Happy Friday, muggles. While claims of cheating in U.S. elections fall short, New Zealand is suffering from actual corruption. It seems 1,500 fraudulent votes were cast in the country’s Bird of the Year contest, allowing a plump, green kakapo to secure its second term as the chosen bird. While this parrot ruffles feathers in the Pacific, these stories are ruffling ours at home. 

Cardboard is more attractive than ever before

Tue Nov 17

With office paper being used less and less as people work from home, cardboard is getting a 2020 glow up. You see, cardboard has traditionally been unattractive to recycling plants, who claimed the effort to sort and recycle this content was too high. Now, all that is changing.

It all starts with China, who increased standards for imported scrap in 2018. This was a big hit to the U.S. at the time, given we largely sent our recycling to China. And since the U.S. was unable to meet these standards due to the aforementioned cost claims, Chinese firms began buying U.S. recycling plants. These investments allowed them to adjust recycling processing to meet China’s scrap purity standards, making China the biggest customer of their own U.S.-based plants. 

Flashforward to 2020, and the recycling industry is thriving. The lack of scrap paper from offices has mixed paper prices surging from nearly $0 to $30 per ton of mixed paper. As a result, there’s a strong appetite for all that cardboard piling up from increased food and package deliveries — even greasy pizza boxes! U.S. paper mills are also coming back on line to meet the surging demand for paper products, including things like toilet paper.

SOURCES: Wall Street Journal, Wall Street Journal, NPR

Where’s the beef (coming from)?

Wed Oct 21

Imagine a world where the beef you eat is obscurely labeled and comes at the cost of a human life. Unfortunately, if you’re eating beef in the United States, this could be you. 

Wait, what?

It’s no secret that the pandemic has created beef shortages domestically. As America turned to other countries to fill shelves, Nicaragua stepped up to feed our love of beef. Now, new reports have found a harrowing issue with this beef source.

Nicaraguan cattle ranchers have been attacking Indigenous communities in east Nicaragua to seize jungle land and clear it for pasture. This land makes up a third of the country and has been legally owned by the Indigenous people for nearly 20 years. The attempts to make them flee have led to deadly attacks on villages and a rapid increase in homicide rates for the first half of 2020. In January alone, 16 homes were burned down in an Indigenous village in order to open up more land for building slaughterhouses.

And this conflict beef is ending up in American grocery chains, such as Walmart, Safeway and Target, with no indication of the meat’s origins. How? 

• USDA’s adjusted labeling requirements allows meat originating from Nicaragua to be labeled as “Product of the USA” as long as it’s processed and packaged in the U.S. 
• Not only is it qualifying as “Product of the USA,” the beef is also marketed as grass-fed, sustainable beef. 

How is this allowed in the U.S.?

The meat is supplied through a partnership with Thomas Foods International, and executive leadership there says they intend to continue their partnership with Nicaragua. The company is citing an agreement that commits to zero agricultural activity in protected areas, but locals are claiming the terms of the partnership are already being broken. Meanwhile, the latest efforts to change food labeling requirements back to include the country of origin continue to fall short.

Meanwhile in Nicaragua...

President Daniel Ortega’s government has been supportive of the growth of these cattle operations, citing their benefit to the economy. In fact, 90% of the country’s beef is currently being exported, with the U.S. as its largest customer. To make matters worse, the Indigenous communities of Nicaragua were among the hardest hit from Hurricane ETA earlier this month.

SOURCES: Reveal News, PBS, Food Safety News, The Intercept

Ordinary mobile apps are feeding location data to the U.S. military

Mon Nov 16

There’s an entire supply chain for our usage data, and some of it’s ending up with the U.S. military. Here’s how:

• Mobile apps, whether for exercise, weather tracking, or even browsing Craigslist, collect our usage data. 
• These apps sell that data to third-party brokers such as X-Mode, a company that obtains location data. 
• Third party brokers then aggregate and sell the purchased data forward to clients, including the U.S. military and military contractors. 

And the largest source of the military’s location data is coming from Muslim apps, according to a new report by Motherboard, a branch of Vice. The most prominent one (downloaded by over 98 million users worldwide) is called Muslim Pro, which uses location data to give its users information such as when to pray. Another major app involved is called Muslim Mingle, a dating app downloaded over 100,000 times. 

Historically, this type of location data has been used by the U.S. military to target drone strikes. This has led to hundreds of thousands of civilians dying during military intervention in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 

How is this allowed?
While Muslim Pro has since stopped selling data to X-Mode, app privacy policies in general make it hard to decipher just how much personal data is being bought and sold. It’s even harder to track down to whom your data is sold. Meanwhile, California recently passed new amendments to their own consumer privacy laws, which classifies user geolocation data as “sensitive personal information.” This could influence new trends around consumer data collection in the U.S. as a whole.

SOURCES: Vice, Business Insider, Watson Institute, National Law Review