Questionable calculations

Brian Taylor

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

Appropriately enough for a phrase that pertains to trying to ferret out facts from obfuscation, scholars have not been able to produce any record of Disraeli having uttered or written the phrase.

Business journalists cannot be so dismissive of statistics, however, as information that is gathered and calculated by government bureaus and trade associations provides valuable insight into 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 12 May 2015, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) unveiled a study and sent out a news release to accompany it that declared in its opening paragraph: “Up to 90% of the world’s electronic waste, worth nearly $19 billion, is illegally traded or dumped each year.”

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 from the world’s two largest recycling organisations have raised the same questions and, at in industry gathering one week after the UNEP study was released, expressed frustration that news organisations around the world had repeated the report’s findings as being credible.

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

Trade & Environment Director Ross Bartley of the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR) remarked, “To say 90% 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. Just because you can’t measure it, doesn’t make it illegal.”

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.