Smoke Screen in Africa: German Photography Needs Self-Ctrl-X

WR3A Photo January 2018

One of the most tiresome themes in the "eyewitness" reporting on African recycling are accounts of smoke from burning wire.  It's definitely one of the most photogenic activities at Agbogbloshie.

Sure, Sasha. Agbogbloshie e-waste oft goes unmentioned - for minutes at a time.

The anecdotal wire burning in Agbogbloshie is a product of underemployment and boredom. But if you ask people in the recycling community how much e-waste wire burning contributes to African urban air pollution (smog), you find it gets mentioned a wee too often.

Where smoke comes from:

• Cars and Trucks
• Diesel Generators
• Charcoal Stoves
• Smelters
• Tire Burning

I asked German photographer Kai Loeffelbein a polite question on twitter about the photo below - from Agbogbloshie.  No response.  I presume he has done just a little bit of background research, enough to know not to climb in the ring.  He's going to ring the bell and get his cash from the publisher for a titillating expose, and let's see if a dime goes to Ibrahim, Muhammed, Awal, Razaq, Yaro and their pals.

Kai, notice how everyone at the largest dump on Earth is on first name basis?

So let's talk about smoke.  The photographers like to tell us that's how their work is benefitting the Africans - by saving them from health effects of burning electronics.

The Toxic Immunity of Russian Pussy Riot

The Globe and Mail's Elizabeth Renzetti has an immaculately written editorial on the Russian government trial of a girl punk rock group for "hooliganism".   What they did was made a very funny video, taking on both Putin's thuggish censorship and the complicity of the Russian Church.

It's really far better than anything I have to write about today.  It can pass as something silly, but Renzetti makes it clear that in the age of communications, a belly laugh can topple a dictatorship.  Laughter grants us immunity.  The more dictators try to stamp it out, the more attention they draw, and the faster the sparks fly.

Since Russians are already wired by television and internet, Putin can't take away the devices that people watch funny stuff upon.  In African dictatorships, they are very afraid of display devices - very afraid.   And the fear has far more to do with potential for a tinderbox of laughter than with witches brews of toxic wires.

Strippers: Drinking Coca Cola With a Blindfold On

Selling Scrap Wire to Chinese (wire) Strippers?

Sometimes there is a really terrific end market which is all blue sky and sunshine.   A true model of fair trade recycling.  But it's impossible to match your supply exactly with the demand... you may have too much of something, and need a backup market.   Or you have too little of something, and cannot ban the buyer from trading with other people whose quality you don't control.

Recycling in a back alley

No one can ever have enough non-ferrous metal to dictate the copper market in China.

No one can keep their scrap copper from ending up in China.  Even if you sell it in the USA, its a sale or two away from Ningbo.

So, if you have clean copper wire, from yokes or degaussing coils (which shows you are demanufacturing TVs and CRT monitors, like a good guy), you are going to have to sell it directly or indirectly into a market that you cannot dictate the terms of.

Even if you visit your copper yoke buyer in Foshan, he may trade your load sideways at the port.  It's a commodity, things get bought and sold, and you don't know into whose hands your scrap non-ferrous will land.

If you sell to China directly, you are taking a risk that even your focus-material-free load is going to wind up unloaded at the same yard, surrounded by junk TVs (which probably were collected from Chinese households), and circuit boards and other focus materials.

If the yard buys from you and ALSO buys from your nasty bad USA competitor, the one you suspect deals in "toxics along for the ride", your sea containers are going to the same address.  If the buyer is then accused of being a nasty, brutish, and primitive wire burning operation, your defense is that you sold "clean commodities".

"Honey.." you say with your one phone call from the Chicago jailhouse.
"I was caught up in a raid of a gambling joint and strip house.  The police arrested EVERYBODY.  But I swear, I swear, I swear to you... I was drinking soda pop.  And playing solitaire.  And I wasn't anywhere even CLOSE to the strippers..."

You were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Or you sold copper to the wrong place at the wrong time.

Your copper buyer was (gasp) a broker.  Only a couple of people have enough clean copper to sell directly to a smelter, and even then it may sit in a yard and be resold.   "Brokers" and "traders" are not bad words, some of us are just more honest about the fact that ALL the scrap wire is sold to them if we don't strip the wire ourselves.

Scrap Metal Fraud: Diary of Export Heart Attack

Dear Diary,

This is a story of a scrap dealer, who has to make payroll while meeting Responsible Recycler standards in an international marketplace.  This is all true, all happening in the past two weeks.

China 2005

Monday... We are still dealing with the aftermath of a missed wire transfer from a USA client.   We took the wire (about $60K) for granted and wrote some big checks against it.   Someone at the sender's local bank claimed to be asleep at the switch (though I think it should be investigated whether the money was withdrawn from the client account on the day of the wire, and the bank was kiting it for 24 hours).   Bank fraud can mean the bank's fraud.  We were hit with about $1600 in bounced check fees and panicked phone calls with our own payees.  I took screen shots of our account showing the wire was late and the correspondence from the client sending us the money that their account had cleared it the day earlier.

Rachael, our CFO, makes the case that the wires are outrageous, taking $20-30 from the sender client and then $18 at our receiving bank... wonders whether we should use more paper checks to avoid the accumulated bank fees.

Tuesday:   To make up for the panic among our suppliers for the bounced checks the previous Friday (one of our loads was actually held and not unloaded until we sent another wire to cover the bad check, truck idling), we issue more checks to get the payables under 30 days.  To do that I need to sell some of the $150K in scrap metal that we have processed in the building.

Wednesday:  We re-double sort the green board to eliminate the "jelly bean" boards (yellow, purple, red, and blue boards typically made in China and typically having much less gold content), to get a better price than our last load sent to the R2 compliant buyer.   That takes extra staff time, and it's part of the reason we have so much metal value in inventory that I now desperately need to cash out.  The high grade printed circuit boards had been processed by our USA buyer for sale to Umicore or Boliden in Belgium or Dowa in Japan... it takes 90-120 days for our buyer to get the reconciliation on their load, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They evidently got some loads back with way less gold than they expected and were told that the culprit was "jelly bean" boards.  They factored their loss over average loads going forward, and my company took a $6,000 hit.  They admitted they didn't know whose boards had how many jelly beans, it was an average spread out to cover their losses.