"Ewaste Crime in Ghana": Day 4-5-6 Tamale Chendiba

Wahab Investor, and Kamal, Owner - Chendiba Enterprise in Tamale, Ghana

I've put most of this part of the trip into a 12 page chapter which I can't post by blog here, at least not yet.  Here's the rundown.   We were always planning on going up to Tamale, Ghana, in the far north, closer to Burkina Faso than Accra.  But my host, Wahab, was contacted with sad news last Thursday AM.   That morning, his father had passed away.

Muslim funerals don't dally, and we had to drop some plans (to visit MakerSpace in Agbogbloshie on Saturday, and to meet Emmanuel Nyaletey on his flight from Atlanta) and to head north in a hurry.

In a nutshell, Tamale has lots of recycled scrap.  The age of the scrap is proof of the UN 2013 Report that said 85% of the "e-waste" found in African dumps (like Agbogbloshie) was productively used by African consumers for years and years prior to discard.

If that means used goods should be banned, we should consider banning bicycles, used everywhere in Tamale, and imported by the thousands and thousands into Tema Port.   Because after repairing and using and using, they eventually wind up here.

A witches brew of Huffys, Schwins, and Panasonic bicycles

Tamale is very different from Accra.   If it was 1930 in the USA, Accra would be New York City, and Tamale would be Arkansas.   The young men (labelled "scrap boys" - a "boy" term that makes my skin crawl when I use it) burning wire and scrapping metal in Agbogbloshie are mostly from Tamale environs.   We were quite lucky, in fact, to have been brought to Agbogbloshie by Wahab and two of his cousins from the area.   After an initial scowling at the cameras, those young men of Agbogbloshie were engaged in conversation with the three visitors in their mother tongue, and came to shake our hands.

Yin, Yang, Omm Part 1: Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (HR2791)

#FreeJoePenna Blog (one of 8 composed on a France beach vacation 2014)

WR3A became the anti-BAN.  But we have both been part of a Charitable Industrial Complex.

It's like a tug of war over dusty, desolated, impoverished Darfur, a guerrilla morality of ethical posturing.   A war between rich over who gets the rights to the poor's images. 

Poverty and inequality, or the perception of it, is power.  Ask Marxists about how to harvest envy.  The bigger the problem is perceived, the more you can justify meddling and redirecting the marketplace to "fix" the problem.  (appropriate illusion and background music by Brazilian MysteryGuitarMan Joe Penna, below)



There is no denying that there are problems and inequalities in the system.  But whether or not the poor are hurt more by the free market than by BAN.org's efforts to "fix" it, we are contesting a moral high ground which itself has an economic value.  In this series (Yin Yang Omm) I'm attempting to write about how the economically disadvantaged either benefit from the dispute, or from its resolution, or whether they have any interest in it at all, and who-the-heck-are-we in that equation.

In several previous blogs, like Environmental Malpractice, readers get a closer view of what it's like inside the planned obsolescence shredding industrial complex, and how it is driven by white man juju - liability.  The fetishes placed on the secondary market by people "responsible" for the continued life of products they've let go of force many to shorten the lives of the product.  Recycling laws have made it almost impossible to export working assets.  It is taking billions of dollars of USA assets which are wanted by less affluent but rapidly emerging markets, and turning them into toxic piles, and puts people supplying countrymen who cannot afford new product into jail cells.

Reactions to perception of inequality or injustice can drive societies to do irrational things, to burn witches at stakes, ban books, and shred new cars.   Envy can drive liability lawsuits, jealousy can sway jurors... (so Mazda said to heck with it).  That's right, liability for product has created a system which actually shreds new cars rather than punt them into poor countries, and the same system is increasingly positioning itself to shred refurbishing markets.

Through a proposed new law on exports to secondary markets, BAN and CAER essentially propose a paradigm where the emerging markets cheap labor is available to only to corporations, but are blocked from buying their own supply of work.  RERA would allow these people to do warranty repair, and to assemble and disassemble brand name goods, but not to purchase non-working products for reuse, repair or recycling.

The Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (HR2791)   

The Bill is supported by some people I really like. Niel Peters-Michaud, for example, has enlisted himself and his company both with E-Stewards, BAN and CAER, and has also been to Africa and testifies that limits on trade to that continent will produce better results.

"Do we really believe that the dream of someone in a developing world is to process our toxic e-scrap?  I think they would prefer to dream of driving a well equipped Audi." - Niel Peters-Michaud

Before going deeper into the psychology of two white CEOs from liberal northern states arguments over the welfare of Africans, let's look at what a state (California) with a system similar to RERA's has created.  Hint:  no new Audis have been distributed to any African nations.

Geeks of Color in Action - African E-Waste Tinkerer

How to Fix E-Waste in Africa in 5 Easy Steps

StEP into recycling

Here is a roadmap for recycling used electronics in Africa, in 5 Simple Steps.

1.  Correctly report the problems.  

African cities have had TVs and electronics for several decades and generate their own "e-waste".  Most of the "ewaste" filmed (BAN, Greenpeace) at dumps was not recently reported, but "takeback" from reuse markets which import newer product.  We want to further reform the trade, not to nuke it.

2.  De-Criminalize Purchase for repair and reuse in the EU.   

The reuse people are not "going back to Eden" if you boycott them.  They are tinkerers who create good jobs and affordable product in African marketplaces.  We want to improve their jobs, not to nuke them.

3. Use value of exports to incentivize domestic African takeback infrastructure.   

Many Africans who purchase imported reuse goods also do repair for domestic electronics. The abandoned repairs are a form a product takeback infrastructure. In fact, it's EXACTLY the same as the evolution of electronics repair and sale in Massachusetts in the 1970s.   

TV repair shops learned they could make more money if they offered a choice of Retail Replacement as well as Repair, letting the consumer make a choice.  When the consumer chooses not to repair (or worse, asks for the unit to be repaired but then changes their mind and doesn't return for it), the TV repairperson becomes a takeback operation.  When Masschusetts DEP enacted the first "ewaste" law in America (CRT Waste Ban), it was a TV repair family which created the largest TV recycling operation in the USA.  Africa is on the same path.

4.  Recycling, Reconciliation and mass balance.   

Hand-labor recycling is actually cleaner and produces better results than mechanical shredding. Just don't burn the items you disassemble, and recycling is still profitable.  The caveat is CRT glass and mercury backlighting.

Left purely to the free market, Africa will have little incentive to properly recycle CRT glass (the most expensive component).   The value of reuse exports should be adjusted, reducing sale price to Europe or the USA according to the actual recycling and takeback, and should be monitored, or they will accumulate the same CRT glass piles the USA has accumulated.

This system preserves Tinkerer Blessing jobs (compared to StEP's OEM-funded solution).  It will also work in India and other emerging markets.  But there's one immediate step we need to take first.

5.  Where scrap recycling, repair, and refurbishment already exist, nurture it.

Major CRT glass recycling operations have been shut down by friendly fire.    In Indonesia, Malaysia, and Southern China, semiknockdown (refurbishing) factories, glass washing operations, and warranty-repair-turned-takeback operations have been closed.  It is not too late to save repair in Africa.  

As Recycling Director for the Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s, I tried always to preserve existing expertise and infrastructure.   Massachusetts had not prepared Salvation Army, Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul for new freon rules in the 1980s, and created a "white goods" glut.  I was determined not to do that, and we took care of our scrap paper packers, our TV repairpeople, and our charities.   The Massachusetts model of charity partnerships was later adapted by Dell in its Goodwill ReConnect program (I met with Michael Dell and Pat Nathan personally in 2001, suggesting the partnership would take them out of the BAN attack on Dell's Unicor prison recycling program at that time). 

The same partnership approach can succeed in Africa. Rather than demonize, demoralize, insult and ridicule the scrap boys and repair technicians, the entrepreneurs like Joseph Benson or Hamdy Moussa or Souleymane Sao, we need to defend them.   Touche pas a mon pote, E-Stewards.

Africa: The Secret of Happiness Continent

The past month I've spent a lot of time talking about Africa and Africans.  I lived there, and like pal Martijn van Engelen (Netherlands) found people in Africa to be - follow me here - happier than Americans and Europeans, on average.

Mon frere

Some speculate that "Stuff" and "Belongings" make people unhappy.  Many religions teach or preach happiness with sacrifice (which has been depicted, cynically by Marxists, as "opium of the people").  But capitalists marketing that "stuff" will make you happy have even less credibility, in my humble opinion.  Happiness is not related very directly to possessions.

As I describe in my Facebook status yesterday (bottom), I think that defining your happiness according to what someone else has that you are taught (through marketing and advertising) to covet is a major mistake.  Happiness is a skill.  When babies laugh and giggle, their brains are wired to smile for the rest of their lives.

Africa's secret to happiness, perhaps, is people.  Commonly it's a culture of smiles.  People in harsh situations tend to be polite, and friendly, and to help out.  In Cameroon, no matter HOW poor a family was, they fed me (even if I wasn't hungry, they insisted).

I don't think that it is the "stuff" that makes people unhappy.  I think it starts out with how we are raised, with a sense of humor.  And I'm not saying every African has the same sense of humor, or smiles the same.  But the preponderance of unhappy, unsmiling, pouty faces from Africa in BAN's Pieter Hugo poster child campaign is unnatural.

The Economist: Follow the Fixers

From this week's The Economist:  Follow the Fixers

Who to partner with in Africa, if you are trying your hand at business development?

"AS GLOBAL investors salivate over Africa's economic growth, Ashish Thakkar, founder of the Mara Group, explains why success still hinges on local knowledge"

I repost this because it's very close to my takeaway, when I left Africa, thinking "I shall return".   The people who fix things, who tinker, who repair.  They tend not to be liars.  It's not the way a Fixer's brain is wired.

This interview by the Economist with African development expert Ashish Thakkar says much the same thing.

"What do you think is the single most important thing..." to help Africa?

Answer:  People who make improvements.   Follow people who fix things.

"E-Waste" Policy: NGOs Living in an RCA World

"A broken calendar is not as good as a broken clock." - Robin Ingenthron

RCA Emblem - Nipper ponders Obsoete Victrola Waste Stream

Catching up with electronics trade publication reading.  In Slashdot, I saw this article about the possible deathbed watch for Sharp Electronics.  Sharp is still a big producer in the display device field.   From ComputerWorld:

"Japan's Sharp, a major supplier of LCD displays to Apple and other manufacturers, has warned that it may not survive if it can't turn around its business, an admission that caught few off guard.

"The Osaka-based manufacture said there is "material doubt" about its ability to continue operating in its earnings report filed Thursday. Sharp added, however, that it still believes it can cut costs and secure enough credit to survive. Its IGZO technology for mobile displays is likely to be a key element of its business strategy.

"Companies with credit trouble must warn about possible concerns over their survival as part of their disclosure requirements."

Intelligent observers generalize on the decline of Japanese "Big E" - Sony, LG, Sharp, Panasonic, etc., and the rise of Samsung and Korea.  Korea is feeling its oats, in car production and electronics and music.  But how significant is this?  Time for a history lesson on Japanese and American transistor manufacturing.

Presentation at MIT: Sustainability and Tinkerer Blessings

The theme of my presentation at Mass Institute of Technology (MIT) University this afternoon.

It's a class on international development strategy.

It took me back to high school.

This slide explains how I turned from philosophy to scrap recycling.

Recycling goes beyond human health, it conserves energy and resources for future generations.   The opponents of recycling have trouble coping just with the fact that kids they photographed 12 years ago are now adults working in smartphone factories in China, and understanding that Africans began throwing used televisions away 30 years ago.  This is ultimately about whether we are intelligent enough, and care enough, to do things today which affect the generations yet to be born.

Departing Words CES Presentation - "EWaste Not"

OECD is 1/5 of world population, but only 1/2 of sales.  How E-Recycling Opens the Market

Fair Trade Recycling is a 4:1 Friendship

My points on yesterday's panel at CES were that the Geeks of Color, and the buyers in the Emerging / Converging Markets who depend on them, are tomorrow's market. 70% of electronics sales in Africa are used, some of the 30% "new" are actually refurbished cores.

When places like Egypt had a desire for big USA brand names (and aversion to E-Machines), the USA was like Ford Motors, watching new drivers get their licenses and learning to drive used cars.   Ford needs used cars so that people learn to drive sooner and own more cars in their lifetimes.  Similarly, our electronics industry needs the used equipment to give people an incentive to get online, watch programming, etc... which will lead to new markets and sales in the future.

When Egypt or Indonesia bans imports of anything more than 3 years after date of manufacture, it's essentially a ban on all used sales.   Goods are often not sold for a year, and then they are used for at least two years, then it takes months to collect and ship them.

The consumers in those markets are left with 3 choices:

1)  Go without
2)  Buy brand new, with 30% of their total annual income ($3000 per year)
3)  Learn to like cheap no-name, white box, Chinese brands.