Questionable calculations

Brian Taylor

In 1906 Mark Twain said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” He credited former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli with having said it first.

Business journalists cannot dismiss statistics, however, as this data provides valuable insight into the conditions their readers face.

At the same time, one must be wary of trade association and nongovernmental organization (NGO) studies and their accompanying statements, as these groups may favor giving one side of a story more credence than the other.

In many cases, the persuasive speech disguised as straight news is fairly subtle, and editors can rinse out the bias by merely changing a word here and there. One recent example, however, was much more striking.

On May 12, 2015, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) unveiled a study and sent out a news release to accompany it, declaring in its opening paragraph: “Up to 90 percent of the world’s electronic waste, worth nearly $19 billion, is illegally traded or dumped each year, according to a report released today by UNEP.”

Where to begin? First, if something is being described as “waste,” how then is it also worth $19 billion? Leaving the semantics aside, how was the figure calculated and what is the definition of “illegally traded?”

Representatives of two large recycling organizations have raised these questions.

Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI) President Robin Weiner said ISRI had analyzed the UNEP report and found in some cases the authors were using one number for the numerator and a different one for the denominator, by including household appliances (refrigerators, washers, dryers, etc.) in the overall end-of-life stream but only measuring the volume of computers and cellphones recycled. “The report is not just off by a couple of percentage points,” Weiner said, but by an amount that is difficult to even measure.

Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) Trade & Environment Director Ross Bartley said, “To say 90 percent is being dumped illegally that would say that everything [the NGOs and the Basel Convention] have been doing for decades has been ineffective. People have made some assumptions.”

Finding sustainable recycling outcomes for some types of obsolete electronics remains a global challenge, but inaccurate and alarmist “studies” make a questionable contribution to overcoming those challenges.

 

Correction: Recycling Today ran the wrong photo with the Eco-Star Dynamic Disc Screen in the Product Spotlight for May. The correct photo is at www.Recycling Today.com/rt0515-recycling-equipment-machines.aspx. We apologize for the error.