Fair Trade Recycling [WR3A] Launches "E-Waste Offset" Initiative In Africa

[Middlebury, Vermont May 22, 2017]  Fair Trade Recycling has launched a strategic partnership in West Africa to create capacity for proper recycling of junk "e-waste" devices without impugning, racially profiling, or interfering with the imports of Africa's talented "Tech Sector".

The initiative is based on "carbon offset" models, and is derived from conclusions Fair Trade Recycling representatives arrived at during research in Ghana from 2015 to the present.

Under the new program, African Tech Sector buyers will be rewarded with lower prices for used computers and tech sector equipment they import when they "offset" or "exchange" the tonnage for a similar quantity of obsolete or irreparable electronics taken back from African cities.  The model is patterned after "carbon offset" or carbon exchange models and the recycling training program for the women's collective "Retroworks de Mexico".

For every 50 containerloads of used electronics imported by Ghana's Tech Sector, the reuse shops will take back 10 containerloads of junk TVs and computers which were imported to Ghana two or three decades ago.  And the Tech Sector will pay for proper tools, training and methods - all funded by the profitable and appropriate reuse of newer second-hand products.

The "Agenda Shift" has already resulted in calls from major manufacturers interested in promoting takeback in Africa as a solution to junk buildup.

E-Waste Tolstoy Syndrome: Best Answered by Africa Tweet?

Like the time limits in High School Debate tournaments, Twitter forces us to present a central thesis in a concise way.

This blog has been criticized for being "wordy" or "nerdy" and has certainly often been repetitive.  My "spaghetti on the wall" approach did work, however.  We only needed a small number of the posts to be read by an influential and respected group of journalists, academics, and regulators.

While Basel Action Network is still in the business of demonstrating its "Ayatollah of E-Waste" powers in the state of Washington, bringing its might to bear against Total Reclaim, the "export virgin" it heralded as a model for a decade, they have been completely ineffective at intimidating me.  That's because I'm using scientific method, logic, and transparency.

Collateral Damage 2: Emerging Markets "Informal" Sector Takes sCrap from Shiny Consciences

Collateral Damage 2. Small scale (Informal) repair and recycling of home generated scrap

Several NGOs made "informal sector" a bad word.  Search "e-waste" and "informal" online, and you find that it's a polite word for a lot of pictures of brown people earning a living the way white boy scouts earn medals - by protecting the environment, adding value, and supporting a circular economy.

Infamous example?  How about the COVER photo from the 2015 UNEP Report.  What exactly do you see here?  A lot of people have been hypnotized to see something nefarious going on.  

This is what I saw happening when I visited Chinese buyers more than a decade ago.  It was informal. But it was also sustainable.  The environmental harm of producing chips from mining, refining, smelting, and manufacturing created small integrated circuits worth more than the gold they held in them.  If it was about the gold, the refiners in Japan and Belgium would have no competition here.  What I saw the Asians doing was memorizing each chip and sorting them, painstakingly, according to their reuse value.  

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If my children were born in a poor rice paddy village, and they learned to do this, creating thousands of dollars in secondary market value, I'd be proud.  It would remind me of how my Ozark family went from subsistence farming, no running water, no electricity and no paved roads, to OECD status in two generations.  And no thank you, it wasn't from big city charities.

Fixers do "git er done" in every culture, and often become the founders of the world's most successful enterprises.  They see stuff for what it can do, not for what it cannot do.  They find treasure where others saw trash.

The "informal" market in Asia, Africa and South America isn't perfect, but if you want proof of racism look at the cover photo of the UNEP article and ask how something which reduces carbon, creates wealth, and is a less toxic process than European refining gets elevated to poster child.

Open WR3A Letter to CWIT / @Interpol on #Ewaste

DRAFT OPEN LETTER

Please send edits, suggestions, comments either by commenting under this draft or by email or tweet to yourname at wr3a.org.


Mr. Pascal LeRoy
Mr. David Higgins
Countering WEEE Illegal Trade (CWIT) 


Dear Sirs,

As you may know, WR3A (dba "Fair Trade Recycling") is an NGO business consortium which seeks to support businesspeople in emerging markets.  WR3A offers discounts on the cost of legitimate used electronic devices as an incentive to create takeback and proper recycling channels in those emerging markets.

We appreciate the advance copies of the CWIT literature [links below] which will guide the discussions in Lyon, France, next week.   While I will be in Lyon (previously scheduled) a few days later, I cannot afford to change my ticket.  Worse, the Association has just completed a major field work in Ghana and does not have the resources to bring representatives of Africa's Tech Sector to the meeting.   Therefore I have prepared this letter to convey our thoughts on this process.

The CWIT report contains a chart (from World Bank) showing electrification rates in several African countries.  We immediately noticed that the first statistic for Ghana was incorrect, perhaps because it is frequently updated.   Understandable, since the statistics on electricity and teledensity in Africa are changing at double and triple digits each year.

What we would like CWIT to learn from this is that import of used electric and electronic devices is not driven by European shredding costs.  It is actually driven by this rapidly changing statistic.

Stating the percentage of household electrification rates in Africa without stating the rate of growth can lead to wrong conclusions.   The relatively low percentage of homes with electricity (as compared to the EU) might imply, to some, that the sales of used electronic appliances are less likely to be "legitimate".

In fact, it is the rate of growth of electrification which predicts demand.

In the USA, for example, the poorest parts of the country were the last to get electricity.  When hydroelectric dams came to the Ozark Mountains, my family members drove to cities like Chicago or St. Louis to purchase used appliances.  Memphis, though closer, had a higher poverty rate, fewer used appliances, and more buyer competition.  If you are poor but making progress, your smartest move is to purchase used goods from wealthy geographies.

Similar modelling accounts for sales of automobiles in geographies which were rapidly paving roads (again, the Ozarks is a good example).   The last place to get paved roads had the highest rates of purchase of both new and used cars, and the ratio of used cars to new cars looked very similar to the rates of used vs. new sales of electronics in Africa.

The CWIT Interpol literature uses works like "illegitimate" and "informal" and "criminal" to describe well established supply and demand patterns.  Perhaps when Germany was reunited, the demand for used cars in East Germany and Poland was driven by a desire in Western Germany to avoid the cost of properly recycling autos...  But if Interpol had targeted auto mechanics in East Germany and Poland, it would have been a poor use of limited enforcement resources, discouraged agents of conscience, and thus attracted criminal enterprise to an otherwise mundane exchange of "good enough" products.

The growth of teledensity (internet, television, cell phone) in Africa is a marvelous story, and one written by canny Africans in the Tech Sector.   The best and brightest students are reading tech repair manuals, hacking phones, and finding the cheapest display devices (ones which last 20 years but are replaced in the West after 4 years are a ripe target).

Language with biblical and "halloween" references, and many photos describing "e-waste" businesses, tend to marginalize, exoticize, and otherize these technicians.  The UNEP's recent use of Agbogbloshie photos to describe Africa's Tech Sector was thoughtless and ill considered.  Similar propaganda was used to describe Simon Lin, Terry Gou, Lee Byung-chul, Chung Ju-jung, and others who repaired and tinkered their way into multibillion dollar economies which lifted the living standards of their compatriots in the most sustainable and environmentally sound manner available - through sustainable reuse, repair and refurbishment.   

If Africa is to meet its own potential, mining ores and shredding working devices is the least sustainable path.  But the demand will be met... there is no "Eden" to shepherd Africans to, and no "Sodom and Gomorrah" to take them away from.  It is fruitless and pointless to try to arrest all the geeks and nerds in Africa.  They are too many.  Crackdowns on internet cafe investors have already occurred in Africa, using "e-waste" as an excuse.   As we say in the Ozarks, "We don't have a dog in that fight."

Export for reuse and repair is explicitly legal in the Basel Convention, Annex IX.  The title of the UNEP Report contains a line about "inconsistencies", which describes well the challenges Interpol will face in enforcing EU interpretations which create new interpretations of the Convention, lined against the forces of supply and demand.   We would ask why, when rhino poaching and child labor and sex trafficking and arms trafficking and conflict metal mining are such a blight, Europe would want to add reuse and repair of electronics to the list that only criminals would succeed at.  Africans have real problems.  Reusing goods is not one of them.

Unintended consequences, collateral damage, friendly fire... These have been offered as excuses for false descriptions of statistics for ten years.  We are asking Interpol to suspend the enforcement of Project Eden until you have met the technicians who not only import used electronics, but have raised Africa's teledensity far beyond the wildest goals set by the most aggressive UN ICT or UNCTAD planners in the 1990s.   Decriminalizing things which should not be criminal is the most difficult, but wisest, challenge for regulators. 

Robin Ingenthron

DRAFT


Founder, WR3A
fairtraderecycling.org