Environmentalists Must Learn From Misdiagnoses: How CRT TCLP Would Affect Asbestos, Solar

First, by request, here are the photos the blog "Halloween Images of Scary Black People" pointed out a decade ago.  The blog was about language used to flog normal activities, rendering them repulsive - or heroicizing the same image (using Wordsworth's "The Village Blacksmith" to describe metal recycling compared to the way BAN.org described metal recycling at Agbogbloshie).

The BAN NGO was so proud of one photograph - of a man carrying copper and aluminum wiring (from scrap automobile harnesses inside a 1970s Magnavox kitchen tabletop TV case) - that they use it on their website masthead, and in annual fundraisers for "Giving Tuesday".  BAN offers readers who feel sorry for the "primitive" man the chance to donate $25-1000 to their NGO.  How the young man will benefit from your donation isn't exactly clear.

But as we pointed out in 2012, that self-same Magnavox kitchen-table CRT television was very, very, very unlikely to have arrived - as BAN repeatedly claims - "days earlier", or as a result of environmental externalization. Even back in 2012, that 1970s TV was an ebay collector's item selling for over $100. It bore no earthly relation to the TVs BAN or Greenpeace filmed unloaded at African port of Tema in 2009, or Jim Puckett's infamous updated photo of Africa's "primitive" Tech Sector.

Here is a picture of the top selling album in Nigeria in 1978 - by Africa's "Elton John" of the 1970s, the artist crowned as "Prince Nico Mbarga" (whose lilting song "Sweet Mother" from the same album remains Africa's chart-topper to this day).

Soooo, there's no evidence at all that the man in BAN's photo is carrying a TV imported used in 2012, vs. imported new or used in 1977. But BAN's practice of pushing the plastic casing as evidence of environmental injustice is ironically quite bigoted. BAN's unspoken assumption is that if-not-but-for villains like Joe "Hurricane" Benson, Agbogbloshie would be full of swimming and fishing young Michael Ananes, littered only with banana peels and coconut shells.

INTERPOL's (Higgins and Lindemulder) "Project Eden" was cruelly naive about African city waste. 

WasteDive Asks: Are Solar Panels the Next CRT Recycling Problem?

 Our small Vermont company gets 2 big stories in July.

First, Recycling International is publishing a 2 page interview with Yours Truly, whose small Vermont Recycling Company has catapulted to #36 on the Magazine's list of Notable Recyclers worldwide (and that's not just "e-waste").

Do we belong on a list that includes Robin Weiner of ISRI at #15, or author Adam Minter at #6?

My only explanation is ironic - compared to similar lists a decade ago, Recycling International now realizes there are hundreds of well-managed recycling companies in places like Ghana, India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore.  After reading their interview of me, I realized the irony that a) thanks to us (and this blog), the list is much harder for a white American to get onto, and b) we are deliciously placed several rows above Basel Action Network (screenshot below), which tried to get me labelled as a pariah after being called out for profiling Joe "Hurricane" Benson as a "primitive recycler" (rather than a 25 year expert at reuse export) based on his nationality.

But before I "bury" the lead about solar panel recycling ---  it's been my honor to put together an esteemed panel on how Solar Panel Reuse in Emerging Markets may offer the same solutions as it offered SVGA computer monitors 20 years ago... Register at NERC.org for a front row on Zoom, as I participate with Emmanual Nyalete of Ghana, Lennart Banaszak of Germany, and Good Point Recycling's very own Solar Nerd Trevor de Young (who's trailer home is almost completely "off grid" with salvaged solar panels - including some deliberately smashed by the solar de-installers in an botched "end of life" crime).

(see hammer marks, which rendered this panel 50% efficient. If it is relocated to Ghana, the 50% efficient panel will produce more KWH - due to abundant sunlight - than it produced in Vermont before it was "sabotaged" to prevent reuse).

Katie Pyzyk's interview in WasteDive explores our pilot program for solar panel reuse... and finds parallels to the CRT Reuse concerns that resulted in California SB20 and piles of shredded leaded CRT cullet across the West.

Is the UNU E-waste Research Program Ever Going to Learn?

 I'm a little behind in editing and posting a number of draft blogs, but just sent this email to a university professor who shared a Grist article with me.

The Grist article is not that bad. But listen as I go on a tear of the UNU program (source of data in the Grist article). I used to have a friendly relationship with the UNU e-waste program. But they are fricking racists, and it's time to drop the mic on uncle bubba.

When I meet with the UNU boys (who are convincingly nice) I can smell the ruffled feathers. But they doubled down specifically on Joseph "Hurricane" Benson, and when proven completely wrong, hid their BS 80% press release statistic (switching from "primitively managed" to "undocumented" means "we didn't know what we were talking about when we said primitively managed but we don't want to retract our 80% BS statements in the past used to sentence the guy we applauded the arrest and sentencing of, so we use "informal sector" to imply that black techs are to be mistrusted")

Now that I have our attention, I share what I really think via the email below. Wake up, UNU. Every Univesity researcher who read you study has discredited it as Criminal Negligence. The fact that it's still being cited by environmental publications like Grist just show you to be the Thomas Midgely of surplus electronics management.

Robin Ingenthron Academia.Edu - Two decades of building a case in favor of Trade between Global Geeks

The blog has almost as many unfinished and unpublished posts in 2021 than posts that made it online. Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin force me to make the points more succinctly, and that can be good if the subject is retreading of past fair trade recycling posts. 

Given no word limit, I find myself tiptoeing up to the edge of obfuscation. But at the same time, there are a few people out there still who appreciate the intellectual bedrock of Right To Repair, Right to Own, Right to Recycle, and the tactics of Action Networks and Big Corporations.

 To make sure everyone can find copies of articles I've published, or authors and researchers who've done research on projects of mine at Fair Trade Recycling - Here are some of the highlights of 20+ years of research, and the untangling of a charitable industrial complex that doled out heaps of collateral damage on the E-Waste Hoax. 

 https://independent.academia.edu/RobinIngenthron 

Note that the oldest one is a paper I had to hand-write on completion of my 1983 semester at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland (couldn't fit a typewriter in my backpack). I'd gone to research the Infant Formula controversy and the USA's refusal to participate in a motion by the UN General Assembly to restrict the trade of infant formula to developing nations (LDCs). 

At Carleton College I worked to re-instate the Nestle Boycott by circulating petitions, and was pretty confident that I'd discover the US was wrong. But after deep interviews with Americans at World Health Organization, the leaders of the INFACT* 'Infant Formula Action" group, and Geoffrey Fookes (VP of Nestle) I got a taste of the "career path" of activism. I could not see any way the boycott could have traction without targeting Nestle, the most wealthy and conservative and best-practices-oriented manufacturer. And I didn't see how the NGO could grow and build on a micro-issue.

"WHO's in charge?" was a pretty decent pun summing up the problems I saw with UN and World Health Organization acting as pharmacists to police sales of baby food.  The real solution was right under my nose 2 years later, when I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Cameroun, Africa.

(*or was it INFORM? One was the USA counterpart)

Frederick Douglass 1881 Speech about Abolitionist John Brown

 Finished reading, then watching "The Good Lord Bird" yesterday. 

From the National Park Service museum page for Harper's Ferry... this tribute to John Brown by Frederick Douglass serves as a reminder not to dismiss those who go down fighting for a just cause.

On May 30, 1881, Frederick Douglass delivered a memorable oration on the subject of John Brown at the Fourteenth Anniversary of Storer College. Especially notable was the presence among the platform guests of Andrew Hunter, the District Attorney of Charles Town who had prosecuted Brown and secured his conviction. In his oration, Douglass extolled Brown as a martyr to the cause of liberty, and concluded with the following passages:

Frederick Douglass

"But the question is, Did John Brown fail? He certainly did fail to get out of Harpers Ferry before being beaten down by United States soldiers; he did fail to save his own life, and to lead a liberating army into the mountains of Virginia. But he did not go to Harpers Ferry to save his life.

"The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught.