Good Points Well Taken - By China

A day after I wrote another absurdly academic post, directed at Allen Hershkowitz of NRDC, the morning news made my point.

I questioned yesterday how drastically "poisonous" the interpretation of Basel Annex IX (allowing export for repair) could be, when everyone agrees that China can:

1) Mine the rare earths and leads for the monitors
2) Refine and smelt the rare metals for the computers
3) Melt and mold the (virgin/new) CRTs and circuit boards
4) Take back product they sold for "repair under warranty"
5) Take back their own domestic e-waste (which dwarfs USA imports)

Somehow if the identical Chinese factory takes back a monitor NOT under warranty, they are going to be a toxic witches brew child poisoning disaster area. I'm talking about well screened computers, ones shipped to an ISO14001 audited facility, not blind shipments without TAR removed.    It seems like the Fair Trade Recycling solution has not been embraced by ewaste advocates because healing the wound is a threat to their sale of medicine.

Actually, its absurd that China cannot be relied on to recycle, let alone repair monitors.  But China has banned used goods imports, so we cannot go there under R2 for that reason anyway.  But this campaign to get India, Indonesia, Egypt, Kenya, Pakistan, etc. to also ban used goods imports is sick and environmentally hideous and wrong, wrong, wrong.

So anyway, today several news sources announced that Chinese engineers have made the worlds fastest supercomputer, 40% faster than the USA's largest.

If they repair or recycle it one day, it's not going to be the worst thing that has happened to China.   Let's can the denigration, innuendo, photographic sleight of hand, etc. which is being used to convince mainstream America that Shenzhen is a polluted rice paddy.  China has huge pollution problems.  Recycling is a SOLUTION, not a problem.