The Righteousness Trap: Do Ewaste Exports Pollute, or Empower, Africa?

The Righteousness Trap.

A problem recognized years ago comes into comically dramatic form in the Netflix Series "Tiger King". When megalomaniacs think their opinion is righteous, their followers and staff - and Big Cats and Export Markets - become collateral damage.

By Chris McAndrew - https://api.parliament.uk/Live/photo/bxXGHuLA.jpeg?crop=MCU_3:4&quality=80&download=trueGallery: https://beta.parliament.uk/media/bxXGHuLA, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67598764 Righteousness Trap

Lord Chris Smith [LCS] (Christopher Robert Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury, PC, to be exact) inspired INTERPOL's Project Eden. He wanted to show he meant it, and demanded the prosecution of Joseph Benson. Over the course of Project Eden's 5 year mission, LCS ignored multiple studies that disproved his claim of "80%" waste dumping. He is not a bad human. He just got trapped.

He strives to be a righteous human. So righteous, in fact, that he gloried in others following him...

Into the Righteousness Trap.

The initial assumption - that Africans were coming to Europe to BUY Europe's worthless e-waste - paying thousands per container to prepare, ship, and clear it through customs - and then dumping 80% of it into a city landfill - was preposterous. There is no way that Lord Chris Smith or his team interviewed a single person in Africa's Tech Sector.  They had zero physical evidence of their public contention that 80% of these exports were for scrap.  They wallpapered announcements with photos of African children, and described African metal recycling community with words like "pawed at" and "primitive". To an experienced exporter and former Peace Corps volunteer like yours truly, Project Eden was fundamentally bigoted at the outset. 

Righteous environmentalists - like priests and ayatollahs - can become blinded by praise and pride. Unconscious of their institutional racism, they never checked whether junk in Agbogbloshie is decades older than what is being imported to Africa today. They never even took the most basic step - available in seconds via online World Bank data, to see how many millions of Ghana households had at least one TV set 15 years earlier, or to compute how many TVs would be "normally" in the junkyard.  They went directly to rewrite the rules to criminalize Joe Benson's business, and then spent five years making his life miserable and flagrantly declaring his guilt in the press.

Exports of functional and repairable electronics empowered Africans with the critical mass of users profoundly necessary since 1960 to support the infrastructure of electric grids, radio and TV broadcasts, internet cable, dedicated satellites, and mobile phone towers. If not but FOR #freejoebenson, Africa would not have been "EDEN", your holiness, any more than Joe Exotic was preserving tiger habitat. The control of the trade by one party is control of empowerment.

Do ewaste Exporters pollute Africa, or empower Africans?  

A handful of experts who knew next to nothing about Africa's Tech Sector, electric grid, mass communications, consumer demand, or scrap metal recycling sector were holding meetings and conferences with each other to write the rules for Africa. They decided their answer.

Seven Secrets Of SECONDHAND Professionals - A Guide thru Adam Minter's Dilemmas

Blog 1,430. Fresh on the media blitz of author/journalist Adam Minter's second blockbuster - Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale - there are a lot of questions about how to deal with the growing mountains of secondhand stuff.

First, a shameless self-promoting plug. Based on my experiences - Africa Peace Corps volunteer 1980s, grandson of Ozark hillbilly families with no electricity or running water, tales-of-the-Depression-dinnertable-correspondent, used electronics recycling company entrepreneur, and former state Recycling division director (MA DEP) - I've had a chance to answer more than a few dozen of Adam Minter's questions over the years.

In fact (shameless plug), we met ten years ago next month. December 1, 2010, kicked off a period of "dueling banjo blogs", when Adam was writing about secondhand and scrap markets from Shanghai (ShanghaiScrap.com).  Here in Vermont, I was writing blog about my heroes in emerging markets, telling positive stories about differently abled poor people ingloriously described as "primitives" by white savior barbies who insist all used electronics be shredded rather than traded, and who described the purchases of secondhand stuff "illegal dumping".

[The concluding 2 chapters of his book are a distillation of ten years of correspondence between me and Adam, including his 8 trips with me to Ghana, Vermont, Boston, and the Bronx NY.]

Yesterday, before going on air (NPR On Point), Adam sent me an email reminding me of that inspiration. We met when he had just given a shoutout to the Best Recycling Blog in the World. Shameless plug, but I'll take it again, because the blogs he was attracted to were about racial profiling of secondhand reuse markets as "primitives". I'm proud that he has carried that message forward in Secondhand, and has joined the fight for Right To Repair, and against shaming secondhand trade with poverty porn.

Meet Adam in Person Thursday Nov 14 at University of Vermont Davis Center.


SEVEN SECRETS OF SECONDHAND PROFESSIONALS
A Guide Through Adam Minter's Dilemmas

Triage.  At Good Point Recycling in Middlebury, Vermont and Brockton, Massachusetts, our 40 staff have to manage up to 500,000 pounds per month of used electronics. A few of those devices are recently "electively upgraded", with a good resale value. But alas, like by Minter's other Secondhand firehose drinkers (Goodwill, Salvation Army, Japan's BookOff) we find that the vast majority has been in a closet for way too long. We send very little (5%) to the dump - mostly Ikea-grade wood from older electronics. But most of the items are going to be de-manufactured or shredded into little pieces of copper, aluminum, glass, black plastic, white plastic, circuit boards, etc.

There is a lot of value, a lot of waste, and a lot of emotional baggage. Fortunately, some things are easier than we make them out to be.

So there's a training program for the staff, based on the concept of "TRIAGE". There's a first sort, to get stuff to the department where there's an expert in that stuff (usually, de-manufacturing). Then there's a "second sort", which may mean testing the electronics to see if they work, looking up demand for them online, or removing 36 screws with 8 different screwheads using power drills. Sometimes, with things like "vintage" or antique electronics, or items that might have a hazard like lithium battery, there's a third sort, or reason to ship the third sort equipment to a different electronic specialist.

And also this hits home... All of us eventually are called to sort and settle our loved ones possessions.  Last month I flew to my 77 year old mother's home in very rural Marshal Arkansas. 29 years before my dad passed away in 2017, he had moved his own mothers STUFF from his super revered grandfather's home in Taney County Missouri. I wish I'd had 40 employee company when he did that, a lot of valuable antiques were lost, and dad  tried to save a lot of things that had only sentimental value.

Dad moved a few tons of those things to an abandoned house on their new property in Marshall, down the hill from mom's.  As giant oak trees are wont to do in Arkansas wind storms, one had sliced the abandoned house practically in half, and by the time I got there several rains (and a couple of meth-heads) had been through the place (one methhead kindly forgot all the silverware in a cottage cheese bucket near the door, probably set it down and couldn't find it again).  Anyway, I came down as a professional to "TRIAGE" the damage, and cherry pick the 20% of non- ruined stuff worth saving.

The thing I'm most grateful for finding in the destroyed home was a wood carving by my grandfather, Clarence Fisher of Ridgedale, Missouri. He taught me early on about quality, repair, and the good-enough market. He was probably born to the poorest hillbilly family in the county (his father did not read or write, signed his name with an "x"). A self-taught carpenter and subsistence farmer, he left a deep imprint on me. Adam Minter had a similar relationship with his own grandfather.

The carving I salvaged from the house is the lower one (the top carving Pa gave us as a gift, it was his last carving). He told me he was worried he might not be able to do one for everyone in the family. But later it turned out he had an idea, to make a wood carving template, so he could "mass produce" them, or some other carpenter could.  That lower one I found on the floor of his daughter (my mom in Arkansas) in the house the tree destroyed.

Adam is going to get a lot more coverage this month - C-SPAN, NPR Marketplace, and Fresh Air. And check the reviews so far in Nature, Publishers Weekly, Waste Dive, Recycling International, and NPR to name a few.  It's a great read, and if you want to hear some secret advice on the dilemmas he addresses, directly from a Reuse Pro, read on.

WR3A is Fair Trade Recycling - 10 Years

The World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association, doing business as Fair Trade Recycling, was legally incorporated in Vermont a decade ago.  How have we done, and what it the status?

The group originally had great success by finding very very large import orders (places like Malaysia's Net Peripheral) and working as a collective to supply those orders from USA companies willing to export to the right people.  It was financially interesting to both the buyer and seller.  However, this model created a disincentive to add more members (increasing supplier members diluted USA members, recruiting demand members diluted vetted overseas companies).  Membership reached a critical mass it could not grow from.  We added more USA suppliers, the price of exported goods went down, etc.

The coop model severely imploded in 2012, when a copy of one of our audits of the Malaysia company was sent by a USA Big Shred investor to the Malaysia Department of Environmental Conservation.  The import letter was valid, Malaysia officials said, but they also visited the factory and took away the import permit.

"No good deed goes unpunished."


"Poverty was not created by export of used goods. Wealth was created by import of used goods."

Hidden Data, Racist Assumptions, False Claims, Payola - Huffington Post Believes NGO Malarky

BAN Attempts to Conceal Hong Kong locations

Another journalist appears as "collateral damage". Basel Action Network's snowballing racist depictions of African Geek hubs as "Primitive Orphan Shantytown" and Hong Kong Technicians as "Rice Paddy Child Laborers" caught another well meaning reporter.

BAN's sly, seductive "white savior" siren actually succeeded in getting Huffington Post to directly link to a petition to POTUS Barack Obama to create an executive order banning us from trading with emerging markets, where people buy and fix repairable electronics.

It was a classic bait and switch. BAN shows a port, then doesn't show ANYTHING positive about the country.  They take the reporters to a hand picked operation which looks a little ugly, and most importantly, has foreign-looking people doing hand disassembly.  The juxtaposition of brown faces and old tech strums their guilty banjo tune.

Photos posted in June by Huffington Post Tech Editor Damon Beres are a little unclear, however, in how the depict the actual locations in Hong Kong which actually received the material.  Many of the actual GPS locations have been obscured by BAN.  The Huffington Post photos definitely show brown people and definitely show old tech gadgets being recycled "by hand"... and typically of the caring, liberal journalists BAN targets, Beres seems outraged enough not to seek the standard second opinion which makes for standard journalism.  No one who imports or works on stuff is interviewed to defend themselves, or to offer photojournalists a tour inside some of the ACTUAL savvy, sexy, bright and good-news operations that splendidly demonstrate the best recycling waste hierarchy.  Upgrade.  Reduce, Reuse, Repair.

Beres declares BAN's thesis somewhat factishly:

Currently, a legal loophole allows organizations used by the government to export electronic waste ― like discarded smartphones, computers, televisions and monitors ― to other countries, where they’re dismantled by workers in unsafe conditions.

There is nothing in the article indicating any investigation of the claim.  There's no interview with any counterpoint, and certainly no interview with the importing company in Hong Kong.  I have previously called out MIT Sensability Lab for lending MIT's gravitas to the small NGO in Seattle. We showed Beres a response from MIT claiming NO data and NO knowledge of ANY claim made by BAN - about child labor, rice paddies, primitives, illegality, etc. - whatsoever.

Folks at Michigan State, MIT Senseability Lab, Blacksmith Institute, etc. take BAN's thesis and describe it, and BAN sends those to reporters as if it's peer reviewed research.  Google 80% waste export figure.  Complete and utter fiction, reported for 10 years based on a shell game of credible names repeating a number that doesn't exist.

What also bugs me is that even the "worst" photos just show manual disassembly by non-white people.  Like the photos of guys with hammers separating aluminum from copper in Agbogbloshie, it seems to represent prima facia evidence that something is wrong when brown people separate metals. That's a racist appeal to the thesis, in my book.  What are they disassembling - Hong Kong stuff or imported stuff?  What percentages of each? How much is there, is it a significant percentage of the "crisis"?  Does 2 tons per day of printers really show a world crisis?  My plant in Middlebury Vermont manages  more stuff than is shown in Hong Kong.

But the damage is done by implicit racist association of brown skin and "toxic" electronics.  The same electronics in your kids bedroom are made to seem exotic and poisonous, and all the more so to people who know nothing about technology.  That's the frustration with Damon Beres - as Tech Editor, he should really know better than to accept "ju ju" depictions of risks of manual disassembly.

Can you guess the country, nationality, and "e-waste" fate from the photo to the left?  Compare it to the photo in Beres' June Huffington Post article.  Which is OECD?  Who is Primitive?  Where's the "child labor" claimed by NGO?

NOW HEAR THIS.  I have obtained data OBSCURED by MIT or BAN in the Hong Kong printer scrap shipments!  BAN has made a vague statement that the data points  were obscured to somehow assist enforcement... but then trashed Hong Kong Environmental Department a month later for somehow allowing a location to become the "next" Agbogbloshie or Guiyu.

The "bait and switch" was done on Carlo Ratti and Damon Beres.  I would hope the days are numbered when BAN can declare a place with 7 million people, like Hong Kong, as a port of receipt and then obscure the coordinates and hand-pick which operation they bring the photojournalist to.  Tema isn't Agbogbloshie.  Hong Kong isn't Guiyu.  And Eco Park isn't what BAN brought the camers to.

BAN has obscured data, implying that the data tracks their e-waste to the "primitive" facility shown in the Huffington Post photos.  BUT I HAVE DATA SHOWING LOADS THEY TRACK ARRIVING AT ECOPARK!  This data comes from inside sources at BAN's Seattle HQ and was NOT provided by MIT Sensable City Lab through our request for MIT's data (Carlo Ratti claims not to have the data we used to track the load to the Eco Park).

BERES and Huffington Post do have photos of a printer scrapyard.  Perhaps some printers did wind up there.  BUT WE HAVE DATA showing that SOME of the loads were tracked to the STATE OF THE ART FACILITY at Hong Kong's Eco Park, and that THOSE data points have been obscured by BAN and/or MIT!  As has the financial arrangement with the Recycling Company which funded BAN and whose loads were NOT TRACKED.

Some of the data that was obscured last month on BAN's claim that "enforcement" was required is now accessible on the MoniTour application.  The screenshot below shows an LCD arriving at the permitted, state of the art ECO PARK, and then to an inner city location Tuen Mun, as described in our June blog.  Why that data was ever obscured is now subject to some serious questions.

WHY WAS THIS EVER OBSCURED?  AND WHY DID BAN NOT BRING PBS TO THE STATE OF THE ART ECO PARK?

Is BAN partially funded by a competitor of one of the licensed facilities at the Eco Park? Definitely, that is known, and the same competitor is also now disclosed as a funder of PBS.  Did that influence the reporter?  Probably not, but the purpose of bringing the reporter to the ugliest place possible is clear.  Equally clear is the obligation of the reporter to ask someone else where ELSE the "e-waste" might have gone in Hong Kong, and to ask why BAN obscured that data for 2 months.

From the Eco Park, this LCD can be tracked to an apartment in Fui Sha Wai in Hong Kong New Territories.  Hardly "cowboy land".  And export for repair is NOT "e-waste" or illegal under the Basel Convention (nor is recycling).  Where else DIDN'T Basel Action Network take journalists?  THAT is the pattern - not taking CBS 60 Minutes to the SKD Factories in Foshan (where the monitors they circle by helicopter went), and not taking PBS to Accra's Tech Sector shops like Chendiba Enterprises.   This is the pattern.

This is potentially criminal behavior, and should certainly give pause to Huffington Post decision to provide links to the petition.  I absolutely believe that this shows BAN has purposefully obscured GPS data showing scrap arriving at this Hong Kong R2 Certified recycler, which has import permits and contracts with original equipment manufacturers to provide recycled plastic content for new electronics being manufactured in Shenzhen.  You know, the place where Mike Daisy told Ira Glass that he saw schoolchildren being escorted in child labor camps by machine gun, basically.

Now Damon Beres is not likely a racist. I'm sure he's not. I don't tend to ever describe people as racists.  But there are assumptions, profiles, fears and insecurities which crop up when people see photos of brown people doing stuff, and false data to leverage and increase those perceptions, for the financial benefit of white people, or the fame and "exoticness" of photojournalists, does arguably reflect a racist economy.  When black African TV repairmen go to PRISON based on a white guy's absurd "ghoulish" descriptions of Agbogbloshie (thousands of orphans? hundreds of sea containers of e-waste?), and journalists get Pelly and Polk awards for breaking the story, and its all based on fake fictious and retracted numbers, yeah I will call that racism.

Damon Beres Huffington Post article in June does show brown people disassembling electronics in Hong Kong.  Jim Puckett says they are of the place where the electronics were tracked. What conclusions we are to draw from that is left to Basel Action Network.   There are no photos of USA recyclers to compare the scrap to (my photo above is Mexican women trained in an R2 certified recycling facility in Vermont).  Beres article shows photos of TIRES!!!!   (Oh my GOD!  Tires in Hong Kong!!!)  What the photo of forklift tires at a scrap yard in Hong Kong (which is richer than the USA per capita) is supposed to show in the Huffington Post article is a little unclear.  But you could send the reporter through an R2 factory in the USA and find photos of oil drums and tires and batteries and accidental breakage, and if you purposefully didn't bring the photographer to see the NICE parts of the facility, and then said it was all somehow typical of the race/geography/language/creed of the facility owner... yeah I will call that racism.


BAN has the data now, including ECOPARK coordinates now obscured at the Senseable City web page.  MIT claims to be unable to release it.  I won't say exactly how I obtained the data from BAN, I will invite them to state that they did NOT track any scrap to Hong Kong's state of the art ECO PARK (then I'll provide it).  I can say it was an inside source in Seattle, not Cambridge or MIT.  They will ignore this because they know it's true, and won't want to explain why they "obscured" GPS data showing proper, legal recycling imports.

Again, maybe they found some illegal work too, but they definitely have GPS data showing stuff arriving where it's permitted to arrive and being processed legally, and they have definitely obscured that data point.

Now, Damon Beres was very forthright in responding to my tweets and emails and my request for editorial retraction or insertion of counterclaims.  But as of this AM, has done nothing about it.  I provided MIT correspondence to him, he took from it that I am personally in the business and therefore perhaps have a conflict of interest.  FAIR ENOUGH BUT THEN STATE THAT IN THE ARTICLE.   Because everyone in the industry following this story knows that BAN is almost completely funded by USA shredding companies who are competing directly with the Hong Kong Eco Park company, and if conflict of interest is part of this discussion I welcome that discussion wholeheartedly.

Berees joins Scott Pelley, Michelle Rey, Peter Essick, Cahal Milmo, Raphael Rowe (BBC), and others who get tricked by the planned obsolescence, big shred, non-profit payola scandal.

1) BAN tells you the port of import in a country BAN says is suspect.
2) BAN brings you to the ugliest place it can find in that country - Agbogbloshie, Guiyu, etc.
3) BAN lets you photograph brown people there
4) BAN gets a link to its website, its petitions, etc.

BUT the "e-waste" didn't go there.  Got it?  CBS 60 Minutes, watch it again and again, and there are NO COMPUTER MONITORS in Guiyu.  The stacks of computer monitors CBS shows in Hong Kong definitely, absolutely, did NOT go to the place BAN led them to.  But the imagery of the place BAN did lead them to pulls the guilty heartstrings and gets BAN money.

The journalists are the victims here, in a way.  But they also need to be interviewing people like Joe Benson, the importers, who can give them tours of the ACTUAL facilities which import the stuff, rather than take the word of an organization PAID handsomely by the competitors of that facility.

Agbogbloshie (BBC link) is a real place.  Loads tracked to the Tema Port outside Accra in Ghana do NOT go to Agbogbloshie.   

Guiyu is a real place, and its ugly.  The monitors in Hong Kong (CBS link) did NOT go to Guiyu.  
Given that those two locations were false leads, BAN's decision to "obscure" data points in Hong Kong should raise suspicion of any reporter.  And now we have proof that BAN has obscured MIT Sensable City lab data showing loads they tracked arriving at the ECO PARK revealed by this blog in May and June.

At the time I didn't have the data showing it went there, I only had copies of the Purchase Order showing it was supposed to go there.  Now I have proof that BAN found some of the material DID go there and BAN is now HIDING that information from journalists.

Huffington Post has now been given direct evidence of fraud in BAN's story, but the link to BAN's website remains.  Huffington Post does NOT have MIT's word for it.  Huffington Post does NOT have the GPS coordinates (if it does, follow them to the EcoPark and one LCD monitor to a place where it has been repaired and is in use at/near/in a Hong Kong restaurant).

Let me boil this down.

• Asians and Africans and Latin Americans have had cars and televisions and VCRs and all kinds of electric gadgets for more than half a century.

• Poorer nations tend to use manufactured goods three to four times longer than rich nations.  Same dynamic inside OECD,  Poverty is linked to car repair, clothing reuse, electronics fixing.

• Even if poor nations use electronics for 10-15 years rather than 3-5 years, they do, eventually, generate city trash with "e-waste" or "e-scrap" in it.

• There are tire piles in China and Africa, just like there are tire piles in Europe and America.        
• Taking a picture of a tire pile or TV pile in Africa doesn't mean recyclers in the OECD are secretly and illegally dumping our waste there.
• Posing children in front of piles of garbage (often quite small ones) is a marketing technique designed to get money to the western NGO.  Not one dime is shared with the kids in the photos.

• Calling African and Chinese technicians "Primitives" and making vague and false claims of "child labor" and "thousands of orphans pawing through junk" is just racist.  "Pawing"?  For God's sake.  "Witches brew", "skeletal", "hideous"?  This is 1930s language used by Nazis to portray Jews, for gods sake.  Completely inappropriate description of SKD refurbishing factories, African Tech Sector, etc.

• When you get wound up and want to avoid using a recycler who employs these "primitive" practices and "child labor"? GUESS WHAT?

• ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the recyclers "recommended" by this racist, false claim making NGO  have PAID the NGO to be listed, actually entered into a CONTRACT to pay the NGO!

• When recyclers stopped making CASH payments to the Seattle NGO, their companies were dropped from the NGO recommended list.

CBS, NPR, BBC, Economist, Guardian, Interpol, UK Environmental Agency, dozens of respectable journalists and environmental enforcement organizations have been DUPED by racists, Afrophobic, Asia phobic, bigoted assumptions about Geeks of Color.  The journalists aren't consciously racist, they are just being manipulated by the same ignorance of emerging markets exposed by TED Talk's Hans Rosling.   They see stacks of CRT monitors in Hong Kong, you bring them to a chip harvesting scrapyard (downstream from textile mill effluent) and they are so busy subconsciously reacting to poor brown skinned people that they NEVER BOTHER TO LOOK for the CRTs.  They are reacting to the "scrap boys" burning wires in Accra, and never notice that NO SEA CONTAINER has ever been unloaded there, that you couldn't even access that site with 5 containers per month, let alone the 500 sea container per month you describe in the article based on BAN's "testimony".

TEN YEARS of documenting this stuff.  This is hideous.  Wake up, journalists and legislators.  This is a massive con game.  Arresting Africa technicians like Hurricane Joe Benson should have been the last straw.

Who's the Troll: But how much are Fair Trade Recycling staff Paid?

See April 2012 Post "Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People"

I confess I've lost interest in the "rate of pay" issue in voluntary trade. 

What drives participation in low-pay or exploitative or criminal activity is generally a lack of other opportunities. A system where USA or EU "moral agents" are expected to give their imprimatur to each potential activity, when the EU-USA agents of conscience don't know the context of the choice between opportunities, can ironically limit opportunities.  

The agent of conscience too often plays an unwitting role (or bears responsibility) when labor finds its own level, in the vacuum created by limits on trade opportunities.  

Not buying a recycled product, or not supplying a recycled feedstock, unless you know how much the maker is paid, is usually a terrible idea.  The more consumers buy (demand) the product, the more opportunities the "marginalized" workers will have.  If in doubt, let the affected worker of your concern choose their opportunity.  

So what is the root cause of this market interference by agents of conscience?  Writing below from my own experience (I coined the term "agent of conscience" in a high school journal, btw)...

The "agent of conscience" in the west is initially fed a righteousness-rush.  That's a little jolt of ethical dopamine, for having made a righteous purchase (see also "moral licensing"). The purchase may simply mean "cash" to the "marginalized" producer, e.g. the African women in the business of washing scrap plastic bags to make tapestry, rugs, and purses... they often don't "get" the moral angst angle.  Learn more by reading about "spiritual materialism" (Trungpa) or Steven Pinker if your goal is to know thyself.

Here is film of Africans taking used film plastic, like trash bags, washing them and using them in weaving (replacing cotton).  I posted it and someone immediately asked me how much the people were paid.