"IT'S ALIVE!" Author Stephen King's Personal Vintage FM Broadcaster To Go Back Online In Ghana, Africa

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Vintage Stephen King FM Station Broadcaster “Rises Again” for Halloween—Bound for Accra, Ghana to Champion Reuse & Recycling

IT’S ALIVE!

Middlebury, VT & Accra, Ghana — [October 28, 2025] — In a season made for re-animation, a piece of broadcasting history is getting a second life. A 1980s-era FM radio broadcast station once used by author Stephen King has been recovered in Maine by Matthew Strong, a retired electronics recycler, collected and conserved by Good Point Recycling of Vermont, and purchased by BridgeSolarPower.com CEO Emmanuel Nyaletey of Ghana. The vintage gear will be co-owned by BridgeSolarPower.com and Good Point Recycling and installed in Accra for community programming that spotlights electronics reuse, safe recycling, and circular-economy jobs.

Broadcast Electronics FM10 10Kw FM transmitter with qty 4 4CX7500A tubes

“Finding this equipment felt like uncovering a time capsule,” said Matthew Strong, who recognized the significance of the station and preserved its key components. “It’s satisfying to know the next chapter won’t just be museum glass—it’ll be on the air, creating public value.”

The project pairs BridgeSolarPower.com’s energy-access mission with Good Point Recycling’s fair-trade reuse ethos. “Stephen King helped make Maine famous for stories that travel,” said Robin Ingenthron, spokesperson for Good Point Recycling. “Sending this gear responsibly to Accra—where radio still stitches communities together—turns a great story into a working system. It proves that reuse, when done right, is not a horror show—it’s the hero of resource conservation.”

BridgeSolarPower.com will host the restored studio as part of a public-interest broadcast initiative focused on right-to-repair, safe handling of end-of-life devices, technician training, and the economics of reuse in African markets. The programming will include interviews with local repairers (“the real experts”), call-in shows on product longevity, and segments demystifying environmental compliance and downstream accountability.

“This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake,” said Emmanuel Nyaletey, CEO of BridgeSolarPower.com. “Ghana’s tech sector runs on ingenuity and repair culture. A functioning broadcast studio gives us a megaphone to share practical advice, highlight good actors, and inspire young people to turn reuse into careers. It’s about jobs, access, and dignity—and doing it transparently.”

To Matt Strong, it was not immediately evident that Stephen King’s broadcaster had survived since it was decommissioned.  “When we arrived at the transmitter site, it was obvious that nobody had been there for quite awhile… the door stuck… And as we got it open, it erupted into the Sargasso Sea of ticks. They were everywhere, outside, inside the equipment, and began to crawl all over us!  We all agreed it could be a theme for a Stephen King story.”

The partners emphasized that all international movements are being managed with proper documentation and that the equipment, once commissioned in Accra, will operate as a teaching platform for electronics testing, safe refurbishment, and compliant materials handling. “We want trade readers to see the model: verify demand, document flows, elevate local technicians, and measure impact,” Ingenthron added. “That’s how reuse outperforms disposal.”  The three businesses are aligned under the mission of FairTradeRecycling.org, an international NGO based in Middlebury, Vermont.

Specifications

STEPHEN KING’s Broadcast Electronics FM10 10Kw FM transmitter with qty 4 4CX7500A tubes, one installed and 3 spares (all filaments test good). Complete manual, large box of (new) spare parts, spare blower motor (new in box).  Tuned @ 103.3 (was WKIT in Bangor Maine) 

Made in October of 1987.

About BridgeSolarPower.com

BridgeSolarPower.com develops community-scale energy and technology solutions in West Africa, bridging access gaps with practical, locally serviced systems. The company invests in training, local supply chains, and circular-economy practices to keep equipment in service longer.

About Good Point Recycling

Good Point Recycling (American Retroworks Inc.) is a Vermont-based, ISO/R2-certified electronics reuse and recycling company known for Fair Trade Recycling partnerships and transparent downstream management. GPR supports right-to-repair, technician training, and data-driven environmental compliance.

Media Contacts

Good Point Recycling (Vermont)
Robin Ingenthron, Spokesperson
(802) 382-8500 | press@goodpointrecycling.net | GoodPointRecycling.net

BridgeSolarPower.com (Ghana)
Media Relations
info@bridgesolarpower.com | BridgeSolarPower.com

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Halloween kicker: From the King of horror to the kings of reuse, this station isn’t haunting the attic anymore—it’s back on the air. In recycling, we don’t fear the afterlife… we call it a second life. 👻📻

Interview with Ghana TV Repair Veteran, and Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt

A Great Gift - The Ability to Interview Elders

Why do some of us become very attached to our grandparents, and others of us secretly dread the holiday base-touch?  Why do some of us spend thousands of dollars per year flying back and forth to visit elderly relatives, and others don't bother to make a ten minute drive, more than once a year?

The gift of boredom.  It's something perhaps lost on the current generation of non-fisher, non-hunter (I'm neither, either), non baseball-watcher generation.  The ever-ready internet is at our fingertips. The cell phone has balmed our boredom so thickly that even minutes lead to fidgets.

Will this reduce book reading?  Great books have made me better than who I am. Could I have finished reading them if I'd had internet in the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s?  I appreciate many people who know history and still read books (many far more often than I do). But in wondering at my own weakness for distraction, I fear that great books will not die in fire... but in ice.

Master Baba of Tamale Ghana, retired Tech Sector, on the history of West Africa Television

Help Us Define "Waste Colonialism": Talking Secondhand

Looking for University Research to Help Us Define "Waste Colonialism"...

Robin I

@WR3A

·

2m

Actively seeking university researchers interested in "waste colonialism", or the use of apparently environmentally minded rules to serve planned obsolescence and protectionism. #wastecolonialism #freejoebenson #fairtraderecycling

"Waste Colonialism" comes up in the final chapters of Adam Minter's new bestseller "Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale".  Adam kicked off his book tour at the University of Vermont, in part to thank my company and our global partners for "dropping our drawers" and giving him access to secrets of the trade.

In fact, the next to last chapter is titled "A Rich Person's Broken Thing". That is drawn directly from conversations I had with my Ozarks grandparents, both on the farm as a child, and in long talks with them after I returned from the Peace Corps in Cameroon, Africa (June 1984-December 1986). Adam captured my grandpa Clarence Fisher's anecdotes about when automobiles first came to the Ozarks (his own father had a horse and wagon, and signed his name with an "X"). As many family members were leaving the Ozarks during the Great Depression (along the "Hillbilly Highway"), his older brother, he said, got into the used automobile business. He explained that no one they knew could afford a new car (and the unpaved roads would be heck on them anyway). Used cars were affordable... but his brother's method was to go to St. Louis, Memphis, or Chicago and listen for sounds a car was making when it had broken down or was about to. If you knew what went wrong with a car, what the sound that problem makes, and how to fix it, you could buy the "rich man's broken thing" for a lot less. They'd bring it down to Cedar Valley, fix the car, and flip it for the price of a working used car.

I explained to my grandparents how I'd seen Africans doing that exact same thing. And Adam not only put it in the book, but recounts the tale of Joseph "Hurricane" Benson of BJ Electronics in England, who was sentenced to prison for buying used hotel CRT TVs and selling them to Africa.

Adam shows the wisdom of the African traders, and accepted my challenge, which was to ask why do rich countries (and in particular white people, because Japan and South Korea don't do this) create "rules" by which Africans can buy secondhand equipment?  And when the UK House of Commons reported that the African exports needed to stop - not to "save" the Africans from pollution, but to retain "strategic minerals and metals" for European industry - why did no one from that House of Commons think it worthy to write the UK Barrister who was recommending Joe Benson be prosecuted?

Adam's answer is "waste colonialism". He doesn't use "racism" the way I have in the blog, but he certainly calls out the bigotry involved in confusing (sometimes deliberately) the secondhand (and "thirdhand") Tech Sector with the unschooled wire burners of the scrap sector.

As I said when apologized to 7 years ago, the apology from Basel Action Network should not be made to me, but to the Africans, Asians and LatinX whom the NGO has been racially profiling as "primitives".

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.

Systems Founded in Byproduct Management: Ingenuity 101

Lucid Energy, Stormwater X, Toilet 3.0, and Africa's Tech Sector and Scrap Sector might solve 4 problems with byproduct management.

If you are an agent of conscience, and choose to either be perfect, or become someone guided by perfect intent, you need maintenance. Like a regular teeth-cleaning or oil change, you need to regularly evaluate your interior motives, your pridefulness, your righteous indignation, and cognitive biases.  Preemium primum non nocere.

Like a machine that has been well maintained, you will, through the cumulative exposure and effort towards the improvements you've devoted yourselves to, be in the right place when the right time for an insight, inspiration, or opportunity occurs. If, for example, you care about people living in slums in emerging markets, you might spend years doing Mother Theresa one-on-several assistance, and begin to be inured to the scale of the problem. Keep your ego in check, and your eyes open, because someone else may have a good idea and never have your insight into an application that would "save the world", or your piece of it.

Where is this going? Downhill to the problem, whose byproduct is opportunity

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)

NGO "#EarthEye" Gets OEM Cash for GPS Trackers: Do It Right Dell

Summary:  We applaud the next generation GPS Tracking study - if it's a truly random distribution and random sampling of end points.  It's not the tracking that was bad in 2016, it was the opportunity for bias distribution and biased sampling of end points.  Dell should ask MIT Ethics Review Panel (via legal department) how to do a reputable GPS used electronics tracking study.

1. Randomly track and place all used electronics inputs. That means putting some trackers in 25 year old CRT TV junk that no one imports, some in working product that should be reused, not selectively sabotaging good enough looking stuff internally. 
2.  Randomly distribute the randomly selected used electronics. That means blindly send the goods so you don't send specific selected stuff to a specific recycler.  
3.  Randomly select end point export markets. That means you don't "obscure" good repair markets (cringeworthy 2016 study hid best and brightest in Hong Kong). 

What Dell can Learn from MIT Senseable City Lab "Partnership" with Basel Action Network.

In 2016, Basel Action Network sent GPS Trackers out in the field and provided MIT with a textbook study of how to do it wrong.  Sampling bias, financially involved research team, etc.

In 2018, BAN has announced they have a new partner - Dell.  Above the fold are the steps Dell can take to avoid MIT's mistakes, and do this study right.  I will applaud the tracking if the samples are done fairly, because then they will tell just as many stories about good Tech Sector outcomes overseas, as well as good stuff that got destroyed - not just bad stuff that didn't get fixed.  I'm all for science.

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 #2

This Good Point Ideas Blog has a dandelion in the background.  The wind is blowing the seeds. The image isn't random.

Some people consider the dandelion to be flower. Some consider it a salad green. But many consider it a weed.  Some of my earliest memories of "ethics" were my parents and great aunt's explanations of why I should be careful about blowing on mature dandelions, the "controversy" or "ethics" of spreading the seeds of a flower that will blow onto other peoples' lawns. My parents told me they don't mind dandelions on their own lawn, but others felt differently.  The issue, my dad said, was whose property the dandelion seeds landed upon.

On the first year anniversary of the passing of my dad, William J. Ingenthron, professor of Mass Communications and Journalism at the University of Arkansas (and Fresno State), I find myself reflecting on the dandelion discussion.  I was probably 3 and a half years old at the time, standing on the lawn at Auntie Maude's home in Columbia, Missouri, where my dad was to earn his J-School degree (I do have memories of 2 and a half as well, and possibly earlier).

"That is frowned upon here."

That "frowned upon" expression was expressed to me about 18 years later, when I had just thrown a lit firecracker out of a Carleton College dorm window.  And I did feel a little chagrin about that, though my friend and future Co-RA Peggy shrugged just afterwards, saying "I smile on it".  Using social consensus to define ethics is an interesting tool. Juries do it.  And consensus forms the crucible of the most important theme of this blog - Environmental Racism.  Accidental environmental injustice. Collateral damage. Friendly Fire...

It matters who we ask.  And after about 10 years, the chief "Authority" - Secretariat of the Basel Convention - has recognized that its first foray into screening used electronics sales had not asked enough people about the ethics and effects of used electronics exports. A little pat on the back here - I never attended a PACE meeting. But we were recognized for our contributions by SBC's Partnership for Action on Computing Equipment (PACE)...

The primary comment we submitted ten years ago was that Emerging Markets Technicians (not just regulators) had to be consulted in the drafting of the PACE Guidelines.  If OEMs (Planned Obsolescence), Secondary Smelters (Big Shred), and NGOs (White Saviors) were drafting the rules without consulting Africa, Asia and Latin America's Tech Sector, they were likely to do more harm than good.  As Emmanuel Nyaletey told the IERC conference in Salzburg, Austria, last month (my paraphrase) "writing rules for used electronics repair without consulting with African technicians is like writing a health manual without ever talking to a doctor."  The buyers know what they want, thank you.

Some consider used electronics to be a weed that must be kept on our own lawn.  Some consider them a flower.  And some consider them a source of income, a way to put food on the family table.

Here's an interview with a man, Olu Orga, who started in Agbogbloshie, and worked his way into Ghana's Tech Sector. If the Secretariat or the Basel Convention has something to thank American Retroworks Inc for, it's for keeping the doors and windows open during an echo-chamber of false claims and ewaste hyperbole.  As everyone sought to prove they weren't dumping on the poor, they became ashamed to admit friendships like this, if they were even brave enough to have them.

False Fears

Fair Trade Recycling Launching Ewaste Offset - Countdown in Ghana 2018

Ghana's Tech Sector abandons Environmental NGO "Missionary Position" on imports, launches shipments of junk back to OECD, ton for ton, to offset imports for reuse.

Emmanuel Nyaletey gave an excellent 30 minute presentation to IERC 2018 in Salzburg, Austria 2 weeks ago, where he documented the growth and use and consumption of household electronics since construction of the Okosombo (Volta) dam in the early 1960s (and 4 subsequent dams have failed to keep up with demand since then - see draft presentation on google).

Rather than treat Africa's Tech Sector as "competition for strategic metals", Fair Trade Recycling proposed to organize Africa's Tech Sector to send back one ton of decades-old e-scrap for every ton of equipment they buy for import.

We are now 2 weeks into our interviews with Tech Sector repairers in Ghana, who are enthusiastic about sending decades old waste back rather than "prove" they have the skills to use, sell, or fix the "Stuff" that they buy. We have learned perhaps the most from surviving mentors (original TV repair trainers) from the 1970s and 80s, who shed light on the market for 'home used' electronics, and how it has evolved over 50 years.

5 years of CRTs (imported 10-30 yrs ago) abandoned at Tamale TV Shop