve Pinker, de Tocqueville, or Laicite, I'll assign the pilot episode of My Name Is Earl., something of a transition from the recent "cultural gulf" theme, a very humorous USA television program I just discovered a couple of months ago.

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Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets #4: Just the Facts M'am

Why did Africans, Latin Americans, Mid Easterners, and Asians purchase used computer monitors between 1995 and 2010?  Because marketplaces (mostly urban, where electric grids develop first) earning $3,000 per person per year constitute most of the growth in Media Consumption (internet, TV, and cell phones).   The measure of cultural gulfs is streaming music.  Here is an analysis of photos shown in the Guardian, examined under the light of facts about computer displays.

From 2004 to 2012, Ghana's number of internet users increased tenfold from 1.7 to 17 (per 100 residents).  As a percentage of world GDP, Ghana improved, but still remains a work in progress.  Poverty levels remained at 28.5% the year before 2007, when the internet exploded in Ghana. But that was a reduction by half (from 51.7% poverty in 1992 to 28.5% in 2006), and progress must be recognized.     

2006 was when Jim Puckett and I met over export policy in Africa.  It was still an amicable relationship then, and I was very polite in the back and forth with NIH author Charles Schmidt (Unfair Trade E-Waste in Africa) that year.  Eight years later, a lot of data has surfaced, but in the Western Press, the song remains the same.  From The Guardian (2/27/2014), "Agbogbloshie:  the world's largest e-waste dump - in pictures" circulated the Twittersphere.

Exoticization of rag picking, at its finest.  "Other-ization" as my wife (a Francophone African Studies professor at Middlebury College) describes it.

"Largest E-Waste Dump in the World" - Accidental racism at The Guardian?  or just sloppy?

As it turns out, that @Guardian story came out the day after Good Point Recycling's head technician, Eric Prempeh, returned to his home country of Ghana for three weeks of family reunions, and a side helping of research on the state of electronics reuse and repair.  How will the Guardian's portrayal of African recyclers in "primitive spear-handling poses" compare with a professional technician's findings?

E-Scrap News 2/28/2013 |
Good Point Recycling of Middlebury, Vermont announced one of its technicians is headed to controversial e-scrap hotspot Ghana to try to help determine how much of the material dumped at crude processing sites there is actually imported from outside Africa. Eric Prempeh, the technician, is originally from Ghana and will be back in his native country for three weeks. Good Point Recycling is associated with Fair Trade Recycling, an effort that aims to promote responsible export of used electronics so that the technology can benefit individuals in developing nations. 

I've been somewhat guilty of fighting fire with fire.    Emotionalized responses to the Basel Action Network's depiction of Geeks of Color were, in no small part, out of the guilt I feel.  I was wrong for handling Jim with kid gloves in the Charles Schmidt interview.  Letting Jim ride roughshod resulted in the arrests of "Hurricane" technicians like Hamdy Mousa and Joe Benson.  It was the beginning of a firehose of disinformation in support of planned obsolescence, and "big shred".  The #ewaste hoax campaign was directed against smart people emerging from poverty.   With skills and brains, these geeks of color were supplying products for the "good enough market".  For E-Stewards "certification" payments, thirty pieces of silver, BAN.org sold Big Shred a story against the reuse competitors.   BAN successfully monetized the hyperbole.  It's my fault. 

Yep, it's my moral responsibility to be mad about environmental malpractice.  However, ranting isn't music to many peoples ears.

Ducking the Dunning–Kruger Effect (Part 2)

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.^[1] Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding." - wikipedia (see date of blog post)

From EWaste Whiplash II:  calculator ju-ju

Does this mean that any observation of poor performance is mistaken, or incompetent?  Of course not.  If I'm truly an expert in the geography of central Cameroon, I may well know more about it than the average Mbawa tribesman who has not gone to school.  If you are the most knowledgeable mechanic in your town, you will recognize a "hack".

It just means hacks are bad judges. (you can quote me).

The USITC / MIT study on "ewaste" used surveys to leverage estimates, as predictors.  Respondents were asked to respond to questions with estimates on KNOWN statistics, and the higher the score of the respondent to the undisputed questions, the more weight their estimates of unknown statistics was given.  The best and highest scorer on the MIT survey, of the X00 respondents, based on answers to the known questions, was given an Amazon gift card.  (Ahem, cough-cough, I used it to buy a new camera for Eric Prempeh, our head technician, born in Accra).  The Dunning Kruger effect does not state that opinionated people tend to be ignorant.  Rather, it states that ignorant people tend to be opinionated.

Bullyboy 7: The Great Cabbage Farm vs. TV Repair Controversy

If you do an image search for "cabbage worker" on Bing or Google, you can find a lot of very interesting, very different photos, spanning a great deal of time.  Cabbage is eaten in almost every part of the world.

Well, it's interesting to me.  Let me explain why it's related to "E-Waste" exports in general, and Joseph Benson in particular.

You can search "African cabbage farm", or "Guatemala Cabbage", or "Chinese cabbage harvest", or "Russian cabbage".

Want to guess where the cabbage photo to the left was taken?  Florida.

There are some Australian aborigines cabbage worker photos from a century ago, and there is an ocean of cabbage photos on alibaba.com.  Dried cabbage, chopped cabbage.  

There are workers clinging to the sides of a moving cabbage truck in Guatemala.  There are workers dressed in white smocks and moon suits in the Czech Republic.

I was searching "cabbage" on alibaba, and searching images for cabbage, because I wanted to find something as boring and non-controversial as... television repairman.

Africans, Chinese, and Latino workers who head to the Bright Lights, Big City places like Lima, Cairo, and Joseph Benson's Lagos, are usually making a choice not to do something.  They don't necessarily know what jobs they'll find in Accra, Kinshasa, or Dakar.  But they don't expect to grow cabbage, or tubers, or sugarcane, or cotton.

"Ag Flight".   It's basically exactly the same reason the USA cabbage farms import migrant labor from other countries.  

I've got rural, subsistence farming roots.   Three out of four of my grandparents lived on subsistence Ozark farms, and remained in farming until the 1960s (fourth grew up in journalism, and as a child of someone in the Indian Service).  Agriculture's an honorable profession.

I was told the easiest thing to grow, if I chose to be a farmer, was probably cabbage. Cabbage is pretty virulent, cabbage crops can survive temperature disruptions.  You won't make a lot of money on cabbage, but barring an Oklahoma dustbowl storm, you are unlikely to utterly fail.  As I looked down at my grandpa Fisher's cabbage row, I thought it was the dullest, most boring thing in the universe.

Had Joseph Benson been a cabbage farmer, he would not have been the center of a sting by Greenpeace, Basel Action Network, Cahal Milmo (Independent), or BBC Panorama.  Unfortunately for Benson, he invested in a different job abandoned by white people - one exoticized to titillate environmentalists.

Television repair.

FIREHOSE Statistics on Exports of Used Electronics

"The majority of refurbished products stem from imports via the ports of Lagos. The interim
results from project component 2, the Nigerian e-Waste Country Assessment, show that 70%
of all the imported used equipment is functional and is sold to consumers after testing. 70%
of the non-functional share can be repaired within the major markets and is also sold to
consumers. 9% of the total imports of used equipment is non-repairable and is directly
passed on to collectors and recyclers."

- Final report of the UNEP SBC, E-waste Africa Project,  Lagos & Freiburg, June 2011 

Right wing think tank?  Protectionist industry study?

"9% of the total imports of used equipment is non-repairable and is directly passed on to collectors and recyclers."

No.  This is from the two year study of the Basel Convention Secretariat, one of the several listed at the UNEP and Basel Convention site.  " Informal e-waste management in Lagos, Nigeria – socio-economic impacts and feasibility of inter-national recycling co-operations"  And it is not a typo.  Thats NINE PERCENT, not 90%!

Ok.  It's not perfect.  9% of the used electronics purchased by Africans could not be reused or repaired, and that's a lot of waste.  But is it bad enough to ban exports?  

Take a guess what new item store returns are for product sold in California?  11.9%

That's right, dear readers.   According to the National Retail Foundation, store returns of merchandise sold in California is nearly 12%.   Now, no doubt some of those returns are "buyers remorse", and the NRF estimates that a certain percent is return fraud.  But that's retail, it doesn't include damage in shipping... or static damage discovered before the goods are sold, or are pulled from the shelf because of high returns.

Here are the statistics of the percentage of electronics which are damaged by ELECTROSTATIC charges upon import to the USA.   From ESD Association web site:

“Despite a great deal of effort during the past decade, ESD still affects production yields, manufacturing costs, product quality, product reliability, and profitability. Industry experts have estimated average product losses due to static to range from 8-33%. Others estimate the actual cost of ESD damage to the electronics industry as running into the billions of dollars annually. The cost of damaged devices themselves ranges from only a few cents for a simple diode to several hundred dollars for complex hybrids. When associated costs of repair and rework, shipping, labor, and overhead are included, clearly the opportunities exist for significant improvements.”

So damage to new electronics is estimated at 8-33%, and store returns in California are 11.9%.   And Ghana and Nigeria studies found loss or damage of used product to be between 9% and 15%.  

AND HERE'S the killer.   At the Vermont Fair Trade Recycling Summit at Middlebury College, I learned that brand new product - the ones Africans can afford, cheap stuff from China - fails at a higher rate than used goods!   The Ghana and Nigeria study never tested the new product, so there's actually not even a control group... but the Africans who came to the Summit said there's much less risk to buying used American  name-brand electronics.

Based on the firehose of disinformation hurled at Africa technicians, the statistics above aren't ever considered.  Basel Action Network fabricated, hallucinated, or otherwise made up the only statistic Interpol needed to arrest and seize the goods of 40 African electronics businesses in the past 6 months, 240 tons of affordable computers and televisions purchased by Africans for resale in their cities...

And now, without further adieu, here is today's press release from our friends in Seattle Washington.  Click below... hear how Puckett describes the "reuse excuse", those nasty, polluting, toxic African techs.  From the source of the "90% of Africa Imports are Primitive", here's a report from the Basel Convention.... which leading up to the Fair Trade Recycling Summit, is leaning our way.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Term Paper: Poorly Defined Problems, Rules, and Bias

The Term Paper Theme in the blog (past 3 months) has been a real stretch.   I'm just not able to write a Ph.D thesis from the coffee lounges of hotels, at least not writing which is accessible to non-academic readers.   But I write on.  If there is something "breaking" I think industry should know, I promote it so it gets the 500 page reads.  But the goal is not to have every post widely read.

The biggest problems in the E-Waste and WEEE research-osphere have been from documents like West's of MIT which are written densely but don't define what they are researching sufficiently enough to escape the gravity of bias against trade between Rich and Poor.  Two examples in the past 4 months actually reprint the "80-90% export to primitive recycling" statistic which even BAN.org has abandoned after the UNEP duplicated previous research (Peru) showing only 15% of the exports are for primitive recycling.

Why the stubborn belief that Externalization of toxics from rich to poor describes most of the trade?  In my previous "@term paper" blogs I showed how enforcement does police higher property values, which is why you can't mine gold in the Cleveland Heights OH... and I've written how ROHS inadvertently externalizes a very very small risk (leaded solder) from rich people landfills by destroying coral reefs and creating more toxics in Indonesia (where tin, the non-toxic replacement, is found).   Externalization does happen.  But the fact it happens should not make it believeable that poor people in developing nations pool their money to buy  e-waste and pay thousands to transport it across oceans, through customs, to burn it.

My company ships TVs to our Fair Trade Recycling operation, Retroworks de Mexico.  We pay the transport there.  But that is rare.   Most exports are paid for by the buyers.  We've pretty much proven they have no interest in the junk (unless it's mixed in as TAR), that they have high reuse.  But even a big name consultant like DSM Environmental reprints the fake 80% statistic in a report less than a month ago.

Why the persistant belief in false risks?   Muggings do happen in Harlem, but 80% of Harlem residents are not muggers.  Today's thesis:  Opinion favors the concept of "underdogs".  That is probably genetic ("won't someone please think of the children").  And it is marketed to by all sides, conservative and liberal.  People are more likely to interfere in the marketplace if they believe one of the two parties is an underdog.

Case Study:  Arkansas vs. Florida, Maryland vs. Duke (NCAA basketball)

Humans have an innate or genetic trigger to prefer "Underdogs".   I explained to my youngest son last night why his older brother and I were rooting for Maryland in the final minutes of the NCAA game vs. #2 Ranked Duke.   I'm a fair weather NCAA basketball fan... when my hometown Arkansas Razorbacks beat previous #2 Florida a couple of weeks ago, it got my attention, and I started watching games again.

Export Trade Bracket:  The Externalization Tournament

TIME OUT: Free the Geeks! Release E-Stewards Rules!

In reviewing Parts 2 and 3 of the essay "Environmental Malpractice", I'm a bit stumped... because I don't know what the "Practice" E-Stewards requires actually IS.

E-Stewards markets itself as being superior to R2.  But R2, the Responsible Recycling standard developed by environmental organizations and EPA, is PUBLIC.  They have their document up for 2013 compliance changes, and are soliciting comments this month.

There is no similar public comment period for the E-Stewards Standards, and in fact you have to pay them money to see the rules, and agree not to republish them.   "Licensing" the path to goodness, it's a remarkable cause.  It's kinda now, kinda wow, kinda 1400 AD.  Just which "Madonna" are we talking about?

If there is a way to heaven, and you demand donations to tell the secrets that will free me from hell, just how noble is your cause?

FREE THE GEEKS!!!!!!!!!!

UPDATE:  Following this publication, we received news that Joseph Benson settled his case, after 3 years defending himself in court, for 11,000 British pounds.  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/owners-and-employees-of-a-string-of-waste-disposal-companies-fined-over-200000-for-exporting-dumped-electronics-to-the-developing-world-8386688.html

100 Years Ago, before USA was OECD

Emailed from my mother in the Ozarks.  Great grandfather Freeland bought her property in 1908, then bought a used printing press and started a newspaper (Taney County Republican).

At the times William Freeland wrote his daily news columns, here is what the USA was like.  Today, more people have electricity in the non-OECD than in the USA during my parents childhood.

Here are some statistics for the Year 1910:

************ ********* ************

The average life expectancy for men was 47 years.

Fuel for a car was sold in drug stores only.

Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.

There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower 

The average US wage in 1910 was 22 cents per hour.

The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian

between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births took place at HOME.

... more

Making Statistics Up as We Go: Philippines ewaste

Typical Video Pronounces Export Data, MIT Announces Data Research Effort.

During the past decade, whenever someone was asked what percentage of "e-waste" is exported to "poorer nations" (the 6 billion people in non-OECD), they could pretty much say whatever they wanted.  It didn't even seem to matter that the same person asked gave a different number each time.

In an interview, Ted Smith of SVTC says 90% is waste.   BAN says 80% in other reports, but in this video BAN is quoted at 50%.   The video elsewhere says 30% of used electronics exported are "e-waste"...  (Perhaps it sets up the title, as ewaste goes from 80% to 50% to 30% before our eyes...)

Video "The Vanishing E-Waste"Complete video is below the fold.  I'm finding that video embeds are blocked as many institutions and offices.  When I put something from Youtube, even documentary, it causes the whole page to be blocked for some readers.  So here's a hotlink above, and the video is now embedded "below the fold".youtube 11:15

Actually, I like the video, it's fair and moves the conversation forward.   Would like to talk about the "las Chicas" and Fair Trade alternative with the producers.   The video documents that most of the "e-waste" comes in for reuse (the "bad" are residuals or exhausted after years of use), and that the USA and EU are far smaller a percentage of imports than Asia-to-Asia trade.  Unfortunately, it dwells entirely on the bad apples, and therefore arrives at "prohibition" conclusions.

This hospital-via-morgue (start at landfill) is typical of activist image management, and the images this video captures are not atypical of what I saw in China in 2002.  Of course, I also saw extremely good EOL recycling and reuse operations, and took photos of both.  The concept of Fair Trade is not to ban exports, but to build financial incentives into the trade so that the legitimate sales leverage the creation of a proper end-of-life recycling stream.   This video tends to concentrate on the bad side, what it calls the 30%, which everyone knows I'm fatigued by.  And the worst shots are still better than metal mining and smelting.  But this is what we need to clean up with Fair Trade Programs like ours in Mexico and Asia.

As far as data and diagnosis over the statistics (vs. poster children), how can we move the dialogue forward?

EPA and MIT [correction will SOON release] have released a plan to research and obtain real data.   What will be difficult is to get exporters and importers to share what they are really doing during this period of "green scare", Senator Joe McCarthy, rabid accusations.   Even E-Stewards and R3 certified companies have accused each other of exporting plastic from shredding to the "wrong" places in China.

Basel Convention vs. OECD Convergence: Export Facts

WE ARE THE 17 PERCENT.


The worst recycling practices in the world need to be cleaned up.  R2 and E-Stewards, along with different state and federal stewardship laws, create a space which Moral Recyclers need when there are tough choices to be made on recycling price points.

I agree with Basel Action Network and Computer Takeback, at least half the time.   We agree about the situation of the poorest three billion people, or half of the six billion people who do not live in OECD countries.  Lead poisoning of children is not a myth, it's a heartbreaking environmental crime.

This is why I'm so upset to see my friends falsely accused of causing it.  Good exports are different than bad exports.

Rationally, let's look at the numbers.

"Non-OECD" does not mean "primitive". It's 83% of the world, and 50% of the world economy.  I am a staunch defender of geeks and technicians who happen to live in "non-OECD" nations, who operate impressive repair, refurbish, contract manufacturing, elective upgrade, white-box manufacturing facilities, which create sustainable economies and internet access.

1. Half (50%) of the Global Economy is in Non-OECD countries.
2. Of OECD raw material exports, about half (50%) are mined ore and timber.  Half are recycled.
3. Of the recycled portion (including e-waste), it is alleged that 80% of sales are to 83% of the world's population.
4. During the past decade, growth of internet access in the non-OECD nations grew at ten times the rate as OECD nations.  They need the monitors, even used ones, for video display.

So OECD exports 80 percent of its used monitors (either shredded as raw material, or for reuse) to this 83 percent of the world.   The surprising thing would be ...anything else.  The non-OECD nations are growing, projected to be 60% of the world economy by 2030.   They are younger economies, which have less scrap and more virgin land.  Internet there is exploding.  The older economies have more scrap, and less mining and forestry as a percent of their economy.

Poisoned children in Guiyu China is not a scam or a hoax.  The hoax is that E-Stewards lends them a dime or does anything to help those children.  This is not a beauty contest, where the NGO with the most heartfelt answer gets the contract.  Fair trade recycling means locating the people doing fantastic things, like IFIXIT and WR3A members, and giving them incentives and compensation to create sustainable comfort and prosperity.  Boycotting 83% of the world because the worst 30% of the world is so, so, so sad... It's not a final answer.

And the worst recycling, even in Guiyu, beats beats lead mining in Kabwe. We have to let the developing world reuse and recycle, while giving them the financial incentives to do so in a safe and clean manner.

Fair trade is a real methodology for dealing with e-waste, based on data, trade. We don’t address “primitive” recycling practices in one area of China by boycotting the best recycling practices in the world in another part of China, or another country.

One man’s opportunity for exploitation is another person’s chance for cooperation. The ban on interracial marriage was also a bad idea,no matter how many pictures of unhappy marriages the opponents take. Love will conquer all. And I love the geeks of color in the converging economies of the rapidly developing world.

(Reprinted in Motherboard.tv   More stats below)

Why WR3A Certification (2007) Woulda Shoulda Coulda

R2 Certification and E-Stewards Certification Growing Pains:  Been There.

silver label for working, repairable, scrap, and dumping

The crybaby e-scrap companies, the public outings of single export loads, the fees to see non-published standards, the waffling by EPA over which standard to endorse... It's a category killer.  The public already discarded ewaste once, and is bound to lose interest if we don't prioritize our goals.   This week someone I know in our business got confused and thought a company in Chicago was "under indictment" (he got confused over the Executive Recycling Colorado indictment).  No, having BAN publicly end your application to be the best company ever does not result in prison.  What my friend's confusion illustrates is the perils of using "certifications" as a substitute for rule of law. We are all attracted to the idea of a simple solution to a complex, robust, multi-niche industry.  As the developer of an earlier fail-to-thrive certification program, I know.