Oceans, Pigs & Glory Hole Mining

Trash in the ocean is getting more coverage this year. See today's NYTimes article in the science section (which I discovered, ironically, while following a different linked headline "Pigs Prove to be Smart, if not Vain").

".... researchers have found that pigs are brilliant at remembering where food stores are cached and how big each stash is relative to the rest. They’ve shown that Pig A can almost instantly learn to follow Pig B when the second pig shows signs of knowing where good food is stored, and that Pig B will try to deceive the pursuing pig and throw it off the trail so that Pig B can hog its food in peace."

This is actually a lot like Western, and now World, natural resources policy. Say what you want about mining and forestry companies, they are incredibly intelligent engineering-based companies which, at a certain level, act merely as the Top Chef, serving a society which really doesn't care what it eats so long as it tastes good ("More foie gras, anyone?").

Copper and gold mining companies, like Newmont, are having record years. Whatever society wants - coltan for a cell phone, copper for a TV, silver for ROHS compliant ("lead free") solder, they will get it.

While I have written about the tremendous and largely unheralded costs of mining, in comparison to the press over "recycling residue", and "trash", I don't really mean it as an insult to the mining companies. Just look at papers like this one (diagram: "Glory Hole Mining") ...

AN INTRODUCTION TO GEOLOGY AND HARD ROCK MINING by Dr. Willard Lacy

(Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation)

... and you see that environmentalists have to pick up their game when debating engineers from the mining college.

While the mineral deposit engineers are probably not going to celebrate the impending reform of the 1872 Mining Law, they are going to play a wicked smart hand with whatever cards they are dealt. The big question is whether mining reform would drive them to less regulated countries (I would argue that Superfund and pollution laws have already served that purpose and that royalties on mined material are easier to calculate and factor into "exploitable find" capitalization than pollution abatement). What it definitely does do, is causes these firms to look more closely at recycling.

From the Lacy paper, see the way mining engineers think. I think I could write a blog about almost every sentence in the paper and shed light on recycling.

A. MINERAL LAND OWNERSHIP

Expenditures for mineral exploration and development are wasted unless secure tenure on surface and mineral rights is obtained on all parcels vital and necessary for a mineral project.

Mineral land ownership in the United States resides with the Federal Government (FEDERAL LANDS), the State Governments (STATE LANDS) or with private individuals and business entities (PRIVATE LANDS)

When recycling giants like Sims swap assets with mining companies like Xstrata (formerly Noranda), engineers are doing calculations that look at a gram-per-kilo yield from scrap the same way they would analyze a vein of ore.

Well established is the fact that electronics have a much higher yield per kilo than virgin mines, the question is whether there is an exploitable quantity. You know what you own with a mining stake (actually, hopefully you know, it is one of the open questions when you mine in a developing country). When you invest in a recycling venture, you don't own the stream of "ewaste" or scrap material you intend to recycle.

In about 35 years, the USGS.gov estimates that landfills themselves will be among the richest and most exploitable deposits of metals like copper and aluminum, and landfilling will prove not to have been "disposal" so much as "in ground storage". What we in the recycling field are betting on is that between now (mining) and then (landfill mining), that recovery of materials before they are buried or burned will become increasingly lucrative. It is not theoretical, actually, it can be studied from historical records of wartime demand (when scrap metal is 'command and controlled' to get it to military use) or even hot-economy peacetime demand (when countries like Philippines "ban" the export of scrap steel).

Predictions: Whenever the US Bureau of Land Management is staffed by reform-friendly people (as opposed to the Norton-Scarlett-Abrahmoff clique), or reform of the General Mining Act of 1872 is up for debate and possible passage in the US House of Representatives, those expert miners will, like the intelligent pigs in the NYTimes article, figure out where the economically exploitable resources are. And they will invest in recycling, like Noranda did when Canada reformed its mineral policy in the late 1990s. Not because they are pigs, but because they are smart like pigs. They are the Top Chef to the society of pigs.

Almost finally, references to mining and mineral policy allow you to post JPGs titled "Glory Hole Mining Method" (see pencil diagram). This reference by itself could improve internet ranking, but could also cause your blog to be filtered by parental controls.

And now, another tribute in the recurring theme of musical references to recycling and e-waste policy, gracias a George Harrison.

Voila! Fuji Xerox supports government management of "e-waste"

In a very recent post, I had the premonition to repost links to the Fuji vs. Jazz Camera lawsuit which went all the way to the USA Supreme Court, claiming that repair and refurbishment for resale is a violation of a patent. The "Obsolescence in Hindsight" lawsuit failed in the USA but did win in Japan.

Today we see where enthusiasm comes, as predicted, for national product stewardship legislation. Fuji came out applauding for a new Australian e-waste law. Australia is the inventor of the "tested working" standard which banned resale of products for refurbishment.

Product Stewardship advocates, if you want strong backers for your "solution to the e-waste problem", get the list of the AGMA (formerly Anti Gray Market Alliance, now called (SIC) "The Alliance for Gray Market and Counterfeit Abatement (AGMA)". But as you find that those most opposed to refurbishment, repair and reuse are also your strongest allies, take a look at this old chestnut from Monty Python, the Dennis Moore sketch.

"Blimey! This redistribution of wealth is trickier than I thought!"

Industrial Scale Vermi-compositing... with Rats

Vermicomposting is using small worm bins containing worms that eat garbage. "Worms eat my garbage", by Mary Appelhof, was first published in 1982, from scholarly work she did in Wales in 1973. It was republished in 1997.

I say, between 73 and 97, she should have scaled up. After all, for hundreds of years, "Pigs eat my garbage" has been the standard in Cairo (daytime population 27M). For places like Tokyo and Mexico City and Beijing, we need more than worms.

"Velociraptors eat my carrion" would be going too far, I think. But for a major city, like New York or Chicago, "Rats eat my garbage", or "dung beetles" at least, would be more appropriate technology.

The "NIMBY" (Not In My BackYard) potential for a contained rat digester is high, so you'd need to build this with a lot of redundant security. I'm thinking something much more modest than Boston's "Big Dig", but probably higher scale than a paper mill hydropulper.

Think of a giant cast iron pit, as deep as the pit Luke Skywalker is thrown down chez Jabba the Hutt. The pit would have tunnels that could be cut off or opened from a central control room (like Jabba's, but smaller), and the tunnels would lead to little rat nests. You could choose how many tunnels to open from the central control room. You may want to have a giant blade, a whirly disposal-all blender, at the bottom of the pit.

Trucks would back up to the pit, loaded with wet garbage. They'd dump the loads into it while the tunnels were closed. Then the cage gate would close up, and the rats would be released onto the pile. After they'd eaten their fill, the smart ones would retire to their tunnels. Any stragglers would get cleaned up by the disposal-all and be there for the next tunnel opening.

From time to time, for population control, you'd have to flood the rat chambers.

I can think of no reason why this would not work. I'll work on a diagram. Maybe I can convince my wife to let me build a smaller scale model, using dung beetles.

Environmentalist "command and control" - Sorcerers Apprentice?

These four slides show four markets which environmentalists might wade into with accidental confidence if they distrust the free market, or fail to finish their math.

First, an actual example I was involved in during the 1990s. We wanted to increase recycling of office paper by increasing the price offered for the scrap paper. The idea was for the US government (GSA) to increase the post-consumer recycled content of printing and writing paper in order to create demand for office paper. That required de-inking investments from paper mill engineering companies, such as Beloit, as the tolerance for a dark spot on printing and writing paper was very low. Previously, the growth in the market for "Sorted White Ledger" (SWL) had been the toilet paper industry, which had very high tolerances for relatively shorter fibers and some of the dark spots from deinking. The demand by the GSA had the effect of increasing the percentage of toilet paper made from trees.




In the second slide, plastic supply-demand is considered. First, the post-consumer plastic recycling infrastructure was way behind the market for paper, glass, and metals, and plastic seemed really "high tech" to those of us old enough to have seen "The Graduate" in movie theaters. What I later learned was that plastic recycling was hampered in large part because, unlike metals or fiber, the polymers are a biproduct of fuel (gasoline) refining. When you make gasoline from raw petroleum, you get this stuff that makes good plastic. If you are making diesel, you are probably creating a different byproduct for a different plastic. If you cut demand for plastic, they keep making it, like curds keep coming out so long as we are buying whey. That is just one reason that the plastic recycling market lagged behind a bit. More important for these slides is what created postconsumer plastic recycling. It was not created by demand for the material, it was created at the back end AFTER collection - of bottle bill material. The bottle bills helped hasten the transition from glass to plastic (since stores and distributors now had to handle it twice, it doubled the handling issues associated with glass). Once the plastic PETE bottles started accumulating in bales, someone was able to experiment on them as a feedstock which was scaleable - much easier to finance than "if you build it (demand) they will come". Waste bans and collections at MRFs created the same supply-availability investments for HDPE, and film (LDPE) began to follow the same chains. However, those pesky styrene yoghurt containers were still in the waste stream. So some governments heard a pitch that you could make them into lumber. The problem with that? Not enough 4-7 plastic to make enough lumber to capitalize the investment. They had to try to chase back PETE and HDPE - where the resins were out-paid for because they had the higher added value of polymerization. The mixed lumber largely failed for the same reason that waste-to-energy and re-conversion to petroleum engineering fails... it is backwards yardage to take #1 and #2 and #3 plastics - which account for over 90% of the postconsumer recycling stream - and de-polymerize them.

Third example, AAARRRRGGH. ROHS or lead free solder. The free market had gotten very efficient with lead, capturing 85% of it, and most lead made is made from recycled sources like auto batteries. But lead is toxic. So to protect the pristine landfills in the rich countries, the rich nations of the EU dictated that the tiny amount of lead used in solder should be replaced by something non-toxic... which turns out to be silver and tin. Whenever silver is recovered, it goes into jewelry, so there's no way the added demand doesn't increase mining. Tin mining happens in places like Malaysia and Borneo, where it destroys things like rain forests and coral reefs. So, reducing the toxicity of the solder is improving the landfill at the expense of the coral reef. And the mining of tin produces more lead as a biproduct and effluent (also mercury) than was in the solder to begin with. A total failure.



Fourth example, a "modest proposal" following the same logic. How about a 100% organic, 100% reuseable, 100% non-toxic packaging material? Baby seal pelts. Or baby polar bear pelts. We could substitute it for practically any packaging, no one would throw them away afterwards.

Walt Kelley of Pogo had the best line, spoken by an environmmentalist swamp critter.

"We have met the enemy, and he is us!"

"Cradle to Cradle"

On the subject of raw materials policy, it has become popular to refer to manufacturer takeback as "cradle to cradle".

The manufacturer is more like a high school teacher than it is a midwife.

The cradle of materials is the mine, or the forest, where the material is harvested. The harvesting of raw materials is so completely impactful, polluting, and devastating, that no matter how high the yields, it cannot be done in proximity to cities. Copper mines in Chile must bus employees from 30 miles away because the drinking water in all the adjoining towns is poisoned by the mining. Even secondary, or recycled, metal refining is toxic. While less toxic by far than primary mining and nuking ores with cyanide, all the secondary copper smelters in the USA (7 as of 1960) were closed down because the pollution was too much for residential cohabitation.

The cradle, the maternity ward of raw materials, is where the trees are cut down to either produce cellulose fiber, or to make room for heavy armament bulldozers which will scrap bare the mountaintop.

Sending copper, or plastic polymers, or other raw materials too far back is "negative yardage". You can turn HDPE plastics into petroleum, but you wouldn't want to, because the petroleum then has to be re-refined back upfield into HDPE. You don't want to send pure electric grade copper back to a blister-copper smelter. You don't want to grind a working PC power supply back into steel to be made back into a PC power supply.

So, "cradle to cradle" in one context means back to the one-yard-line in a football game, so you don't necessarily want to go back to the cradle. But if you did, for the record, the "cradle" is where the raw material is harvested from the earth.

The manufacturer in USA-Speak is a marketer who puts their brand on the face of equipment assembled from 18 other products. Dell is closer to Walmart than it is to Palmer and Dodge copper mining. Dell is probably closer to Walmart in its practices than it is to Intel or Corsair. That is not a criticism (I think Walmart is a consumer union on steroids).

I guess the landfill or incinerator really is the grave. Except that USGS.gov says that based on the economically harvestable raw materials (by economically, far enough away from people for society to accept the environmental costs of the mining) identified for mining, that landfills will be richer in copper and other metals than viable mines in 50 years. So for those of you who insist on throwing your computer away, Recycling Man says "see you later."

Fair Trade "E-waste" Recycling = USA JOBS!

This weekend in Tucson, Arizona, our women partners, Las Chicas Bravas, are holding a TV and computer recycling "event". The ladies will supervise the unloading of TVs from cars to bring back into Mexico, to be repaired and resold if possible, in a "Cash for Clunkers" program sponsored by EPA and Mexico's EPA (SEMARAT). The ones that are not worth reusing will be torn down into copper, plastic, steel, aluminum and lead silica for proper recycling.

"Blackbird singing in the dead of the night, take these broken wings and learn to fly..."

The Mexico facility is in an OECD country, and we are going to certify the factory to R2 standards. Always expecting criticism, I was not surprised to hear the argument that exporting electronics for legitimate repair and reuse is "exporting jobs" from the USA. Jim Puckett made the point to me at the EScrap show in Orlando, and now I heard it at NERC, so let's look at the facts.

At Good Point Recycling, our export-for-reuse program increases jobs, and the quality of jobs, in Middlebury. Inspecting each monitor to see if it can be reused, and testing it for functional parts, creates a better and higher paid job than leaving it with the rest to be torn apart.

I do admit that if anyone in the USA is actually reassembling and refurbishing monitors and repairing them in the USA, that would create more jobs than Good Point is creating. But no one is doing that! (Video Display Corp. of Tucker GA and Lexington KY used to, now they only do it for specialized CRTs, not ordinary computer monitors).

Instead, the "recycling jobs for America" argument is being made on behalf of "crush-shred-recycle" operations, big black boxes which grind the monitors up into plastic, silica and lead. Fair Trade Recycling works arm-in-arm and supports this practice, because we can only export for reuse 22.5% of the product. By exporting it, we lower our margins by 50%, which allows us to get more product for domestic recycling. Good Point Recycling also uses manual disassembly of the CRT monitors, either at our own warehouse or at ERI in Garnder (a BAN supporting "eSteward" which, unfortunately, will not allow us to export their monitors for reuse - but they are a good place to send our bad 78%).

Big crushing machines don't employ many Americans to begin with, but my point is that reuse creates jobs side-by-side with domestic processing. We hire staff to screen and inspect each monitor, create inventory, market, re-price, and test for non-functional CRTs. Taking 22% out of the stack of bad monitors and TVs employs 80% more people per ton than leaving the 22% in with the others to be smashed apart. (Warning, this video is noisy)

In Vermont, the money we bring in by properly selling the good monitors also helps us pay people more than we could with a "no intact unit" export policy. It also goes towards lower fees for our clients, which brings in more material -- probably exceeding the 22% we divert to reuse. The lower the costs, the more we bring in of ALL e-waste... the folks who take stuff apart get more stuff to take apart, and the employees who test for repair specifications get more stuff to sort, inspect, test, record and ship.

Reuse and repair is a win-win scenario when it comes to jobs. It creates more and better jobs in both the USA and in the overseas "BSFs" (Big Secret Factories). Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and south China got their economies started with refurbishment and re-manufacturing, and we sell a lot more American cars and trucks to those countries than we would have by keeping them "barefoot and pregnant".

Again, if Video Display Corp or a USA TV repair factory wants to criticize us for "exporting American jobs", I will listen. But when I hear it from companies who don't repair the CRTs, I got to say it's a pretty lame argument, and I'm quite sure we create more and better jobs sorting and screening electronics for refurbishment than we would create lumping it all into a big demanufacturing machine.

The companies which specialize in tearing down the 78% bad need to partner up with the companies that reuse and repair surplus electronics. Our common enemies are hire just enough illegals to fill sea containers of unscreened junk and TAR. Three down, four to go. You guys know who you are.

Creating jobs for Mexicans in Mexico is good. Reuse is good. Let's drop our buckets where they are and lift them as we climb.

aquí viene el sol ! Here is a link to a cool recycling stop-motion film made in Peru. Not good enough quality to embed though. So here instead is Here Comes the Sun played in Spain.

Pre Vetting Your E-Waste Recycler

Certification and EPA enforcement may turn out to be the holy rain that washes away the sins of the recycling industry and brings the world into happy and holy compliance with the environment.

In the meantime, as a former environmental regulatory official, let me offer a couple of mud boots.

1) Civil Law: Get your e-waste recycler under contract. Better yet, use an existing state contract, enforceable by your state Attorney General, and incorporate your contracts by reference. Better than that, get your state officials to hire WR3A to help them write their state contract.

2) Due Diligence: We recyclers get 40 page RFPs (request for proposals) to do one day events on a Saturday at the parking lot of the suburban such and such. It is a lot of work to fill out a whole proposal for a one-day event, and a lot of work for the Suburban Recycling Coordinator to write and actually vet such a document. So here is a reminder of a tried and true formula for culling the herd of ewaste service providers:


- CRT Glass Test. Bad CRTs remain the bulk of the weight, the bulk of the cost, and the bulk of the toxics in all used electronics. The wicked savings by NOT hiring a guy to NOT inspect the monitor or TV and to NOT pack it carefully to reduct damage and NOT get environmental insurance to NOT properly break and recycle CRT glass and NOT transport it to a lead silica furnace, usually at least a quarter the way around the globe and often halfway... Well, the savings are wicked.

- Printed Circuit Board Test. If you claim that all the PCs are "functional" and "repairable", then you didn't need to hire anyone to disassemble the PCs and remove the boards. Ca-ching.

- Employees per ton. Not hiring people to inspect and remove the non-repairable and obsolete equipment? No demanufacturing? No department of labor worries.

- Sea Containers per ton. Baled, demanufactured, clean scrap takes a LOT less space than loose used electronics. And obviously, the less bad electronics you remove from the sea containers, the more sea containers you need.

WR3A now has a vetting program (click "find a recycler") which automates these tests, and with funding we will be able to check the data via at least 4 sources, one for each "test". Our experience so far? Falsely submitted data shows up funny on the scattergram, and at least one external source "outs" the liars... but usually the companies we are pretty sure are exporting everything don't click to pay $350. They see where this is going.

If we get the "Certification Scholarship" underway, we will have tens of thousands of dollars to pay auditors to get even deeper into the walls of the recyclers. The 4 tests might be retired. But until then, remember to ask "where's the beef?" Simple questions are best left answered.

More to come. Stay tuned.

CRTGlassTest_RetroworksDueDiligence