Basel Action Network's Relentless Racism Against Africa's Tech Sector May Succeed

For years, Basel Action Network has insisted on fake statistics about e-waste "loopholes" in the Basel Convention.  The original Basel Convention, in Annex IX, explicitly exempts reuse and repair of electronics from "waste" definitions (list B1110).

BAN's Jim Puckett was a film major, and when he advised someone I was taking with me to see reuse factories in China, Jim told him to "take pictures of children on the scrap".  His other tactic was to make up statistics that were so alarming that they made people accept that it must be terrible. If 80% of X results in something bad, there must be something wrong with X.

- homosexuality, atheism, swimming.... if 80% of it is bad, make it illegal?

https://resource.co/article/basel-convention-require-informed-consent-e-waste-exports

Depressingly, Ghana (which never signed or ratified the Bamako Convention, and consequently benefited by massive mass communications investments, leapfrogging Mali) has its name on a Ghana-Swiss proposal to finally change the Basel Convention to make import of used electronics de facto defined as "waste".  See my comments to Resource Magazine, (Amelia Kelly) which made the mistake of interviewing Basel Action Netwwork but not the Tech Sector importers who are capable of speaking on their own behalf.

"There are 170,000+ mobile phone towers on the African continent today, thanks to the "critical mass of users" of flip phones which BAN tried to stop the export of a decade ago. The privileged wealthy white guy gets to define what is "waste", and the African tech sector experts who made the mobile phone tower investments possible are profiled as "Primitives" or at best "Informal Sector" (as if not knowing how smart they are is a reason to prosecute them). Free Hurricane Joe Benson." - Robin Ingenthron

 This guy loses his job, and the displays get ground up for raw materials... and doesn't get to reply to Jim Puckett's quote (below the fold)

Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 2: Lithium and Indium

The photo below is actually related to blog 2, the problem of under-investment in recycling rare earths. $300 million for EV battery recycling may be too much, but $0 for indium may be too little.

Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 2: Lithium and Indium 

We need to be "small c" conservatives. "It doesn't take a genius to see the world has real problems, but it would take a whole roomful of morons to think [throwing government money] can fix it." (paraphrase from The Watchmen, 2009). Or better yet, yes, do fund these programs (at least to the degree government has subsidized mining and nuclear energy development), but make sure you have conservatives managing conservation.

The Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 1 took a critical "what could go wrong" with well-intentioned environmental policy to supply Electric Vehicles with recycled content Lithium batteries, focusing on a Wall Street Journal article on the shortage of Lithium batteries for planned "recycled content", and a more detailed focus on the need for more mining by Hans Eric Melin.

Government funding of Lithium recycling capacity ($200M in the "Inflation Act" budget) may not make a lot of sense if there's a shortage of batteries to recycle... or if it requires cannibalization of reuse markets.  The hospital shouldn't build a morgue so big that it needs to toe-tag every patient to feed it.

But the history of nuclear power - funded enormously by government research - may make a different case.

To make the case that it does make sense to invest SOME government funding in recycling, I'll now focus on the opposite problem - I can't find a buyer for indium bearing "black glass" from our Good Point Recycling flat screen TV reuse and recycling program.

Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 1: Lithium and Indium

Recently I have moved away from the longer, deliberative, but time consuming Good Point Ideas Blog and more to LinkedIn posts and "Twitter Threads".  I'm not alone in that - writers like Adam Minter have pretty much dropped blogs like ShanghaiScrap entirely.  And I'm using Facebook's Fair Trade Recycling account even less than I blog, because you know, Facebook.

But the dandelion motif of the blog remains important. "Fishing for swordfish while surrounded by perch" was a label given to me 23 years ago, which I've embraced (or sometimes substitute dolphins for swordfish and tilapia for perch when it's a international audience)... the blog is sometimes discovered years later by someone important who will never see the Tweet or Linkedin hashtag.  As bad as my blogs suffer from too many to sort, there are important reporters, researchers and policy makers out there who rely on Google or DuckDuckGo rather than the equally important Twitter search box.

The previous blog, my public submission for the General Mining Act, was important enough that I don't want to write anything to compete with it. The MassRecycle Podcast with Aaron Mintzes of Earthworks (the most important Mining Reform NGO) was also more important than much else I have to say.

But let me put two very important Mining / Recycling dilemmas on the Blog for September. Both are current.  Lithium and Indium.

I'll briefly link the Lithium debate to better written posts by experts, but Adam himself helped promote my Lithium Battery WSJ article Linkedin post and Recycling International asked me to turn it into a guest editorial. Hans Eric Melin also wrote a more astute post on the dilemma, which is as follows.

1. The carbon / global warming challenge demands more Electric Vehicles #EVs*(see footnote)

2. The EVs demand Lithium Batteries

3. There is not enough Lithium refining to manufacture the currently planned EV manufacturing.

4. Europe and USA (Biden's "inflation bill") are trying to solve the shortage by investing in RECYCLING of replaced electric vehicle batteries.

5. The batteries are not there, largely because they are being REUSED, and the investments in meeting demand with recycling reflect the same false assumptions Europe and USA generated for CRTs in the late 1990s and flip phones in the first decade of Y2k.

6. The wealthy OECD nations buying most of the #ElectricVehicles demand the two tons of car travel 150 miles between charges - and the battery is replaced because it goes less than 100 miles between charges.

7. A Secondhand Lithium Battery that will push two tons of metal a mere 75 miles between charges has WAY MORE REUSE LIFE and demand than the battery recycling investments will be able to pay.

8. Just as "Big Shred" funded reuse of flip phones and CRT monitors as "primitive" and "polluting", the new Lithium Battery Recycling industry will probably feel forced to denigrate the secondhand solar panel recycling market.

Here again is a 42 year old solar panel put to reuse by Good Point Recycling in Middlebury Vermont. It's powering a radio (symphony cuts out when my shadow passes the panel), a desk lamp, and is charging a mobile phone.  It would make zero sense for the homeowner not to replace this with a newer more efficient panel, AND it also makes no sense to ban it from reuse in Africa. The millions of solar panels that will be upgraded will drive demand for used, secondhand EV batteries. COUNT ON IT.

more...

Comments to Federal Register: Request for Information To Inform Interagency Working Group on Mining Regulations, Laws, and Permitting

 

Request for Information To Inform Interagency Working Group on Mining Regulations, Laws, and Permitting

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/07/15/2022-15114/request-for-information-to-inform-interagency-working-group-on-mining-regulations-laws-and

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland

It is critical to environmental public works, waste management, and recycling sectors in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coasts that federal lands in the interior west be managed in a way that levels the playing field. For too long our Congresspeople have failed to recognize that subsidies and lack of management of mining, fracking, and timber management on federal lands have direct consequences on recycling programs for metal, glass, plastic and paperstock.

After 150 years, the critical need to reform the Mining Law of 1872 is well documented. As professional recyclers from states without federal mining, fracking, and extraction, it is essential that we convey the importance of mining reform to the investment, job creation, economic realization, and sustainable economy.

When recyclers in cities like Boston, Albany, Baltimore, Burlington, etc. pay people to collect secondary raw materials from urban, suburban and rural waste:

1. We must pay for the value of the material, unlike “royalties” unpaid by virgin material harvests
2. We must pay for the cleanup of sites when we are finished with our recycling work
3. We are responsible for waste effluent and byproducts

Unfortunately, even as we recyclers provide 40% of all of the metals, paper fiber, and plastic used by USA industry, we must compete - unfairly - against wanton waste, crude processing, toxic tailings, and environmental injustice for the “backyards” of indigenous Americans, whose “NIMBY” interests are never paid as much attention to as the urban neighborhoods of our recycling enterprises. Our recycling programs provide raw materials at a fraction of the energy and carbon costs of virgin material extraction. Our children's children will appreciate every ton we conserve by leaving in the federal lands to be used, sparingly, to meet future needs.

Every time serious reforms of the mining laws in North America (by Udall and Bumpers in the 1980s, or Canada in the 1990s) are even discussed or threatened with a committee vote, the free market invests in recycling. Since this committee started its consideration, two of the largest investments in electronics recycling were made by the raw material smelting industry.

As the front-line regulators, investors, workers, and consumers of “Urban Ore” recycling programs, we urge you to recognize and defend our interests in a level playing field and circular economy.

Robin Ingenthron

Founder, Fair Trade Recycling (tradename of WR3a.org)

Three Legged Journalism: Reporter + Source + Editor > Blogger

While on summer vacation at my parents place in rural Arkansas (Buffalo National River, the only river managed by the US Department of the Interior - please don't issue mining and fracking rights here), I have a chance to reflect on journalism, and my critiques of lopsided and inaccurate reporting over the years.

Talking with Mom on the apparent loudness of politics, and tribal journalism, and bias confirmation... We settled on risk analysis, and how so many people believe in conspiracy theories.

Around here in the Ozarks, the "deep state" conspiracy is admittedly popular. I was informed yesterday (indirectly from a confidential source) that a contractor lady for Mom - sweet gal, hard worker - informed her that the Republican staff and White House lawyers who testified to Representative Thompson and Cheney's January 6 Investigation committee were "paid" to testify against Trump.  By whom? Didn't get to ask.

Now I do know on firsthand that this can happen.  Conspiracies can definitely happen. But the rumors of conspiracy travel halfway around the world while the Truth is still waking up to a hangover.

"Going Out On a Limb" however is a lot easier for a blogger than it is for an institution. It is rare that a blogger like myself should be a better source than any of the journalism institutions or international agencies that gave Anane's wildfire story on illegal e-waste dumping the oxygen to burn people like Joe "Hurricane" Benson. So today I'll reflect on how rarely anti-conspiracy experts get it right.