SECONDHAND.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

In 2014, an exporter of used electronics from the U.K. to Lagos, Nigeria, was sentenced I to 16 months in prison and over 142,000 British pounds in fines. His crime? Helping get used TVs and other electronics no one in the U.K. wanted to the largest secondhand electronics market in Africa, where they'd improve the lives of workers, sellers, and consumers by being repaired and resold or stripped for usable parts.

His punishment came from a cruel do-gooder stunt by Greenpeace in collaboration with Sky News, which put a tracer in a TV and abandoned it in Hampshire. When they found it in Nigeria, they knew someone had violated a law defining such devices as "hazardous waste." Their search led them to an exporter, Joe Benson, who ended up in trouble with the law over 11 shipping containers' worth of electronics he was sending into Nigeria.

"Insisting that Africa's secondhand traders adopt Europe's definition of 'waste' or risk prosecution--in Europe--is a kind of colonialism," complains...