RobinRobin Haiku: Recyclers Are The City Blacksmith

Recyclers Are the City Blacksmith - by RobinRobin


Guiyu's not dumping
Harvest IC chips - it's smart
Imperfectly wise

Hong Kong's not dumping
Monitors Rebuilt TVs
Re-manufactured

Agbogbloshie films
Capture urbanization
City waste, recycled

Teledensity
Demand for education
Mankind makes cities

Rapid city growth
Is dirty, unlike forests
But melds womens rights

cont.

Fair Trade Recycling's 2020 Vision for Agbogbloshie Ghana

2020 Vision

In March of 2020, five years after Fair Trade Recycling toured Ghana, a thriving refurbishing, assembly, and recycling operation exists.  Chendiba Recycling Enterprises, headquartered in Tamale, has hired most of the Ghana scrap workers who previously hung about Agbogbloshie looking for copper on a barren and charred landscape.  The recyclers have uniforms, appropriate tools, and safety training.  They offer tours of the recycling operation to Western university students, reporters, regulators and photographers.  Visitors are housed in a new affordable housing complex, erected where the slum was bulldozed in 2015.  This “urban eco-tourism” has created opportunities for economic migrants in Accra, and also at similar “recycling parks” in Tamale and Kumasi.

Transforming attitudes, not Africans

The recycling staff are overseen by Technicians of Chendiba Enterprises, a computer, cell phone and television "R and O" (Repair and Overhaul) operation.  Chendiba was nearly shut down by misdirected environmental enforcement in 2015.  Happily, Africa’s “Tech Sector” workers are now recognized as the best and brightest of Ghana’s economy.

        “We would no more boycott the Techs of Agbogbloshie than we would a manufacturer takeback program,” said a spokesperson for an environmental NGO, who is taking university surplus property officials on a tour of the grounds.  Referring to the past decade of boycotts as “collateral damage” and “friendly fire”, the NGO leader now promotes a “Hurricane Joe Benson” scholarship to bring students from around the world to see “win-win” in action.  "The Tinkerer's Blessing" is seen as the best, most sustainable economy in emerging markets - the opposite of the Resource Curse.  Africa's geeks add value to e-scrap with their minds, and use the profits to clean up Africa's own recycling yards.

Environmentally and Economically Sustainable

The program is funded not only by the environmental tourism,  but by the very import-for-reuse economy once targeted by anti-globalization NGOs.  Chendiba is now the leading importer of, and recycler of, flat screen LED and LCD televisions worldwide, and employs hundreds.  “While the major cause of waste generation in Europe and the USA is physical screen damage, Africa’s flat TVs most often suffer from blown boards due to ‘fuzzy current’,” explains Muhammed Odoi. “We import and part out the TVs and use them to provide affordable parts in Ghana.”

The Fair Trade Recycling program does not need European customs agents or Interpol staff to interfere with Chendiba’s imports.  It encourages the import and export as a "value added, job creating industry".  Asked whether the parts are “properly tested” in America, African regulators now shrug.  They explain this recycling system is based on “carbon trading” models.  “For every ton of electronics we import to Ghana,” explains Muhammed, “we collect and recycle two tons of old electronics from Ghana’s cities.”  

Opportunity vs. Embargo

        The Fair Trade Recycling program has been much easier to monitor and enforce than "PAT tests" (which never accurately predicted African consumer demand or shelf life) or traditional "certification" programs.  The Chendiba traders order and buy what they want.   Chendiba must simply show it recovers and properly recycles at least as many pieces of "ewaste" from Africa's cities as it imports. VCRs, CRT televisions, Pentium 1 computers, etc. were imported in the 1980s and 90s, used productively for years, but now need a recycling solution; Chendiba is there.  

As more countries allow export under Fair Trade, the quality of imports has improved.  “We no longer have to choose between buying in back alleys and staying barefoot and off the internet,” says Kamal. "We benefit from more choice of suppliers, lower prices, legally enforceable contracts, openness, and transparency.  It is a "computers for clunkers", or needle exchange, or carbon trading model.  We recycle as much as we import, period."

Marketplace Solution vs. Enforcement

The 2020 “ewaste trading” project has been far more successful than western certification programs.  It is less paternalistic, more transparent.  It involves less liability for sellers, and frees up valuable Interpol time to pursue endangered species poachers, rather than "geeks-of-color".   This circular economy interferes less with the “good enough market” African consumers depend on.  The main question, students here ask, is "why did it take so long to accept a solution so simple?"

Just as it is more efficient for an airline to pay for carbon removal by planting trees than to squeeze more carbon from jet fuel combustion, it's easier for Africa's Tech Sector to recycle the urban e-waste than to "certify" every piece they import. Fair Trade Recycling assures that even if an item is damaged in shipping, that a recycling infrastructure is in place to manage it, and that another piece of junk was properly recycled in exchange.  The program brings Ghana’s poorest scrappers and drop-outs from the slums, and surrounds them not with Western “saviors”, but with the Africa’s high-tech entrepreneurs, Africa’s valedictorians.

Legal, Safe, and Necessary

American and European recyclers now get to meet the technicians overseas who were once impugned as shady characters, and pay less tax money to prosecute them.  They see that Africa is not a jungle, not a dystopia. They see that African techs, African consumers, and African recyclers are no more “primitive” than Americans, Europeans, Asians and Latinos.  They need affordable technology, and then have decades of older machines to recycle.

“Most Africans live in the Africa the media never showed you,” says Wahab. “Fair Trade Recycling sees Africa for what it can do and must do, not for what we cannot do.”

"We are transforming attitudes rather than Africans."

This is a pre-published excerpt from the 2015 Fair Trade Recycling report on Agbogbloshie, Ghana by WR3A.org. This is our vision - not of boycotts and paternalistic "training" by Western NGOs. It harnesses what Africa's Best and Brightest already have, right now. Like most win-win paradigms, it can be self funding, but needs help in the development stages (e.g. to cross train Americans in Africa, and Africans in the USA). Please contribute to WR3A via FairTradeRecycling.org to help make this real.

Why do we always define signs of intelligence as something we understand and recognize?  It usually turns out that we didn't recognize it because of our own "lack of intelligence".  - WR3A

Term "Third World" is Anti-Second-Hand Propaganda

How "e-Waste Tragedy" propaganda is imprisoning African Geeks, Nerds, and Technicians.

1. 

1. The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO (with the United States, Western European nations and their allies representing the First World), or the Communist Bloc (with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and their allies representing the Second World).

2. Third World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
   

   Wikipedia
3. 
   

Ok.  So, the number of people who are not aligned with either the Soviets or NATO is... irrelevant.







Now, we all have friends who are overly anxious to impart their trust quickly on the statistic which affirms their bias.   The "bias confirmation" here could be something Eric and I suffer from.

We see that people are being arrested for importing stuff which mostly works.  To us, banning the trade between rich and poor makes as much sense as outlawing the used car market.

Game Theory 3: Monopoly Itch Mite Cure

Part of what makes game theory interesting is the use of analogies to analyze rules.   Gedankenexperiment (Thought experiment) is a game theory approach to philosophy and ethics.   And for an Ethical E-Waste blog, its a way to view a situation from 20,000 feet.

Wikipedia - Schrödinger coined the term Verschränkung (entanglement).

What if one player uses a different set of dice than another player?  If that player won 60% of 1,000 games, you'd want to control for imbalanced dice... but you'd have spent a lot of time playing in order to prove it, so it seems better if both players have to use the same die without the effort to prove one set of dice is faulty.  That requires an umpire, an authority, an NFL, and NBA, a regulator.

In non-democratic communist governments, the authority is itself a monopoly.  Regulators can be paid off, and you can't go to court to appeal weighted the dice.  In capitalism, the use of patents and trademarks create temporary, time-sensitiv,e monopolies... the authorities enforce your monopoly for a limited amount of time, which does promote research and invention.  The use of a combination of government regulators and capitalist corporations is a horrible system, the worst, except for all the other ones.

As this week's thought experiment, lets look at a theoretical entanglement of ethics and patent law.

What about... PermaChiggerInc?

What if a corporation - PermaChigger - cross bred some kind of chigger and itch mite to develop a type of scabies resistant to sulfur, to permathrin, and neem  oil.. resistant to every treatment except their trademarked GMO petrochemical?  The entire world is scratching its collective butt off, and the money rolls in.   The GMO treatment can be manufactured at scale, cheaper to produce and more profitable.  Empty bottles of PermaChigger become as common as litter from bottled water.

That's about the worst capitalist system I can think of.  It's similar to AIDS conspiracy theories of a decade ago, but the AIDS conspiracy doesn't make sense because it kills the clients.  Mite management might make more sense.

Short of being caught contaminating people on purpose, the corporation has engineered itself a guaranteed profit.  They don't even need to do the dirty work of enforcing it, they have government trade commissions and international police to stop the sale of counterfeit and copied product.  I'm not anti-capitalist, and the system here is the one which AIDS and Ebola have the highest chance of being brought under control.

Profit ensues.

Now imagine a Nigerian man, Benson, who has never been to school, from a pidgin speaking corner of an inner city Lagos slum, has the itch.  A six foot six man weighing 260 pounds, he's black as they come and looks scary as all hell when he gets mad.  He has the genetically modified mites, his wife has it, his kids have it, all their neighbors in Lagos are scratching their thighs off.  But they can't afford the Capitalist GMO treatement.  It's not a fatal condition, but life would be a lot better if he thought of a solution.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets 9: Deliverance from Comics

"Dueling Banjos" composer Arthur Smith passed away this week, at the age of 93.  If you call me on my cell phone, the (originally titled "Fueding Banjos") song slowly erupts, and builds crescendo the longer I wait to answer.  When Arthur Smith was born, few Americans lived in cities.  When I was born, more than half of Americans lived in cities, and my Ozarks family was already in the minority.

I grew up very aware of the "cultural gulf" between USA's urban and rural families, at a time too many of us got our news about the world from comic books.   My future wife studied "Snuffy Smith" and "L'il Abner" from her home in Paris (Rosny was considered a kind of ghetto), and I learned about urban life from "The Cross and the Switchblade" comic, and "learned about" Europe from Richard Scarry, and about Africa by reading "Tintin".



Today, you no longer need to go to a college library to find out about what the world is really like.   But many of us hold onto our simplified stereotypes the way we hold onto comic books, hoping they'll become vintage collectibles.

The term "lesser developed country" or "LDC" was retired, and "emerging economy" is much more in vogue.  The same transition which occured in the richest nation on earth, the USA, is occuring everywhere.

"The world is undergoing a sustained urbanization process that's pulling more people into city centers and turning more places from rural outposts into denser urban organisms. A new report [PDF] from the United Nations projects that the world's urban population – roughly 3.6 billion in 2011 – will grow by about 72 percent between now and 2050, bringing the urban population up to 6.3 billion. That's about the same amount of people on the entire planet in 2002." - Nate Berg, The Atlantic Cities Blog

Those of us who see the world first hand, who travel from city to city, comparing Kinshasa, Cairo, Paris, Singapore, Kansas City, New Orleans, Paris, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Lima, notice more similarity than differences....  we see the world is melding and growing and culturally merging and mingling.   The internet, stoves, and the city traffic have more in common.  The music is in a state of free exchange, Soukous has rap lyrics, rap has sampled bluegrass.  African, Asian and European visitors to my home in the Ozarks are sometimes a little disappointed how similar it is to Vermont.  Having spent all that money on travel, they want to point their cameras at a hillbilly, the same as I was tempted to take snapshots of 'poverty porn' in city scrap markets in Asia, Africa and South America.

Comic books and photos are not substitutes for policy data.  Fortunately, there are far more people studying cities and urbanization than there are studying "e-waste".  Electronic scrap is an intellectual policy backwater compared to projects like NYU Stern Urbanization Project.   Billions of people are consuming and discarding in ways which make Annie's Story of Stuff seem oversimplified to an almost Biblical degree.

NYU SUP has produced 4 short Youtube videos to show the growth of cities, like modern art ink spots bleeding onto a white canvas.  Paris, Chicago, Sao Paulo, and Los Angeles... from space, they grow like fungus in the fingerprint of a petri dish.  Cities as they would be visible from space.



Cities recycle, and cities finance extraction of metals from rain forests and coral islands.  Cities repair and reuse, and cities discard.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets #5: Urban Youth

Basel Amendment to End E-Waste

When we discuss the rapid meshing of cultures in rapidly growing cities, and how the "last mile" of people tend to migrate to the first mile of track (and electric cable, TV broadcast, and internet), there's another factor to consider in making comparisons:

Age.

Rural families tend to be large.  My late buddy Yadji had a brother in Yenwa who had 12 kids and 4 wives, and said his goal was to have 25 kids.   I met other men in Cameroun who boasted of 30 children.  It has been well studied that this is a rural phenomena that tends to decluster within a couple of generations of living in a city.  Quarters are more cramped, school is expensive, and multilingualism is mandatory. Girls get to school more often, and educated women have fewer kids.

But life is tough in the slums for the first generation.  As Adam Minter told me, the young Cantonese may take the super-long workshift at Foxconn for a year or two, but they burn out and adapt more reasonable habits.   It's a difficult way out of rural poverty.  But the rural immigrants don't remain "suckers" for long...

It’s estimated there were 1.2-billion people in extreme poverty in 2010. That’s a decline of 700-million since 1990.  - Chronic Poverty Report

There are about six billion people in the "non-OECD", but "non-OECD" doesn't mean poverty or hunger for most.  The young kids from rural villages have it the worst, and they are the fodder for sex traders, child soldier warlords, pirates, drug runners, etc.  The worst jobs Africa has tend to fall disproportionately on the families with the most children.

Youths have a reputation in every country for thinking they are ten foot tall and bullet-proof.  If you want a challenging environment for OSHA rules, hire a bunch of recently graduated blue collar high schoolers.  The race of the kids doesn't matter, the geography doesn't matter, kids are willing to exploit themselves and to be explioted, especially if they are hungry.

But the flame of experience burns quickly.  You can fool them once.  You cannot exploit them permanently, you either have to hire more rural immigrants, or move to a place where they are more abundant.  And in the meantime,  you have grown an urban middle class which will stick around another 40-50 years.  Visit the demographics in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Incheon.

[China's] costs have grown while surplus labour has shrunk, as three decades of the one-child policy means China’s working age population will likely fall by 20% in the next 40 years, and by a further 20% from 2050 to 2100.

Tweets responding to Fareed Zakaria's links (to Jack Goldstone in TheCoversation.com) always yield interesting links.   Jonathan Berman's Havard Business Review (10/13) article "Seven Reasons Why Africa's Time is Now" points out, among other things, that Africa will have more working population than China by 2050, and that investments in "assessembly" jobs are already coming strong.   Today only 24% of Africa's $2 Trillion economy come from natural resource extraction.  The "resource curse" in Africa is beginning to look a lot like Indonesia and Malaysia, which (as I've frequently written) are seesawing away from resource economies into "tinkerer blessing" repair-and-assembly economies... the same path as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and originally Japan followed.   The less rural land a country has drawn ("lines on maps") around it, the faster it makes this motion.  Singapore was originally part of Malaysia, and it's stunning growth is as attributable to its cessation from rural geography as it is the country's difference from Penang, KL or Jahor Bahru.  The growth of Taiwan correlates to its ability to concentrate on the "first mile of track".

Cities shrink families. Smaller families have more disposable income.  That's the parentage of e-waste at African dumps, smaller families from a generation passed own TVs, and the TVs are scrapped by kids from rural families, more recently immigrated.  It's ripe for improvement and reform, either through StEP or Fair Trade Recycling or by Indian and Taiwanese entrepreneurs.    It has nothing to do with ratification of the "Basel Convention".  

Ask Nneka Egbuna (Soul is Heavy artist)

@Nnekaworld

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets #2: Guilt Kittens

Well, if ever there was a blog title to discourage readership, I think I found it - "Morality of drowning kittens".  The proper thing seems to be some warning of the subject matter on the relativity of "cultural morality", and giving the proper weight to the moral decisions of the rural and unempowered.  I don't want to lure a reader inside and shock them.  The alternative title to Cultural Gulfs #2 was "A Load of Clue".

When I was four or five years old, I lived in Columbia Missouri, a college town.  My dad and mom were both from Taney County in the Ozarks (Land of Taney, Elmo Ingenthron now $55-210 on Amazon), both studying at the University of Missouri.   Each was the only person in their respective high school classes to go to college (though my mom, a female valedictorian, did not get a scholarship to MU.  The rotarians gave her one to a secretary school in Springfield.  She married my dad instead, at 18 years old, and left the county).

We lived in the basement of my auntie Maude Freeland (dad's aunt), who grew up on Indian reservations in the southwest with her father, a teacher in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  My great grandfather was a onetime liberal converted to Republican newspaper editor by the "unintended consequences of charity".  He disliked FDR and the TVA, thought government bureaucracy was always worse than private sector development, and he basically fought to keep the TVA out of the Ozarks.  One year, my mom's brother Eddie lived in the basement with us as he went through his freshman year at MU.  It was cozy.  Auntie Maude never married, worked as a photographer for the newspaper and wrote editorials for the Taney County Republican.

Columbia Missouri was the "big city".  Well, really St. Louis and Chicago were not that far away, but for people whose parents grew up in homemade shoes, Columbia had electricity and running water and was a symbol of American progress much earlier than Taney County.  I imagine it wasn't that different from a rural Chinese family moving closer to Guangzhou, living in the basement of an aunt's house, putting up an adult brother from the farm.

(there's a great video posted at the bottom of the blog, John Jacob Niles singing over old film of mining, stay tuned).

Bullyboy 6: Eden is Not On Our Map

Fair Trade Recycling.   Our vision is not the same, perhaps, as Basel Action Network, or the "Back to Eden" program of Interpol.  Arresting dozens of Africans and seizing thousands of "good enough" televisions and monitors, purchased for repair and resale, will not get us where we are going.

Where are we going?  According to the Economist, to the end of poverty.  The world population is making the same progress as the United States made, in standard of living, for the past 100 years.

Nearly 1 billion people have left poverty in 20 years.

In "Towards the End of Poverty", the Economist shows how at this rate, another billion will leave poverty in a decade.

This  is our vision.  Africans with television, barios with high speed internet, rice fields with smart phones.  Yes, that means they will "generate e-waste", just as we did/do.  But "Back to Eden" isn't on our Map.

Parkour: Do No Harm

I have been under the gun for several important deadlines in the business this month, auditing financials, environmental audits, and managing the huge increase in volume.  I'll probably post some more when in San Francisco (APEC meeting) and Washington DC (Peace Corps 50th Anniversary) this weekend.  It's a cross-country parkour of airports, hotels, conference calls, and bank deposits.

The previous post (Part I) has bugged me for months, and I finally just posted the bugger.  There is something important about horizonal and vertical lobbies, and how interested expertise plays upon cognitive risk perception in the public policy.  E-Stewards is definitely trending towards vertical lobby standards - establishing a standard which keeps out riff raff.  R2, on the other hand, is the first standard to be made mandatory law (Vermont regulations).   I can be arrested and put in jail for not meeting R2 standards.  It has some kind of a burden not to implement a standard based simply on the fact that not everyone meets the standard.  Facts are called for.