Slashdot Mirror
UK Man Sentenced To 16 Months For Exporting 'E-Waste' Despite 91% Reuse
retroworks writes: The Guardian uses a stock photo of obvious electronic junk in its coverage of the sentencing of Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics. But film of the actual containers showed fairly uniform, sorted televisions which typically work for 20 years. In 2013, the Basel Convention Secretariat released findings on a two-year study of the seized sea containers containing the alleged "e-waste," including Benson's in Nigeria, and found 91% of the devices were working or repairable. The study, covered by Slashdot in Feb. 2013, declared the shipments legal, and further reported that they were more likely to work than new product sent to Africa (which may be shelf returns from bad lots, part of the reason Africans prefer used TVs from nations with strong warranty laws).
Director of regulated industry Harvey Bradshaw of the U.K. tells the Guardian: "This sentence is a landmark ruling because it's the first time anyone has been sent to prison for illegal waste exports." But five separate university research projects question what the crime was, and whether prohibition in trade is really the best way to reduce the percentage of bad product (less than 100% waste). Admittedly, I have been following this case from the beginning and interviewed both Benson and the Basel Secretariat Executive Director, and am shocked that the U.K. judge went ahead with the sentencing following the publication of the E-Waste Assessment Study last year. But what do Slashdotters think about the campaign to arrest African geeks who pay 10 times the value of scrap for used products replaced in rich nations?
Director of regulated industry Harvey Bradshaw of the U.K. tells the Guardian: "This sentence is a landmark ruling because it's the first time anyone has been sent to prison for illegal waste exports." But five separate university research projects question what the crime was, and whether prohibition in trade is really the best way to reduce the percentage of bad product (less than 100% waste). Admittedly, I have been following this case from the beginning and interviewed both Benson and the Basel Secretariat Executive Director, and am shocked that the U.K. judge went ahead with the sentencing following the publication of the E-Waste Assessment Study last year. But what do Slashdotters think about the campaign to arrest African geeks who pay 10 times the value of scrap for used products replaced in rich nations?
That's the problem with Capitalism these days, if you're not bribing the right people in government, you can't sell stuff.
Remember, arbitrage is only legal when dealing with intangible financial instruments. Arbitrage with actual products is gauche and therefore punishable.
How is that a capitalism problem? Capitalism puts emphasis on the private sector, not the government. Furthermore, I don't think this is even something advocated by any private entities. All of the lobbying behind this is environmentalist groups (which actually tend to lean socialist and/or communist) who think that they're doing the planet a favor by preventing used electronics from going to countries that are often the last stop in the useful life of goods (when they "recycle" them, they send to scrap the valuable raw materials, and just trash or burn the rest.)
In this case, you have to decide what is worse: Preventing all technology exports to these countries (which guarantees that they'll remain in third world status forever) or allowing about 20% of these goods to end up being discarded on the ground.
This problem is cultural in nature rather than cost related in nature. For example, in countries like Liberia it is actually common for people to defecate in public and just leave it there (they don't even bury it,) and often eat in the same place (breaking the old "don't shit where you eat" rule.) This creates a health AND environmental hazard that really has nothing to do with technology or politics, rather it's just really bad decisions made by the people over there.
Depriving them of technology will NOT solve this problem.
The way quite a bit of e-waste gets out of countries with strong regulations is by being shipped in "working" or "repairable" units, which are in principle allowed by law, even though they are actually waste. So this may be a bad thing, or may be a good thing, depending on the details. The mere fact that the devices are working or repairable does not mean that they aren't waste--if someone gave you a working 20-year-old TV, would you want it?
The way quite a bit of e-waste gets out of countries with strong regulations is by being shipped in "working" or "repairable" units, which are in principle allowed by law, even though they are actually waste. So this may be a bad thing, or may be a good thing, depending on the details. The mere fact that the devices are working or repairable does not mean that they aren't waste--if someone gave you a working 20-year-old TV, would you want it?
If I didn't already have something better, then yes, I would want it. My current main television is about 10 years old, and I bought it used two years ago to replace another that was 14 years old and needed an expensive repair.
I think, as an American, I need to wait for a politician or a celebrity to tell me what my opinion should be. I'm quite sure I'm outraged, I'm just not sure why yet.
Be Excellent To Each Other
I would definitely take a working 20 year old TV if I had no hope of getting one any other way. It's all about "what can I afford".
These TVs are waste because they are not digital, the countries they are going to are probably a long way from going digital.
One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure.
I've got a Nigerian neighbour (I live in Australia) who fills containers with electronics and sends them to Africa. I spoke to him about it and he said that they repair the stuff there, and reuse most of it. Considering that the analogue TV signal was switched off last year, and essentially all CRT TV's don't work, a lot have been dumped on streets, and they naturally been picking them up for free.
So it's surprising that they so blatantly claim that they're dumping them, when I can hardly see the sense in spending the money on shipping containers half way across the globe, only to dump it there, when it has already been dumped here. Clearly there's some thing going on which the business world isn't particularly keen on. If this person jailed was being paid to dispose of garbage and he was just dumping it in countries that don't care about dumping, then that's a different matter, but I get the feeling that our garbage is somewhat more valuable in developing countries.
In the UK, that's the normal sentence for defending oneself from a criminal attack or leaving your wheelie trash bin out an extra day.
I have volunteered many, many hours to some 3d printing FLOSS projects over the years.
There is a reason.
Manufacturing is a corrupt, bizarre industry. It does not take magic to build a vacuum cleaner. Mechanical inclination is innate to the human brain. The planned obsolescence fad has done nothing in the past 50 years except transfer wealth from the middle class to the top 1%, essentially by committing mass fraud by forcing engineers to use their skills to produce products that fail on purpose for no reason.
This time is coming to an end. No African would buy castoffs when they can print their own product in their own backyard. Yes, it will be a while before we can print electronics, but it was a while before we could print things like cups and knobs in the past.
"Oh but what about the jobs lost". Lets talk about that. Lets talk about GM, which purposely shipped huge number of cars, knowing that they had a defect that killed people. For years. And punished the person who tried to stop them. I wonder how people who work for low wages at small businesses feel about watching their own tax dollars being spent to bail out a company that kills people because it's management are lazy and incompetent. This is not about 'saving jobs', it's about ending a corrupt and evil system.
Actually, the party elite in the soviet union were bribed regularly in order to make sure things happened when they needed to. A government demanding bribes for doing what it's supposed to do is not 'capitalism.'
Yep. Because selling used equipment to Africa can be called illegal export of e-waste, it has to be destroyed and a lot ends up in landfills. Real fucking green.
Valuable components for repair of other TVs can be easily desoldered from irreparably broken TVs. This would reduce the environmental load in today's world when the planet is already overloaded.
On the other hand how to dispose of the rest when the country doesn't have proper facilities for that.
I think the question whether something is waste or not and whether its good or bad to export it to third world countries is pretty complicated.
I wonder if it would be illegal to mass desolder second hand electronic components and send them to the third world country for the purpose of repair of broken TVs (regardless of questions of economy or component reliability).
If containing broken pieces makes a shipment illegal - if a manufacture ships a container of new TVs and some of them are defective, is it classified as illegal export of waste and the manufacturer goes to jail for 16 months?
Karel Kulhavy, Twibright Labs
These TVs are waste because they are not digital, the countries they are going to are probably a long way from going digital.
CRTs also hold up to the elements much better, and some places do not have 24hr AC. Or any AC. (Air conditioning, not power)
they were more likely to work than new product sent to Africa (which may be shelf returns from bad lots, part of the reason Africans prefer used TVs from nations with strong warranty laws).
Wouldn't shipping shelf returns to Africa be e-waste as well? Is management of budget video/electronic chains going to be serving their 16 months when caught?
Have gnu, will travel.
For stuff they can't use, we ought to keep it and recycle it expensively, rather than shipping it there and have them die young of heavy metal exposure recycling it cheaply.
I understand your sentiment, but think how it feels to be told by the first world "You can not have this stuff that you want because you can not use it responsibly." Talk about arrogance!
Never let action get in the way of posturing. What matters is the pretense of concern, not the resolution of problems.
You're assuming that those same African consumers are buying them FOR aerial reception. DVD players aren't exactly luxury items anymore (I could walk into Wal Mart RIGHT NOW and buy a shit DVD player for about $25) and pirated DVDs of movies & TV shows are available in those countries for a pittance. I'd venture a guess that in the poorest countries, rural TV reception is barely worth bothering with ANYWAY, and most TV content gets delivered via sneakernet and open-air markets.
Also, most American CRT TVs from the 90s required little more to be capable of 576-line pseudo-NTSC than hacking the power supply to convert 220v@50hz into 120v@50hz. Analog CRTs had no fixed concept of resolution... they just swept scanlines over and over, bumping the timing a notch with each scanline, until they saw the vertical retrace signal or rolled over. They might not have had the dot pitch to properly display 576-line video without looking like shit... but that was part of the magic with analog stuff... there was a HUGE gulf between "what it was officially designed to do properly" and "what it could be coaxed into trying to do if you insisted".
Recycling is not socialism. Recycling is profit when it makes economical sense to do so. You will find this happens with most metals and a few other products like building materials and certain types of glass. Recycling is an economic drain increasing costs to producers and thereby consumers when it doesn't make economic sense to do so. You will find this with certain paper and most plastic and quite a bit of types of glass.
The reason is because it is either more expensive or cheaper to create new materials. when it is more expensive, recycling makes a lot of sense. When it is cheaper, it is just a burden.
Now this can get muddy when you talk about things like electronics. There is money in the metals in most of them but the environmental aspects of extracting them artificially increase the costs. In most of Europe, they have a special tax and a requirement for recycling these devices which covers most of it. In the US, not so much that I know of. In other countries, typically third world countries with lax environmental regulation or lax enforcement, extracting some of these metals are profitable and thereby recycling is also profitable.
Now, threatening you with jail time or heavy fines if you throw a soda can into the trash or toss a banana peal into the recycling bin is not socialism, it's more akin to fascism or the brand of totalitarian communism that communism (which seems great on paper but never works out in practice) always de-evolves into when they try it.
If the arbitrage was carried out by humongous multinationals, such as Japan's Mitsubishi Group or America's GE's, no, nobody dare to punish them
It's only punishable when small fry does it, small fry like that Mr. Benson in TFA
In this case, you have to decide what is worse: Preventing all technology exports to these countries (which guarantees that they'll remain in third world status forever) or allowing about 20% of these goods to end up being discarded on the ground.
False dichotomy. The computers can be sorted into useful and not before shipment.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I somehow doubt most corporations would like the idea of being forced to replace their entire infrastructure every two years. That would get very expensive very fast.
This actually sounds more like Keynesian theory of breaking windows to build economies (a direct violation of the classic "broken window fallacy".) For a modern example of what you just espoused, look at the Cash for Clunkers program. The environmentalists didn't care for it because it didn't further their goals, and used cars around this time (the market that primarily serves the poor) went way up in price because the supply of used cars was forcibly reduced during this period.
The so called "capitalists" were actually opposed to the program entirely. Democrats seemed to like it though, and apparently so did NADA (the group trying to force Tesla to sell only through dealers.)
http://www.politico.com/story/...
In most of Europe, they have a special tax and a requirement for recycling these devices which covers most of it. In the US, not so much that I know of.
As usual, just California. We have an e-waste recycling fee which is charged at purchase time. When you want to dispose of electronics, there is no charge. I take them to the transfer station which is convenient for me, but municipalities often have a curbside electronics _pickup_ once or twice a year. Not here, I live in the sticks, which is why there's a transfer station on the way into town from my house.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's the logical result of capitalism: You get the best government money can buy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Where do ours go if we can't dump them on Africa?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Dell has a program here where I live to destroy all computers that are donated to Goodwill. It doesn't matter if it's two years old or ten years old, if you donate a PC to Goodwill, Dell has a bounty on it and off it goes to the shredder.
I'd hardly call it a 'green' program. It's Dell insuring that there isn't a strong secondary market for PCs. It's heartbreaking sometimes to see the nice new keyboards, mice, and displays come out on the sales floor, and know that recent-vintage machines were probably donated with them.
Oh, and it's because the bogey-man would get the 'information' on the hard drives. And... and... and... somebody might install something from Microsoft on the machines that they didn't properly pay for... or worse... something other than Microsoft.
The last thing that the manufacturers want are people to reuse old equipment. Each is a loss of a potential sale of a new unit. In the perverse eyes of capitalism.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I'm not so sure. The stuff is sorted by chunks and in bulk. No one ever desolders components to remove specific toxic components. Rather they strip out the wires, separate a picture tube, and grind the rest up. Often they send this stuff to third world countries where the labor rates are better for handling waste (and regulations more lax).
Europe does have laws that the original manufacturer must accept the products for recycling, but there's no guarantee that they will do the sorts of recycling that the consumers naively expect will happen.
So what's better, shipping brand new TVs to Africa or shipping older TVs to Africa that work just find but which first world people think are no longer cool. Oddly the first case seems to be legal but the more efficient second case is not. Poor countries like to reuse things, rich countries prefer to throw away stuff and buy new replacements.
Africa has electricity. And they have television signals that European televisions can use. And they have this anachronistic thing called the television repair shop.
What they don't have is a European/American attitude towards turning everything slightly old into trash, or the income necessary to be wasteful.
Damn, you're stupid.
Most of these "environmental" laws exist to stifle the used product market, preventing manufacturers from being undercut by their own older models. This is capitalism buying regulations in their favor.
I remember it wasn't very long ago that we were all making fun of the Japanese throwaway culture where foreign students could get a lot of decent electronic gear from the curb simply because a newer model had a shiny new feature. Now we act in a similar way and those Africans are probably looking at us the same way.
I live in the UK, and I am using a desktop 3 years old, the family PC is over five years old, and our laptops that are 5 year old Lenovo T61's because they are better than the newer models. We dont play games on PCs - we have Android phones for that. PCs are for LibreOffice and Firefox (and the occasional bit of PCB layout). I think our company (Sun) servers are also more than 4 years old. They work fine. If it aint broke, don't fix it.
More relevantly: West African transport operators want mechanically injected diesel lorries with no ECU's because if the ECU goes wrong, the lorry and its load are lost. This means buying old lorries. The Western "polution reduction" Euro 5 etc, is about lining pockets for "Add-blu" sales, not about saving the planet.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Capitalism is defined as a system in which private property rights are respected and people have the right to trade. A system which requires bribing officials to use force to limit trade of private property or sieze the private property of others, by definition, falls outside that definition.
But yeah, this is a long-lost battle to redefine the word amongst the public to mean "whatever evil shit corporations in bed with government do"
My other UID is three digits.
Here in the USA we call bribes campaign contributions.