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“Waste” Hellscapes and Plastics Pollution Mega-data: How Spectacles of Waste Fuel False Fact Claims
I begin this essay with a typical example of waste poverty porn and a groan of frustration that has been building in me for over 15 years:
Why do so many smart academics and concerned activists, top-notch journalists and valiant environmental organizations make false fact claims about wastes and recycling, not just once but repeatedly, even after their errors have been publicly and clearly demonstrated?
To be fair, this is a pretty complicated issue. There are so many kinds of wastes in so many different contexts that it would be ridiculous to say there is one main reason for this problem. However, in discussions on the transboundary movement of discarded electronics and waste plastics, two factors seem to have an astonishingly powerful influence in propelling misconceptions about waste problems. The first, is the ripping of dramatic images of poverty waste-scapes out of their context, as in the shocking picture above. The second, which exerts tremendous authority in academic and policy circles, is the construction of misleading or poorly supported large-scale (aka "charismatic") data.
These days we are all too familiar with the manipulative practice of taking quotes and video clips out of context to use them to make spurious claims. What makes the kind of misguided reports and shock-value imagery analyzed here different from such manipulative deception is that these images and data regarding wastes are rarely if ever produced with the intent to deceive. Indeed, most of the images and reports I will examine are fueled by a sense of urgency, a desire to draw public attention to ongoing human and environmental tragedies, and some are from scholarly journals that ostensibly root their reputations in getting their facts and analysis thoroughly vetted by experts to avoid glaring errors. That being the case, one would think a simple dialogue where fact claims are interrogated and obvious errors corrected would solve the problem. But that doesn't happen.
Take the above image. It has run on Wired magazine's website since 2018 and the caption for the photo claims Agbogbloshie is the largest e-waste dump in the world. But many years earlier both academics and practitioners in the scrap trades published several writings demonstrating that claims about Agbogbloshie's scale were outrageously inflated and that the throughput of electronic devices in Agbogbloshie was less than what flowed through many average "e-waste recycling" facilities in cities throughout the world.
A similarly distorted but repeated claim is made in the title of a related Wired piece: "Inside the Hellscape Where Our Computers go to Die; From computers to refrigerators, the world's e-waste has to end up somewhere"--a claim that Agbogbloshie is supplied directly by imports from "You" (meaning US/EU readers), whereas in fact it is supplied by a network of hundreds of scrap collectors from the streets of Accra and other regional cities. Why have countless editors, researchers etc., often people deeply concerned about these matters, not correct their mistakes? Do they not realize that by spreading misleading claims they might fuel misunderstandings of the causes and processes driving these community health and environmental crises, thereby leading to ineffective or even unjust policy decisions? Somehow it seems that when these two forms of decontextualization are combined--when decontextualized dramatic images of waste-poverty and misleading big data are marshaled together to corroborate the same false claims--the impression they produce is so powerfully persuasive that the claims tend to stick in the public discourse even after being disproved. And once the international policy community gets launched down the path of following such false narratives, reversing their course starts to seem almost futile, especially once international policy agreements are in place.
As I will try to show below, this road to grossly distorted fact claims often begins with what seem like fairly minor differences in interpreting physical evidence and word choice. My hope is that by starting with these apparently minor accidental conflations it might become clearer how these more dramatic/extreme false claims become accepted, naturalized, and even righteously defended despite being demonstrably false.
Problem 1: Getting Scale Wrong
On the left are two photos of plastic wastes. My question to you is: Which one is bigger?
The settings couldn’t be more different, a green tropical shore vs a grey concrete industrial yard. The kinds of plastics are also different. The waterside shot shows a filthy heap of all sorts of hard, soft and film plastics degrading in the elements. The scrap yard shot presents rather clean, uniform, empty PET bottles. Measured in terms of volume (as wastes often are) the mounds are more or less the same size—more or less the same height, length (at least from what we see) and depth. Measured in weight (another way wastes are often quantified), the shoreside trash heap is surely heavier; there is a lot of air space in those plastic bottles. So to sum up: by volume these mounds are about the same size; by weight the waterside heap is significantly heavier.
But in fact these mounds represent utterly different scales. The bottle picture represents a mass several hundreds if not a couple thousand times larger than the beachside trash picture. This is because the trash picture is a heap of wastes, an accumulation that has grown over several months and which will sit there and rot indefinitely, while the scrap yard bottles waiting to be baled are a snapshot of a flow. All those bottles will be baled and shipped in a day, two days at most, and they will be replaced by a similar sized pile of newly collected PET bottles from Beijing’s post-consumer waste stream, and this will continue every day, rain or shine, for years at this stall. The difference in scale between what is represented by these pictures is in fact huge, but unless you are aware of the processes involved in creating these mounds you probably just see them as approximately equal sized piles of plastic waste.
To clarify: there are two related confusions I am trying to illustrate in this comparison: 1) a confusion about scale, where one kind of material waste is seen as quantitatively about equal to another when in fact one is orders of magnitude more massive than the other; 2) a confusion of categories, where one kind of plastic waste (un-usable garbage) and another (a commodity input used for manufacturing) are seen as more or less the same category of thing.
Such conflations of scale and category seem fairly innocuous and they would seem to be easy to understand, point out and correct. Yet when these conflations are embedded in shocking images and framed by misleading mega-data such simple acts of correction often prove not simple at all.
Problem 2: "This place is a dump!"-- Confusing processing waste (noun) with waste processing (verb)
Let's shift for a moment to consider the confusion of terms like "waste," "scrap," and "garbage" from the big picture perspective of China's scrap trade.
From 2000-2017, well over a hundred million tons of scrap plastics were exported from the US and EU to China for recycling. This was only one part of an enormous flow of scrap materials including all sorts of paper and metals. Taken all together about 1500 shipping containers of scrap materials left US ports everyday for China in these years. Chinese customs offices granted import permits for these containers and the government built industrial parks (called "circular economy parks" (循环经济园) and "environmental protection industry parks" (环保产业园)) dedicated to hosting and regulating enterprises that processed much of this imported scrap, particularly because much of it was potentially contaminated and polluting if not inspected and handled properly. The Chinese government presented these industrial parks as bold steps toward environmental sustainability, awarding them loans, tax incentives and congratulatory plaques for their contributions to the country. (The home page from the website of one such "circular economy park" in Ziya, Tianjin is shown here.)
But not all scrap imported to China wound up in these parks, and much imported scrap, particularly lower value plastics, simply passed through these industrial parks and other officially permitted companies on their way to being processed in informal, highly polluting and health endangering conditions. To try to reduce this pollution, in 2013 the Chinese government implemented "Operation Green Fence," claiming that it was going to inspect 100% of imported scrap shipments. Yvan Schulz showed that 100% was certainly an inflated number and Will Flower, a journalist at Waste 360, placed inspections closer to 70%. In any case, during the first year of Green Fence the government made great efforts to strictly enforce its rule that scrap shipments could not be more than 1.5% contaminated. After a year of this intensive inspection regimen, about 22,000 scrap shipments were turned back for failing to meet the 1.5% standard. Some quick math: If each of those containers held the maximum legal capacity of 25 tons, that would total over half a million tons of sub-standard scrap shipped to China--and that seems like a really huge number. But then again, 22,000 containers was only about .04% of all the containers of scrap imported into China in that year. In other words, even under the intense inspection of Operation Green Fence, over 99% of the scrap containers that came to Chinese ports met the standard of less than 1.5% contamination. The point of all these numbers is to provide a sense of proportion regarding how much scrap sent to China could be claimed to be "garbage" by this quite strict criteria. The answer: .4% of shipments were rejected as "garbage" and turned away. Of the other 99.6% of materials, much of it passed inspection for import, meaning each inspected container was judged by Chinese customs inspectors to be at least 98.5% usable material and only 1.5% contaminating garbage. It might be useful to think about this in relation to something like iron ore, which might is often 70% usable iron and around 30% waste minerals and dirt.
Then, in 2017 the PRC stated it was going to ban the import of scrap. Why? The government claimed it was because the world was sending China too much polluted trash and China would no longer be treated as the dumping ground for US and EU wastes, which it dubbed "foreign garbage" (洋垃圾)--a term that implies in Chinese, as the translation does in English, that this was all useless polluted junk. Apparently even less than 1.5% of contamination was now enough to turn the other 98.5% into the equivalent of landfill trash. The Chinese government today is still dedicated to (and hugely invested in) a vision of recycling as environmentally beneficial. But the crucial difference between today and the early 2000s is that recycling in China today is only "green" if the materials are domestically generated; domestic scrap is the root of green industrialization, imported scrap is garbage. Leaving aside for the moment whether this logic can be justified (because there are certainly plenty of examples of terribly polluting and damaging practices related to the recycling of imported scrap, especially plastics) my point here is to focus on the two key areas of factual conflation at the core of this essay: conflations of categories of "waste" and conflations of scale. In this example, the proportions/scales involved were radically reframed by the shifting rhetoric of categorization; a shift of terminology suddenly turned the same materials from green economic input to polluting garbage; all scrap bales, regardless of levels of contamination, became garbage.
This kind of rhetorical slippage is not unique to China; nor does is happen only, or even primarily, in the rhetorical realm. In fact, this slippage occurs across a range of semiotic registers, and the visual is usually the most powerful one.
This slippage is especially acute when pictures I am calling "waste poverty porn" are deployed. In the vast majority of cases I believe the desire of journalists, environmentalists and researchers to share waste poverty porn is motivated by their sincere sense of shock, urgency and sympathy. Most people witnessing toxic and impoverished waste-scapes respond, as they should, with upset and alarm: “That is horrifying! Look at how much waste there is here! It is terrible that innocent people are being exposed to these toxic health hazards, that their water, soil, air and their bodies are being poisoned by other people's waste. And it is even more upsetting to realize that some of that pollution is coming from me!” Those reactions are powerful, they make sense, and they are not distortions. But then the mistaken jump in reasoning often happens... “That place has been turned into a dump!”
Here are two pictures of unmanaged waste from informal recycling markets in Beijing. The bottom one, take in 2013, shows piles of refrigerator insulation outside a used electronics market.
The one on top was taken in an informal scrap market in Beijing in 2010 and shows a garbage heap that was piling up in front of the men’s toilet and overflowing into the truck lane. This garbage pile got me thinking. My first reaction (when I needed to use that bathroom) was, “This is disgusting, why isn’t this getting cleaned up?” Some of the garbage in the pile was unusable plastic wastes that had been mixed in with the recyclables collected from city residents and traded in the market, but much of it was just the daily life garbage and food waste of the workers living in the recycling market. That’s when it struck me that this informal recycling enterprise received no municipal services. This waste pile wasn’t some industrial processing failure or pollution caused by skinflints trying to avoid tough anti-pollution laws—it was just the result of having no waste management service for the market.
Perhaps it would help to see the markets associated with these waste-pile photos to get an idea of the problem the above images pose. Here is a picture of one of 5 aisles in the used electronics market that generated the insulation garbage pile. No doubt that abandoned polluting insulation is disturbing--but once you see the rest of the market, is it even possible to reduce the entire establishment to an e-waste dump in your mind? And I ask the same question for the recycling market waste pile as well. The market had 70 active stalls that sorted and shipped tons of materials everyday. Unfortunately I didn't take many shots of this particular market, but here is one taken at the market entrance.
The point being, the pictures of waste piles hardly represent the totality of what was happening at these two sites, but if all you see is the garbage piles attached to descriptions of the sites as illegal waste dumping grounds, you might easily misunderstand the larger situation. These markets were actually tremendously active places where much environmental good was arguably being done. In one market tens of thousands of used appliances were being repaired and resold, extending their useful lives and getting them into the hands of less wealthy Chinese citizens. In the other thousands of tons of metal, plastic and paper were removed from Beijing's waste stream to be recycled every year. Those polluting piles of waste should not be ignored, but should be seen for what they are: not evidence of enterprises profiting from criminal polluting but rather evidence of a lack of any waste management services at these work sites.
And that, in fact, is what many (though not all) of the pictures of waste hell-scapes in the Global South represent—a lack of municipal or rural waste services. In cities like Beijing waste services are available to formal residents and businesses, but not for the informal clusters pictured here because the Chinese government withheld such services and formal recognition from these migrant recycling networks as a way to keep them from gaining permanent leverage over urban property and systems management. This of course encouraged market managers of these sites to be lazy and cheap; migrant recyclers who rented stalls at these markets didn't have anyone in city government they could complain to if the market manager was not cleaning up the premises.
But of course those are examples from Beijing. Far more egregious cases of pollution from informal scrap and discarded electronic processing occur from China to Ghana to Indonesia in rural areas or urban peripheries where there are no waste management service whatsoever. Many Chinese villages in the 2000s-2010s had no functioning or highly inadequate waste management systems. Below is a picture I took in 2007 of the horrible plastic pollution in Wenan, while it was still serving as North China's biggest plastic recycling hub.
It's obvious from plastic layered into the dirt that plastic wastes have been accumulating here for years, inundating the soil meters deep.There is no question that this in an environmental disaster. But it would be grave misunderstanding of the economic logic that created Wenan and a huge distortion of fact to describe Wenan as a waste dump--the quantity of the untreated processing wastes polluting Wenan's soil are a minute fraction of the scrap processed there. Think about this for a moment: the 10-20,000 plastic scrap enterprises in Wenan processed thousands of tons of used plastics daily, millions of tons each year. There was a massive logistics network that brought in those millions of tons of scrap from all over China and the world, and then trucked out millions of tons of marketable materials—a network created by the profits from trading and processing plastic scrap. But there was no logistics network for the wastes the enterprises in Wenan produced because the local government had no such infrastructures for its residents and made no effort to create them even as the plastic recycling sector boomed. Indeed, the government kept these thousands of enterprises in a legal limbo as informal entities and refused to interact with them officially, no less provide services like waste management. Now, it would be ridiculous to expect a small manufacturing or restaurant business in your city to build its own landfill and then administer a waste management system and to criminalize them for not doing so; but when one brands Wenan's mom-and-pop plastic processing shops of being criminal polluters because their processing wastes are not being managed that is essentially what one is doing.
One might ask: Wouldn't more responsible processors be formally registered and locate their enterprises where such services exist? But in such locations land rents are multiple times higher as are labor costs. Small informal scrap processing enterprises don't locate in villages etc. because they seek out pollution havens or because the money they save on pollution management is the difference between profit and loss for their enterprise; they locate in places with no waste management due to far more important costs--land rents and labor costs. As with so many other sectors where profit margins are small and labor requirements intensive, scrap processing can only happen in areas of low land rents. The disastrous pollution in places like Wenan is caused by huge inequities in income, labor valuation, land rents and service provisions across global and local geographies. The idea that such disasters are the result of scrap traders and processors who are intent on polluting to make a profit might seem very ethically appealing, but it does not tally with economic and material processes of the scrap sector. The point being, the forces shaping the pollution in these sites are not terribly different from the forces that create sweatshop labor conditions and other forms or human and environmental exploitation. To use a comparison more familiar to those likely reading this blog: to blame Wenan's scrap plastic processors for generating pollution would be similar to blaming an Uber driver who can only afford a low-milage old car for polluting the environment while trying to make a basic living, and then labeling them criminals for not being able to afford an electric car powered from by 100% renewable energy.
Maybe, then, instead of misrepresenting informal recyclers as racketeers who through some inexplicable economic magic can profit by buying OECD garbage and dumping it in the villages of poorer countries, it would be more fitting to approach them as businesses performing waste services for OECD countries while lacking proper waste services of their own, a problem that might be better addressed by demanding that the OECD countries and companies that produce the products that turn into these wastes (computer makers, fossil fuel and packaging companies, companies that produce single use plastics, sachets of shampoo etc) either stop doing so or provide economic and technical support for proper waste management and pollution remediation in these sites where their wastes are going for reprocessing. Criminalizing the transboundary movement of baled plastic scrap or used computers has not only proven ineffective, but puts targets the wrong, and typically weakest, actors in this complex commodity chain.