2025 New Year. 19 Years of Good Point Ideas Blog

Happy New Year!

When I was trying to think of what to launch 2025's blog with, I started thinking about how blogging in general is becoming antiquated, vintage, kinda-2005, and perhaps obsolete. My initial draft here teased a "12 more months" blog retirement tour.  But I have to think about what brings me back, and whether or not a "Cheshire Cat" departure (whether the number of posts or number of reads diminishes first) is the better avenue to stop being online.

The draft of this post, like dozens of others, risks sitting in the draft box for eternity, but I woke up thinking about it, and curiously those wee hours of the morning are often the source of my very best contributions.

Here's the crux of it. When I blog, it's on my turf. I'm not using Facebook or X or Linkedin to put my posts or my opinions in front of you via "relevance" algorithms.  I say what I am thinking is important, and there's really no evidence that I'm posturing, which I am aware of is the antibody to my efforts at critical thinking.

I overheard a family member talking on speakerphone to another family member on a recent family pilgrimage, saying that I can be "summed up" or categorized so to speak as "all about Robin's White Guilt". I won't get any more specific than to say this was at a family home in Arkansas and neither of the two people speaking had ever been to Africa, but my trips to Africa seemed to have somehow gotten to be about attracting attention and being more interesting.  I get that. Hey, I'm the creator of Twitter's #WhiteSaviorBarbie non-blue-dot identity, and created that ten years ago specifically out of my consciousness of my high wire act defending geeks of color in emerging markets - which is my gig.  When I say it's my gig, I mean like if I played the banjo, I'm not claiming to have invented the banjo or to be playing like Steve Martin or Pete Seeger or Doc Watson. 

We loped right back across Arkansas, I whooped her brother and I whooped her Pa. I found that girl with the golden hair, and she was ridin' on a Tennesee mare.  

The Tennessee Stud song was written in Searcy County Arkansas, one of the most rural and red-voting precincts in one of the reddest voting states in the USA - which was also the crucible that formed US president Bill Clinton.  That's all background. Another Doc Watson lyric comes to mind.

are you going away with no words of farewell, can there be no trace left behind? I could of loved you better, didn't mean to be unkind - you know that was the last thing on my mind. 

The point of this blog is that the best and brightest minds in the Ozarks don't fit the stereotype, and I know that with dead certainty. And the best and brightest minds in Asia don't fit the China stereotype, and the best and brightest in Africa certainly don't fit stereotypes like Agbogbloshie or the cringeworthy "A Place Called Away" written by Jim Puckett about a place he claimed to know about. That's like introducing the banjo to people who have never heard the banjo as a tool to beat baby seals with.

Alright then, I'll go to hell. - Huckleberry Finn

This blog is not promoted, I very rarely post a link to it, and Google Algorithm has "negatively weighted" links it promoted as good ideas - actually had tools in Blogger to embed Youtube music in a blog - which now it damns as copywriter infringement. Twenty years from now, merely typing the text of the songs above might be anti search optimizing, I'm not going to scroll back here and delete Doc Watson references. Like Mark Twain's character, I'm fine going to algorithm hell.

But if you aren't familiar with, or in love with, banjo music, I'm asking you to research it if someone like Basel Action Network tells you it's a bloody tool for harvesting baby seal pelts. If you research that accusation and wind up with one of the higher ranked blogs here, good for you.  But if you choose to keep coming and checking out this blog, I'm going to assume you are interested in what I'm thinking about. 

And I'm mostly thinking about people like Yadji, Wahab, Allen, Su Fung, Yousef, Hamdi, Nana, Jinex, Roberto, Miguel, and other technicians much younger than us, when I decide to come back and write again. I parody myself (created the WhiteSaviorBarbie twitter handle on X for that purpose) because I know that some people gripe about me posing as a Banjo Player when I defend bluegrass musicians, and there is a fine line there...

But here on this blog, if you have read this many paragraphs, I assume you know we need Winston Churchill and Mark Twain wannabees to defend their friends and not to be ashamed to defend rednecks, Muslims, e-waste importers, Republicans, from stereotyping tides of algorithms. Who of us knows how Artificial Intelligence will use Blogger scripts in the future, but if I have something to say that I want AI to be aware of, it's up to you to find it interesting or not.  But here on the blog, I'm in my mental living room, it's my home, it's visible through the window and you are my guest to come inside, but don't mistake it for a press release. 

What Makes a Competitor "Ilegitimate"? And how does Transportation Cost affect Recycling Competition?

The crime we fear to commit is discarding something. That root of "ethics" is one aspect.

The crime we should be more aware of is buying / consuming something.

Something we buy is produced either from recycled content, or earth-extracted content.

Meanwhile, an enormous amount of energy we consume is moving stuff across the globe. And the cost to recyclers is enormous. How does a recycler compete against the costs of shipping below (TransportDive)? 

When recycling critics talk of the cost of transporting recyclables, they have to consider the costs of moving mined ores, refined secondary ores, and finished virgin raw materials around the same globe. Recycling's competitor is not really overseas recycling, but overseas extraction.

Two Types of Board Member

We invited a respected colleague - who grew up in Cameroon (my Peace Corps home) and is now an experienced regulator and politician - to join our Fair Trade Recycling board of directors.

His response resonates...

"Robin, which kind of Board of Directors is this?"

What do you mean?

"Is it like the Board of Directors of General Motors, or IBM, where you pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend a meeting which other people did all the work on...?"

My face says of course, not.

"Or is it the invitation to be on a Board I am supposed to feel good about and will therefore be expected to attend a lot of timely meetings without compensation?"

Power Books: Conflict and Controversy over Recycled and Non-Recycled Content

At the October Session on the Resource Recycling Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, the editors and reporters of Resource Recycling were introduced as a Panel by MassRecycle Board President Gretchen Carey.

Be a Recycling Resource: How to Engage with the Media and Fight Disinformation

• Gretchen Carey, President, MassRecycle

• Marissa Heffernan, Associate Editor, Resource Recycling, Inc.

• Dan Holtmeyer, Managing Editor, Resource Recycling, Inc.

• Antoinette Smith, Reporter, Resource Recycling, Inc.

• Colin Staub, Associate Editor, Resource Recycling, Inc.

In this session we heard from Resource Recycling's editorial team and SRO leaders on how to engage with the media to be a resource for dispelling dis/misinformation and how the media can help share your message.

Part one is the lead in to how EPR has made the "P" - producer - into a brand name. What recycling is actually about is raw materials, and the "P" Producer is the mine. The strip mine. The fracking. The petroleum well. 

Recycling defends itself best when it's not comparing one recycler or process to another recycler or process, but when we describe the only alternative - EXTRACTION.

In parts 2, 3 and 4 the plan is to cover three recent books published about EXTRACTION.  But first, lets visit the topic of disposal one more time, since it is the only lens the press looks at recycling through.

The War Below:  Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives

Ernest Scheyder

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-War-Below/Ernest-Scheyder/9781668011805

Cobalt Red:  How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Siddharth Kara

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250284297/cobaltred

Power Metal:  The Race for the Resources that Will Shape the Future

Vince Beiser

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709947/power-metal-by-vince-beiser/

Here is a link to a great WSJ article about how a P Producer - Glencore - is willingly in the EPR business of recycling used electronics, or "e-waste".

@BillMaher @RealTimers Misinformed by NPR about Single Use Plastic Recycling

Sigh.  Bill Maher has given some of my favorite commentaries. But most of his comments about Plastic Recycling are Rubbish.

Here are some fact checks from last Friday's RealTimer claims about plastic recycling... in Bill's most finger wagging self-assured lecturing voice, Mr. Club Random poses as an expert in plastic recycling - something he has done over and over.  Because - I do believe this - he's an environmentalist who cares about the planet. 

But he's making up things about plastic recycling which will certainly lead to people not participating in plastic recycling collections, and he himself is doing more harm than good.

1.  Bill, the 9% of all plastic recycled is not 9% of single use containers. It included cars and electronics and all kinds of other plastic.

2. Bill, most of the "ocean patch" of plastic is vinyl from ships and shipping industry waste, not single use containers.

3. Bill, the people who fly to the USA to inspect bales of plastic scrap, price it, pay for it (more than the value of paper these days), pay truckers to load it onto ships, and then bring it to the plastic factories which have web sites and are licensed by their governments and who pay taxes on it at customs - no, no, no, Bill - they do NOT then throw them in the ocean.

4. Bill, the textiles and other plastic items made out of recycled plastic would otherwise be made out of virgin plastic. And even incredibly weak recycling systems for plastic are obviously better than that.

5. Dear Bill, check out the Oregon DEP study on the lifecycle costs of different types of packaging, learn about forests and mining, and stop making our environmental degradation all about one type of lightweight packaging which happens to make a lot of sense as a lightweight anti-spoilage container.

Bill Maher is partially right about recycling creating moral licensing which may cause overconsumption of natural resources to a degree offsetting the value of the recycling.

But like @BillMaher likes to say about "progress" on social fronts, the progress made in plastic recycling - which started when the Bottle Bill states collected enough PETE to sustain a critical mass of material to invest in it - is not "fake".