Fair Trade Recycling: Interpol Promises Fact Check

Not bathwater: Baby bassinet found at Mexican dump 2008

Here's a novel idea.  Habeus Corpus.  Find the body.   Make sure a crime has been committed before you start arresting people.  Witch hunts and mob justice have plagued democracies for thousands of years, and our system of justice has learned, over the centuries, that accusations need to be investigated before arrests take place.

Environmental Crime enforcement thus reminded itself last week.   Interpol, the Lyon, France-based international police force, announced that it would take a year to re-study the WEEE or used electronics trade.  Why is a study a victory for Fair Trade Recycling?  It's called "back to the drawing board"... Interpol studied it once, gobbled up some baloney Basel Action facts, and started an enforcement campaign it is now going to revisit.  Mockingbird will be retried.

11/7/2013 "The impact of pollution caused by the dumping and mishandling of waste is global, affecting the quality of our air, water and soil," said Cees van Duijn, a Specialized Officer with INTERPOL's Environmental Security Unit.

"Through Project Eden INTERPOL will support its member countries in their efforts to implement national legislation and regulate the international movement of waste to ensure healthier local environments and help protect the overall integrity of our environment worldwide," added Mr Van Duijn.

With the recent launch of the Countering WEEE Illegal Trade (CWIT) Project, INTERPOL and its partners will conduct extensive research into the illegal e-waste market in Europe and provide technical and policy recommendations.

- See more at: http://www.noodls.com/view/1E03CF366C333C703F1EE40A61E2A293816DCAF3#sthash.ysnd6TSY.dpuf

Now Interpol's "Project Eden" doesn't sound all that big a departure from the past 12 months of seizures, arrests and enforcement.   Why do I assume there could be good news here?

"INTERPOL and its partners will conduct extensive research..."

What caused Interpol to take a breather, and to make sure of its prosecution?  WR3A, the World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association, monikered "Fair Trade Recycling", perhaps played a  role.   Our organization introduced Interpol to researchers from Memorial University, PUCP Peru, USC, MIT, and Middlebury College.  We introduced them to importers from Ghana and Mexico and Burkina Faso.  We introduced them to recent studies by UNEP and US International Trade Commission.   And I took a few days from my vacation in July to meet Interpol at their offices in Lyon, en route to Geneva and Copenhagen, and to my meeting with Mr. Collateral Damage himself, Joseph Benson.

TVs replaced at London hotel by flatscreens make false arrests

Fair Trade Recycling applauds legitimate investigation of the used WEEE and electronics export trade.  Cees (pronounced "case") van Duijn, the head of Interpol's environmental unit, met with me in Lyon in July, extended his hand, and promised to do what is right.  And I believe him.  He was not there when the enforcements and seizures and questionable arrests based on "80%" baloney statistics got started.  He was not holding a torch, and does not seem to be in the lynching business.

We are on the heels of a year of arrests and seizures of exporters of used electronics, following a great E-Waste Hoax.  Interpol had taken a fake, false, hootenanny statistic from a puny Seattle non-profit, and based on the fake number, had seized hundreds of containers or used computers, displays, televisions, and cell phones.  Items, it turns out, which are reused or repaired 91% of the time.

Habeus Corpus means "Habeus Stuff", habeus #ewaste.  Start at the crime scene, start at the dump. "Stuff" is not, by itself, evidence of environmental injustice.  Just keep the facts straight, that's where justice begins.

Too Fine a Point on E-Waste Exports: You Shall Not Pass

Some have said it's an interesting thesis, the "Tinkerer's Blessing", and the risks of "Environmental Malpractice".  Search those terms in the box to the right.  The "Motherboard.tv" article has gained a lot of traction, in part because it accepts the premise that non-profit anti-export advocates mean well.  But perhaps we have put too fine a point on it.

If you are doing a term paper on "environmental justice", or on a topic I call "environmental malpractice", or simply researching the export of recycling generally, here's the truth.

A small non-profit in Seattle publicly accused African and Asian reuse traders of buying USA waste in order to burn it on the ground, of polluting or dumping.   The NGO accused the African and Asian traders of being motivated by "externalizing the cost" of American E-Waste companies.

The USA NGO, Basel Action Network, has repeatedly told the press that 80% of the used electronics exported are recycled in "primitive" processes, coining phrases like "reuse excuse" and "digital dump" (rather than "digital divide").

As a result, African, Middle Eastern, and Asian reuse factories have had their goods seized, have had their import permits revoked, and have been forced into smuggling channels with less responsible suppliers. 

There is no "habeus corpus" linking these people to the dumps.  It's "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the digital age.

In fact, independent researchers have found the opposite.   Most of the junk shown at African dumps was NOT recently imported, but comes from cities like Lagos (20 million residents, 7 million households with television).  The importers there, according to independent sampling of 279 sea containers, achieve 91% reuse... that's 9% not 80% recycling.  And it is a better reuse rate than brand new product sales in Africa!

Povertyjacking, Fearjacking, Sympathyjacking: Parasites Spamming a Noble Cause

Onion Magazine, October 2009

Lou Reed died Sunday.  Saturday night, I watched Steve McQueen in Papillon, my favorite movie of the early 1970s.   I read the book in Junior High School.   Steve McQueen died at 50 years old.

I'm 51.  So let me take a few minutes to write down what I'd call my "nudge the world" contribution.  Because "e-waste" is a debate about something people have already discarded and want to check off a mental list, it's over.

I'm not being smart or trying to be pulling my part
And I'm not gonna wear my heart on my sleeve
But you know people get all emotional
And sometimes they just don't act rational
And y'know, they think they're just on TV  
- Street Hassle, Lou Reed

What we have to expose is the "jacking" or "hijacking" of our collective compassion.  Our species has either evolved or been blessed with the ability to nurture, to care about others, to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.  But we are not blessed with omniscience.  So we have to choose what we care about, or let others choose for us.  Social cognitive dissonance creates a vacuum, which is easily filled by "celebrity experts".

What did we care about, and when did we care about it?

The blog noted Chevron Oil's titilating exploitation of the poverty aversion in May 2012, and other blogs have noticed, too.  "We agree".  Embrace the poster child image, get in front of it, own it.  Whether it's a small NGO with half-baked "statistics", or a big oil drilling natural resources in Africa, a certain number of people are going to get "cognitively dissonanced" (to verbization) out of caring.

Chevron Economist Ads

Below is chart credited to someone in the "art of self promotion" business.   Don't really care to give the guy a hyperlink, it looks like he wrote his own Wikipedia entry.  But you have to give him credit, he is correct in the life of a news story, and the opportunity between when a story becomes popular and people start to form opinions, or care about it.

As the chart shows, there's almost an art to "riding the wave" of social guilt, of channeling the "caring" to your own cause.  The African Arguments blog (Diana Jeter) taught me the phrase "parasites of the poor", reminding us to do the shakeout, in the end, of how much of the money goes back to the poster child's family.  In the math of exploitation, tinkerer trade is more balanced than either raw material mining (resource curse) or Basel Action charities, or even textiles and contract manufacturing.  More of the value of the sea container of monitors winds up in the hands of the Egyptians, Nigerians, Indonesians, Malaysians, Chinese, etc. Tinkerers or GOCs (Geeks of Color) than drilling, assembly, or even USAID.

But today's blog isn't about the math, or the Economics.  It's about how to hijack the white guilt as a force to kill the tinkerer's "gray market" and "white box factories", and how you, too, can put BAN's pictures on your website and show how much you care, with absolutely no accountability for the royalties the E-Steward branding costs your company.

The chart is about hijacking or "newsjacking" media attention, about the art of inserting yourself as an expert in order to catch the tailwind of public attention, and the benefits of whatever those eyeballs, clicks, or awareness gives you.   If your goal is to become a "celebrity expert", there is an art to that.  And most of us have a distaste for someone who plays the system this way, it's a single surf, an opportunistic ride of the wave.  We hope that the reporters, or the followers of the story, give more credit to people who have been "in the trenches", "boots on the ground", who somehow "deserve" the attention they accumulate.

Instead of Reading About E-Waste, Read Something Important

The Price of Precious, by Jeffrey Gettleman, will shock you back to the reality between Tinkerer's Blessing and Curse of Natural Resources.

"The first child soldier pops out of the bush clutching an AK-47 assault rifle..."

The article is about the "wild eastern edge" of the Congo... an area near Bukavu, where I spent my first weeks in Africa in the summer of 1984.   I've been a fan of Gettleman's for several years, ranking him with Fareed Zakaria and Tom Friedman as mainstream reporters who "get it".

It's the mining, stupid.

Nothing I've written below here is as important or as well written, or as insightful as the National Geographic article.  I urge you not to read further.

The article is profoundly sad.  But its also sad to me that I began this trek into reuse and recycling "e-waste" from the very same ground as Gettleman walks, eastern Congo, Rwanda and Uganda border zones... a frequent theme, and digression, in the blog.

more???...

Procurement 101: Vermont E-Cycles Lessons

As the recycling program manager at Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s, I oversaw something like 40 contracts per year (if you include 03 consultant hires).  We went through one of the biggest bid challenges, for the Springfield Materials Recovery Facility, which saved the state about $1 million dollars per year by switching from an incumbent vendor.

We knew that if the incumbent vendor lost, that they were certain to challenge the bid, so I had lots of time with attorneys at MA DEP making sure that each step of our bid evaluation was transparent, and run by NASPO.org standards (National Association of State Procurement Officers).  (Link to Massachusetts Chapter 30B Guidance on Procurement)

The incumbent Springfield MRF vendor did appeal, and they even won an injunction keeping us from awarding the contract to a new vendor.  Even though the state was losing roughly $500,000 during the six month injunction, however, we saw our jobs as making a smooth and continuous transition, and further, to show that Massachusetts DEP did not even want to suffer the APPEARANCE of impropriety.  By NASPO standards, the appearance of shady procurement is just as costly to society as impropriety itself.  Once an injunction is granted, the best thing is to sit down, in full transparency, and let the protester's case be heard.

So we patiently worked with the incumbent vendor, in as professional a manner as we could, until the court hearing.  The court found The Massachusetts DEP's contract procurement process was valid and dismissed the injunction.  But like an appealed referee's call in an NFL game, no one accused anyone of doing anything in bad faith.  And at this time, I'm not making any noise about bad faith in Vermont.

You will see in the news cycle a number of stories about the State of Vermont's E-Cycles ("e-waste") contract procurement, which my company, along with NRRA.net, administered for the past 27 months, with generally rave reviews.   The truth is that before the Vermont electronics recycling law had even passed, my company had already set up the infrastructure, and had a turnkey proposal in place in 2011.

This is not the time or the place to air our concerns about the new 2014 contract, or the merits of the two proposals the state decided between.  But this is a time to look at Vermont Procurement laws, and ask why "safety railings" are not in place to keep vendors and regulators from having it out in the press.  That's what NASPO standards were created to avoid.

"Does the injunction save the state money while providing the public assurance to a fair review of the process?"  If the answers to both questions is "yes", why fight the injunction?  Save tax money, hear the appeal out, and start the new contract when you've won.