When Basel Action Network shows a junk television at an African dump, and then accuses African traders of doing mysterious favors to avoid UK or USA's recycling costs, it hits a chord... with people who have never lived in Africa.
If you've spent time in Africa, you know the real problems in Africa are things like TRAFFIC JAMS.
Multiple reports show that most of Africa's e-waste is generated by Africans. Cities like Lagos (over 15M inhabitants) have televisions and computers and cell phones, have had them for decades.
And it's a good thing. People are much more likely to get their electronics from repair and reuse, which creates sustainable African jobs, for geek entrepreneurs, than from new tantalum mining in the Congo or tin mining of Indonesian coral islands.
And it's fundamentally good. That's why it's so criminal for UK's Environmental Agency to put the Geeks of Color, like Joe Benson, in jail.
From 2010 to 2014, Africa's Internet usage increased by...
5,219.6 %
Here's a link to da stats http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
15 Reasons to Free Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics, falsely convicted of "e-waste" crime.
REMINDER: JOE BENSON, AN AFRICAN BORN TV REPAIRMAN, REMAINS IN JAIL IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, CONVICTED OF TRUMPED UP "E-WASTE EXPORT" CHARGES.
I will repost this soon with hot links to the trial documents, hopefully by this weekend.
1)The Guardian, Murdoch's SkyNews, BBC, Economist and Independent (2012) Newspapers all reacted to public statements by Lord Chris Smith's environmental agency that exports of televisions and computers for repair was "against international law".
2)The international law in question, the Basel Convention, specifically describes this as legal activity and does not ban reuse or repair, only dumping. (LCS may be referring to a proposed amendment to the Basel Convention which has not been passed or ratified. Violating a proposed rule is not a crime!)
3) The allegation made in court against the expat trader to Africa ("Hurricane" Benson) relied on "statistics" about the likelihood of dumping, provided by Greenpeace and the NGO Basel Action Network. Both of these organizations have been quoted by LCS and by the press, stating that "up to 80%" of what the African traders ship to Africa is destined for primitive recycling. NOW THEY DENY SAYING IT! That's right - nothing was found "dumped", but based on BAN.org claims, Benson's prosecutor said it was "LIKELY" dumped, and he was put in prison based on "likelihood", given BAN's statistics.
4) The photos these organizations (press and NGOs) use to make the case are taken at the city dumps of huge cities (Lagos, Accra). According to the World Bank, these countries have had millions of televisions in use for decades. The number ofNigerians with personal computers? 12 Million. The UK and "Project Eden" depict Africa as if from Disney's "Lion King", while Africans are dealing with their own growing piles of e-Scrap, cell phone towers, and massive traffic jams.
5) Photographs of junk Toyotas in London or Lagos do not prove Japanese guilty of wastecrime, and photos of junk TVs at Ghana landfills do not prove the Trader violated any laws or shipped any junk. Africa has been "rapidly developing" for decades.
6) During the widespread reporting that exports of used electronics to Africa were mostly junk, the Basel Secretariat and UNEP participated in a two year scientific analysis to research containerloads shipped from London, including many by the accused Nigerian expatriot in prison. Examination of hundreds of Sea Containers found 91% of product was useful - better than brand new product sold in Africa! MIT, Memorial University, Arizona State, USITC, and other studies all confirm the "ewaste" import statistic (80%) was a hoax.
7) Evidence presented in the UK court trial included no such test for repairability, or even tested the equipment in the containers, relying on "widespread knowledge" disseminated by Basel Action Network (repeated by Lord Chris Smith). (LINKS COMING THIS WEEKEND)
9)"Hurricane" Benson is in jail, despite no evidence of a crime, a trophy on the wall for #wastecrime enforcement. Benson's guilty plea was admitted at the end of a long appeal, when the judge had admonished him, and he was offered a commuted sentence (16 months rather than 60) only if he accepted a guilty plea.
10) The cost of shipping 500 televisions from London to Lagos or Accra is higher than the cost of recycling them in the UK... The entire "waste export" (for avoided recycling cost) theory was never tested and is mathematically impossible... it can be disproved with a simple review of Benson's receipts and costs of shipping.
11) Pages and pages of individual brands and models listed in the African traders containers in Benson's court records show relatively new units, hand selected. Who writes down the model number of a TV before they burn it??
12) The World Bank statistics on households with TV in use in Africa (e.g. 6.9 million households in Nigeria as of 2006) cannot be explained via new unit sales, and offer proof that past imports were not "mostly waste". There were not enough "new" TVs imported to explain World Bank's households-with-TV statistic.
13) The argument that "even working televisions will one day become waste" is true of brand new computers, cell phones, and TVs, and reflects a colonialist regulation. We do not restrict ourselves from importing new devices made in Asia until we have a recycling system for them in the USA.
14) Planned obsolescence and non-tariff barriers applied to the secondary market is an old trick. Recent investigations by the US International Trade Commission found absolutely no evidence of the 80% waste export claims, and no evidence that "waste" shipments to Africa were common.
15) The NGOs which raise money on the photos of children posed with E-Waste do not share a dime of the donation with the children. Rather, they seek to put the kids parents in jail.
Quantitative studies supporting Benson: 15. Evidence of Wrongdoing?: 0
Lord Chris Smith is probably not a bad person. Jim Puckett isn't a bad person. They are just wickedly late admitting they were WRONG about the "e-waste" hoax, and at this point there is an innocent man in JAIL and all I get from Basel Action Network is a statement about "collateral damage". E-Stewards have to demand this be fixed, Chris Smith needs to look at the references to his quotes in Benson's sentencing and make some calls to get Benson out of there.
Blacksmith Institute has, in 2015, abandoned it's "ranking" of "top most polluted sites", but only after offering legitimacy to the BAN fake and disavowed statistics about Agbogbloshie. The year Blacksmith listed Agbogbloshie at the top of their Top Ten List is the year Joe Benson was locked in a United Kingdom prison cell. #SHAME ON MY ENVIRONMENTALIST TRIBE.
Africans and other "geeks of color" see this as just one of many racist, colonialist, poverty porn, planned obsolescence driven acts by Europeans and do-gooders. It's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
The place has grown since I lived there in the mid 1980s. My wife is back in Yaounde again, and just shared the photo below by Facebook, the view from her hotel.
One thing is the same. Electricity. Yaounde had electricity when I arrived in 1984. And had the first television broadcasts by the end of 1986 (showing Alex Haley's "Roots" in English to people who didn't speak English... it was awkward).
So, since television stations started broadcasting in 1986, not even counting the CRT televisions people had to watch VCR tapes with before that, how many "e-waste" televisions would you expect to find in the Yaounde dump in 2006?
If you can count over 12 of them in the Guardian's "e-waste Chernobyl" photos, how long were the twelve TVs sitting there on the ground? Is it so difficult to image the city above can generate as many TVs as the town of Middlebury, Vermont? Don't the statistics from the UN studies start to sound less crazy? Doesn't it start to make sense that it's only 9% fallout (unrepairable, tossed) rather than 80%? If it was only 20 percent reuse, how many containerloads of TVs would they need to set the city up with television? Or maybe, that's not the point. "Back to Eden Project".
Ah! That's better! That's the way Europe likes to remember Africa.
No TVs, no radios, no computers, no hassle. A tropical paradise.
Now, cue the crouching children. Oh, shoot. No crouching children in the rain forests. They are still crouching at the city dump.
Pictures of Africa suitable for Europe? Picture this: African kids playing free vintage games on used CRTs. And no, they cannot hear our healthy "tsk, tsks" across the Atlantic.
The Woman Behind the Clown Honorary new member of Chicas Bravas. Lucy passed 25 years ago. Sunday AM tribute in the vein of "Cultural Gulfs", and how urban USA markets create an incubator for diversity and equality to triumph in. USA television became a vehicle for women's rights, cultural integration, and spawned a "Star Trek" culture where the vision of the future is cooperative diversity - the exact opposite of Hitler's Nazi Arian monoculture and Sharia etc. Thanks, Lucy. (PS: Funny, I wrote and posted this without even realizing it was the 25th anniversary of her death, I was just inspired by laughing at a rerun of I Love Lucy, and started blogging..."Like laundromats heros are sometimes right under our noses"... written with no clue she's on the cover of Huffington Post today)
Hispanic husband 6 years younger? So?
Rising on my list of heroes. Lucille Ball. An honorary Chicas Bravas.
Hardest working woman in 1950s showbusiness.
Lucy's insistence on better quality led to invention of live studio taping, multi camera editing rooms. She and Desi negotiated to pay (rather than network pay) for the higher quality in return for the first "syndication" (rerun) ownership rights of their own I Love Lucy show, a smart move that paid for their own studio. She strong-armed Hollywood into accepting America would accept a bicultural husband-wife sitcom, and carried the ball.
What brought them down? Divorce didn't help. But according to this article Lucy got leveraged on production costs for these weird expensive production shows... Star Trek and Mission Impossible - which all the other studios had passed on.
She was scorned by many older, more powerful, Hollywood men. A real glass ceiling pounder. If we had had stronger womens equality in the 50s and 60s, and a kickstarter campaign, Lucy would probably be bigger than George Lucas.
Another Desilu production passed over by bigger Hollywood Studios? Carl Reiner's Dick Van Dyke Show, which I grew up loving. She sold Desilu to Gulf and Western in 1967, which combined it with Paramount pictures, a studio G&W bought a year earlier..
And I would add that it was Lucy who muscled in the inter-cultural marriage which made Loving vs. Virginia, the Supreme Court case legaizing all interracial marriages, easier for America to swallow.
Really, you should be watching this in a room with Joseph Benson and Eric Prempeh, Nigerian and Ghanain TV repairmen, and Cees van Engelen, Therese Shyrane, and David Higgins of Interpol, in the same room.
This would make it clear to everyone why the Africans should be arrested for buying used televisions from Europeans. The screen curvature (R4) is Sony Trinitron, by the way. #Ewaste #e-waste, WEEEWaste "This is what an Icelandic Poet told me once... You shouldn't let poets lie to you"
That Exotic Africa, the "Back to Eden" goal, the backwards Heart of Darkness, in need of the Great Green White Father to rescue them from their primitive E-Waste "e-waste hell". Ok, this is not just another insult blog. This contains some really terrific leads for academic researchers who want to publish something new about "e-waste" exports. I have some very new and interesting leads below.
I'm fooling around with some background research, looking at the growth in number of households in Nigeria which have televisions in use (World Bank), the number BAN and ITC and UNEP say are imported, the percentage of sales which UNEP says are used/secondary to new.
Guess what? Yet another data point. I don't have time to really polish the argument below, but it adds up to about 85-90% reuse.
The growth in the number and percentage of Nigerian households who own TVs correlates to two things:
the number of units entrepreneurs like Joseph Benson shipped there (BAN, UNEP, USITC)
the growth in use of internet and TV use in Nigerian households (World Bank)
the percentage of e-waste from Nigeria's own cities (UNEP)
There's nothing exotic going on here. The "Great White Father", Jim Puckett, acts like some kind of a "no dancing dad", an Environmental Fundamentalist from Footloose II, a back-to-Eden, anti-growth, anti-globalization preacher, who has a right to point fingers at free market traders who obey the Basel Convention - which permits export for repair, something Jim voted against and lost. BAN adorns its NGO website with fire and brimstone photos of poor kids at dumps, and says those photos trump the data.
J.Lepawsky photo, Accra (property of ... African)
But all the data is adding up to the same thing. African cities are getting electricity. Africans are moving closer to the city, where the electricity is. Africans growth of internet and television use is exponential, much greater than the growth in OECD. The growth is high where per capita income is $3000 per year, a market which cannot afford brand new equipment. The brand new equipment sales in Africa are rife with ESD (electrostatic discharge) failure rates, as faulty equipment in new packages finds its way to countries with lesser warranty law enforcement. And the per capita generation of "e-waste" grows in these countries, along with the growth of the internet.
Hardly a case for the arrests of Hurricane Joe Benson, Hurricane Hamdy, or Hurricane Chiu. Link to Cahil Milmo and BAN, months before the sting by Milmo on Benson. Follow up by Milmo, crowing over Benson's conviction of exporting TVs for dumping and burning.
UNEP found containers like Benson's, analyzed during his trial, were 91% reused... a higer reuse rate than brand new product. The rest of this blog shows how World Bank data could have exonerated Mr. Benson, and disproven BAN's "Digital Dump" allegations, without even the benefit of the UNEP sampling.
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.
Except the premise "to be stripped of valuable metals in grim conditions, by children" is completely false. That allegation was presented to the UK Independent by Basel Action Network (first link). It was disproven by UNEP. Like a modern day Mockingbird Robinson, Joe Benson has given up on the trial process. Below, I provide hard evidence that BAN's "statistic" was false to begin with, and allege that our society would never have taken the accusation seriously in the first place if the trade in used TVs was between two white men.
That's a day in the life of reporter Adam Minter (who has recently finished his upcoming book, Wasted, at Bloomsberg Press). The photo below is from one inland city.
Adam verified with me (prior to his post) that this is not a certain inland city I know of (which does import CRTs, via inland routes from Viet Nam). No, these are Chinese brand, Chinese generated televisions from Chinese homes. Which isn't at all surprising when you have been to cities - cities in Asia, South America, and Africa - which are full of millions and millions and millions of people generating their own "e-waste".
Some of you may remember one of my more shocking discoveries from my trip to South America last spring. The old reuse market which used to buy USA used TVs was still selling used TVs - marks from China. By commingling their own used ("waste") televisions in a container, China made the new good-enough LCDs they manufacture affordable in smaller, less-than-load samples. It had nothing to do with China exploiting Peru environmental standards.
I'll stop and let you cruise over to Shanghai Scrap to read Adam's post. His conclusion was that the process he witnessed did a darn fine job of recycling the televisions. China has developed a way to manage it's own e-scrap. That's what we need everywhere that imports, exports, or grows their own electronics. A ban on trade just doesn't make any sense at all.
It has the metals, the flame retardants, all the chemical composition of the E-Waste you have read about. Eight pounds of lead in the glass, phosphors, copper and other non-ferrous metals.
In addition, it has live current running through it, posing risk of electric shock. Yet many seek to call it a "commodity", not governed by e-waste regulations.
This device even emits signals intended to change the way you behave. It will try to alter your voting and purchasing patterns. It has been blamed for an epidemic of obesity.
The television in your living room, your bedroom, or kitchen... have you looked at it closely? At what point is it the most dangerous of e-waste? While it's lividly emitting sound and signals in your living room, or when it's safely unplugged in your garage?
It has always been "think about the children", perhaps.
Programming was made for children. OEMs used it to sell the appliance to the parents.
So, the electronics get sold to us via "cognitive risk" - that our children will be left behind socially and intellectually if they don't get the electric gadget. Then, if we sell it for reuse (so someone doesn't buy a brand new one), we are sold the cognitive risk the "e-waste" poses to the poor black children.
It's all about consumption, selling consumption any way they can. We own stocks and retirement IRAs in their corporations and can't complain too loudly about the way they market sans sustainability. And ENGOs are really not any different at all in their use of this "think of the children" marketing. But we can be smart about what panics us.
I'm from the WWF generation - that's "World Wildlife Fund". That's when Greenpeace was powered by Jacques Cousteau, and caring about endangered species and whales. It's a dicey topic to debate which we should care more about - whale, tiger, orangutan, and rhino extinction vs. toxics in a child's environment.
But let's start by being smart. What are the real numbers? What are the real risks? Is this about children's health, or is it about planned obsolescence? Look at the enormous resources spent on non-toxic ink cartridge refilling. Grinding those cartridges into pieces of plastic to be plastic-recycled in China is a lot worse of a job than refilling those ink cartridges with new ink for the "grey market". But look at the attention given to ink cartridge refill risk vs. plastic recycling.
Vegas revolves around retro. The music, the games, the restaurants, the shows... ISRI's conference recycled themes and images of good enough days.
This was the electronic woman known as Xenon, the newest pinball game at the Carleton College Sayles-Hill student union. The arcade was nicknamed the "Peter Tork Memorial Game Room" for Carleton's most famous drop-out, Peter Tork of the Monkees band. Xenon was hilariously erotic for a pinball game... "the game with the sticky cover". The bumpers caused the robotic woman to exhale "Ahh!"..."Ahh!-Ah.. Ah-Ah!" as the steel pinball zigged around the slope of play. If you lit enough of "her" lights, um... something spread itself and you had to shoot the ball up the hole for a climactic free game (It was "Special").
At the same student union post office, I got my Peace Corps assignment for Cameroon (1984). In Africa, there were home-made "pinball" games (non-electronic). The nails and springs and wooden pegs were, I guess, "primitive" compared to Xenon. And there was an overall assumption pervading Africa that they were incredibly far behind the USA in technology. This was 1984-86, before the personal computer or cell phone (they had bag phones in limos in the USA back then). Today, Africa is far more wired than the USA was when I lived there... but as Louis CK describes in his Conan O'Brien interview, "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy" (and if you haven't watched that yet, yes it's more insightful than this blog, go ahead and follow the link).
Electricity in households in Africa has grown at a slower pace than television and internet. Once you get access to energy, you have lots of things to plug into it. But in the 1980s, TVs in Cameroon were extremely rare. If the Mad Men Show "The Fog" was having difficulty understanding why black Americans in the 1960s were buying "Admiral Brand" televisions, it was not as difficult to figure out why Africans were choosing used TVs from the USA and Europe. It was that or nothing, and the amazing thing was the TV or the internet, not the shape of the bloody display device. Once someone has a choice, getting picky becomes and option. Reminiscing about retro is, in part, having common experiences with a generation that had fewer choices to stray from.
Below is what Americans were watching on their TVs when Cathode Ray Tube display devices were first being MASS introduced in the mid 1950s. Technically, the first distribution was in the 1930s (boum, boum, below) - but there was an interruption (World War II, boum boum) during which sales of TVs in the USA and Europe stopped. The TV mass market sales resumed in the late 1940s. When in 1951 the "CBS Columbia" TV was priced at $499.95, people thought it controversial that white Italian American Frank Sinatra was singing a duet with black Ella Fitzgerald (Moolight In Vermont).
(the video of Moonlight in Vermont was removed by youtube... I liked the showing of interacial singing... but maybe this replacement 1951 video will stand in)...
If today the developed nations are saying that Africa and Asia is not as far advanced as the USA was in the 1930s, 40s, and 1950s... boum boum, I beg to **** differ.
If the developed nations are saying that, in hindsight, TVs and CRTs should not have been introduced into our nations, and we are trying to save Africa from our fate, then we need a single, simple, logical example of a TV "e-waste" disaster here in the USA. Who was poisoned by the television? Who died? What is the USA equivalent of the "most toxic place on earth"? And did the pollution generated by TVs in the 1950s outweigh the image of Ella singing with Frank on TV? That would be the case for sacrificing internet in Africa to stop "digital dumps".
The entire case against reuse rests on false data - that 80% of the exports are NOT reused or repaired, but are primitively burned in witches brews and caldrons by black and yellow children. Residue, yes... but 80%?? This is complete and utter malarky. One would imagine a dump in the USA somewhere has resulted in someone in America being harmed since 1938. The only Boum, Boum was in the sound system.
