E-Waste Ghost Tonnage: A Vicious (re)Cycle

How Is End-of-Life E-Waste Tonnage Reincarnated in Neighboring States?

In 2009, I wrote a blog about e-waste "Ghost Tonnage" in state mandated CRT and e-Waste Recycling Programs.  A trade publication spotted it and asked to re-run it.   I declined, as the causes and effects were a little confused at that point.  This was not a simple case of Kramer driving New York deposit bottles to Michigan.

Unfortunately, "fraud" is not particularly rare in recycling businesses.  Yesterday's post about the conviction of the Colorado "Executive" company is not the largest.  The Sacramento Bee had a front page story about Arizona recyclers turning TVs into California for "redemption",using CA addresses "freed up" by exporting monitors for reuse against SB20 terms.  A new report by Lauren Roman of Transparent Planet (my company is one of ten sponsors) scratches the surface of ewaste funding conspiracy theories, about stockpiled CRT glass, and market capacity for the glass.  (I only had 48 hours to comment but Lauren has promised it's a "living document". I will make a separate blog to crib the report... it's good in a glasnosty way to start the discussion, but bears the fingerprints of agendas, and some of the people NOT interviewed in the report will need a chance to respond to "stockpiling" accusations).

A recycler who declares an abandoned car ("A-Waste") to be "covered electronics" in a state program (it may have a radio and electronics, after all) certainly gets a lot of pounds in a short time, and can sell those tons to an OEM rather cheaply.  And a recycler who turns a ton of TVs for reimbursement by two different OEM sponsors has doubled not just his profits, but his entire revenue.   Clearly, anyone getting paid twice for the same recycling, or claiming auto scrap as a "covered device", plays mumblety peg with mug shot photographers.

The OEM may appear complicit in accepting cheap tons to meet a state stewardship mandate.  Because the volumes are so high, recyclers are forced to partner with consolidators, takebacks, and haulers - no recycler can get 10 million pounds directly from consumers and residents.   My company cleaned up abandoned TVs from the sides of roads in Rhode Island, "green up" days in Vermont, and abandoned lots in Massachusetts... can we know for sure?

California is a state run program.  But in the Stewardship Programs discussed in Lauren's report (she omits Massachusetts because the law came from executive branch order rather than legislation, even though MA has stockpiled glass) the state has created the obligation for the OEM to pick up a specific number of devices from homeowners in the state - a numbe derived via... some kind of state employee number crunching...  the ouija board tells OEMs how many TVs and computers they need to fetch, or pay fines for.

So the manufacturer in faraway Asia is given a specific number of pounds of electronics they must "get recycled" in Minnesota.  A number that is not even in metrics.  And if they don't pick up that number, they pay a fine.   Which recycler do we expect them to choose - one who is cheap and has "lots" of pounds, or one who is expensive and struggles to avoid the fine?

Executed Recycling: Colorado Conviction

Claimed Chinks and Gooks were bad

While I'm still on the topic of Environmental Malpractice, let me make the comment that I've never defended the Colorado firm, Executive Recycling, which was nailed by CBS 60 Minutes.

It's called a "straw man" fallacy.  BAN accuses me of supporting a liar, in order to discredit my defense of the truthful person.  I never defended Richter, I did the opposite.  But I defended people buying the monitors that he didn't send, the ones BAN circled in Hong Kong.

What Brandon Richter of CBS Wasteland did was to claim that Chinese were filthy bad recyclers and that people who used his company would know that he didn't export their stuff to China.  He was on the BAN WAGON.  He advertised that he didn't export to China, and represented China as a primitive place.  He was found guilty of FRAUD.

The Economist Gets It: Modern Slum Nariobi

Early in 2012, I wrote about the "pixelized slums" in Lima Peru, from the inside, and showed the OECD slums (Mexico, Japan) from the satellite beside the non-OECD slums in Delhi (Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People).

In its expose on Nairobi (where Fair Trade Recycling sent 3 representatives to a UNEP conference last March), the Economist gives readers a taste of entrepreneurism, rich and salty, in the free markets of Africa's largest shantytown.  "Upwardly Mobile Africa: Boomtown Slum"has incredible photos by Piers Benatar/Panos, taking us inside "a day in the economic life of Africa's biggest shanty-town."

Piers Bneatar photo of private ambulance entrepreneurs in Nairobi (Economist.com) Fair Use/ description

It's easy to take a photo in a tough part of town and use it to simplify a continent.  The Economist takes lots of different photos, not seeking to prove an a priori angle, but to bring us closer to understanding the complex.

The Economist shows an exploding fresco of creativity, of nuance, of good-enough affordability, of people living so close side by side one another that they have a communal interest in peace.  And up close, we see the same seeds of economy that hatched in Franklin's Philadelphia, in Gou's Taipei, in Tokyo and Seoul...

Environmental Malpractice: Conclusion Prelude (?)

We covered a lot of ground (somewhat laboriously) during the past 4 weeks, basically making the case for two serious "environmental malpractice" cases.  Do the poorest people in emerging markets have all the tools and safety protections they need to recycle bad CRTs?  No.  That is the point of Fair Trade Recycling.   Use the value of the proven 85% good material to pay for the proper recycling - not just of the 15% accidental breakage and elective upgrade, but also the electronics being thrown out today in those nations.   Fair Trade Recycling depends on the use of the reuse market to finance these improvements.  But we must overcome an effective boycott on trade with poor people.

In the past few posts on Environmental Justice, I've shown current news stories (within the past 6 months) about technicians framed, outed, and defamed for their reuse and repair work in ICT industries.  Here's a synopsis of the first two cases (already posted) and a teaser on Environmental Malpractice 7.  This is not OLD NEWS.  This defamation is in the headlines today.

- Egypt:  The false statements by BAN (cited in EM5) give an excuse to a regime to seize computers more than 5 years after date of manufacture - including CRTs that last 25 years - as "e-waste".  The timing of enforcement, 2007, meant there were virtually no CRTs with assembly line dates of 2003 to be found, and 100% of CRTs were seized by Egyptian customs during the next few years.  This led to a 2011 Report on "E-Waste Disposal Problems" in Egypt, which is cited (temporally wrong) as support for BAN's original claim. But the report dealt exclusively with the "problem" of the pile of working CRTs seized by customs - a completely Ban-made problem.  It culminates with three things:  an end to sales by reputable USA suppliers, an arrest of USA suppliers willing to tape fake dates on the monitors, and the Egypt market finally accepting cheap new units made in China, the end of a decade when names like "IBM" and "HP" and "Dell" meant a quality, affordable, internet experience in Cairo.  A November 2012 Headline on Egypt shows a massive pile of mixed TVs and monitor "ewaste" dumped on the ground.   Egyptian Geeks are out of business.  #Hamdy.

- Nigeria and Ghana:  The false statements by BAN (cited in EM6), especially the "80%-90% of African = primitive" statistic completely made up off the top of someone's head, leads to a ban on exports by European WEEE standards.  Africans try buying, as they did the previous decade, newish and tested CRTs.  Greenpeace and the UK Independent sneak a sabotaged TV into Joseph Benson's container with a GPS, and track it.  Benson is arrested and goods are seized.  But a 2 year research by UNEP finds that 85% of the imports are working, and that a similar percentage of material at the Agbogbloshie and other dumps were trade ins and discards from African cities (which had TV since the 1980s).  December 2012 Headline:  Joseph Benson found guilty of exporting, implied to be a vindication of the 80% primitive African propaganda, and no mention of the UNEP 2011 studies discrediting the original accusation.  West African Geeks are out of business. #Benson.

In the final section, Indonesia (Environmental Malpractice 7, currently editing), we have the absolutely worst example of Environmental Malpractice and Injustice.   In the two cases above, rich corporations protected their new sales from "secondary markets" by funding an NGO who targets up and coming threats in emerging markets (which were growing in internet use at 10X the rate of the USA and Europe).  This week's headline repeats the fake, false, discredited, unsupported, undocumented, predjudiced statistic - in Science Daily, a magazine likely to be cited as a source by future "e-waste" researchers.

BAN's silence is complicit in the high tech lynching of technicians in developing markets.  I will show that decisively with photos of Jim Puckett in Indonesia, falsely describing people who had hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods seized, in Environmental Malpractice #7.   #Chiu

Environmental Malpractice 5.1: Egypt and USA Crimes

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. 
- Winston Churchill

Aggravated against the profiling, arrest, and then defamation of 3 cases of Geeks of Color...   Just as I went to check on BAN.org's coverage of the Joseph Benson (Env Malpractice 7) case, I found this gem about similar USA arrest of "E-waste Criminals".  It's another digression from the Final Environmental Malpractice case study of the Indonesian reuse plant.

Here is the entire discussion between Mike Enberg of BAN and I, using their blog... assuming my comment below isn't "moderated" away.