I was just reminded that a year ago this week we were putting the finishing touches on a video produced by WR3A.org, under a grant from the Consumer Electronics Association. We were a small dog at the CES Show, squeezed between keynote addresses by Intel CEO Craig Barrett and Cisco CEO John Chambers. The United Nations GAID group also received a grant, and the WR3A video and UN presentations opened a great big window on international sales and the world market for "good enough" electronics products.
The original small CES WR3A Video was nice. They had issued us 8 Flip Video cameras to send to several countries WR3A has refurbishing partners with. They filmed repair and reuse operations of everything from 17 inch monitors to Macbook laptops in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Nepal, Peru and Senegal. We got videos from Fair Trade Recyclers / WR3A members from Vermont, North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, etc., and produced the video linked here:
Find more videos like this on Responsible World Citizen
We scraped up some money and hired a great Vermont Film Editor, Ken French, to remix the international video clips, and he released this new editors cut, mostly from those existing videos .
Good Point Recycling had a lot of rough weather in the recycling markets between the CES Show in 2009 and today. Most of our Vermont brethren stayed with us. It has been tough, but we are coming up for air. We were able to hire back one of the drivers who was let go for financial reasons due to losses... he had stayed awake over 48 hours cleaning up the mess in South Burlington that Earth Day weekend 2008.
The other good news is that the Fair Trade Model for electronics recycling continues to build steam and gain ground. We are going to be here again, year after year, recycling Apple products, IBM/Lenovo, Acer/Gateway, and other products made in China.
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