Meanwhile Back in Yaounde Cameroon ... Eden is Noisy Picture

The place has grown since I lived there in the mid 1980s.  My wife is back in Yaounde again, and just shared the photo below by Facebook, the view from her hotel.



One thing is the same.  Electricity.  Yaounde had electricity when I arrived in 1984.  And had the first television broadcasts by the end of 1986 (showing Alex Haley's "Roots" in English to people who didn't speak English... it was awkward).

So, since television stations started broadcasting in 1986, not even counting the CRT televisions people had to watch VCR tapes with before that, how many "e-waste" televisions would you expect to find in the Yaounde dump in 2006?

If you can count over 12 of them in the Guardian's "e-waste Chernobyl" photos, how long were the twelve TVs sitting there on the ground?  Is it so difficult to image the city above can generate as many TVs as the town of Middlebury, Vermont?

Don't the statistics from the UN studies start to sound less crazy?   Doesn't it start to make sense that it's only 9% fallout (unrepairable, tossed) rather than 80%?  If it was only 20 percent reuse, how many containerloads of TVs would they need to set the city up with television?

Or maybe, that's not the point.

"Back to Eden Project".



Ah!  That's better!  That's the way Europe likes to remember Africa.

No TVs, no radios, no computers, no hassle.  A tropical paradise.

Now, cue the crouching children.  Oh, shoot.  No crouching children in the rain forests.  They are still crouching at the city dump.



Pictures of Africa suitable for Europe?   Picture this:  African kids playing free vintage games on used CRTs.  And no, they cannot hear our healthy "tsk, tsks" across the Atlantic.  

Cultural Gulfs Tribute to Lucille (I Love Lucy) Ball, Chica Brava

The Woman Behind the Clown

Honorary new member of Chicas Bravas.  Lucy passed 25 years ago.

Sunday AM tribute in the vein of "Cultural Gulfs", and how urban USA markets create an incubator for diversity and equality to triumph in.  USA television became a vehicle for women's rights, cultural integration, and spawned a "Star Trek" culture where the vision of the future is cooperative diversity - the exact opposite of Hitler's Nazi Arian monoculture and Sharia etc.   Thanks, Lucy.

(PS: Funny, I wrote and posted this without even realizing it was the 25th anniversary of her death, I was just inspired by laughing at a rerun of I Love Lucy, and started blogging..."Like laundromats heros are sometimes right under our noses"... written with no clue she's on the cover of Huffington Post today)

Hispanic husband 6 years younger? So?

Rising on my list of heroes. Lucille Ball.  An honorary Chicas Bravas.

Hardest working woman in 1950s showbusiness.

Lucy's insistence on better quality led to invention of live studio taping, multi camera editing rooms. She and Desi negotiated to pay (rather than network pay) for the higher quality in return for the first "syndication" (rerun) ownership rights of their own I Love Lucy show, a smart move that paid for their own studio. She strong-armed Hollywood into accepting America would accept a bicultural husband-wife sitcom, and carried the ball.

What brought them down? Divorce didn't help. But according to this article Lucy got leveraged on production costs for these weird expensive production shows... Star Trek and Mission Impossible - which all the other studios had passed on.

She was scorned by many older, more powerful, Hollywood men. A real glass ceiling pounder. If we had had stronger womens equality in the 50s and 60s, and a kickstarter campaign, Lucy would probably be bigger than George Lucas.

Another Desilu production passed over by bigger Hollywood Studios?  Carl Reiner's Dick Van Dyke Show, which I grew up loving.  She sold Desilu to Gulf and Western in 1967, which combined it with Paramount pictures, a studio G&W bought a year earlier..

And I would add that it was Lucy who muscled in the inter-cultural marriage which made Loving vs. Virginia, the Supreme Court case legaizing all interracial marriages, easier for America to swallow.

Search periodicals like "The Economist" for insights into how Womenomics works.   Glass ceilings (and bamboo ones) hold back Japan, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

How Lucille Ball Made STAR TREK Happen

Published September 08, 2013 by Devin Faraci

@RecyHub: The Case for Reformed Electronics Recycling Exports

  White's move...  


In the comments section on Sunday, reps from @RecyHub posted the following questions about the Fair Trade Recycling Model.  As a reminder, WR3A/FTR encourages export of used electronics to Africa, hand picked by Africans, under defined purchase orders and contracts, to meet the desire and needs of African cities.

EU RecyHub writes:

There are some issues in my mind that I think are not cleared out by your model:

- Child labour. In Agbogbloshie there are kids working with the e-waste, burning cables. Somehow, they should be considered in a model that takes into account human development, not only economical development. 

- Non-recyclable parts. Not 100% of the components are recyclable. There are hazardous parts that need to be removed and treated separately, and there are plastics that don't have any secondary market value. Those parts will be travelling together with the reusable electronics. 

How do you approach these two issues?

First, it is now very well established that the junk show in primitive scrap yards is primarily generated by Africa's cities themselves.   The two problems - child labor and difficult-to-manage components - are products of the emerging nations themselves.   A trade ban does nothing to address these problems.

Second, and on the contrary, the WR3A / fair trade recycling model uses the value of the goods to create incentives to address these problems. Instead of paying $7,000 for a containerload of televisions, the African trader could pay just $4,000 in return for a contract to eliminate child labor, recycle the plastic, etc.

This is the only model which creates $3k (or $4k, $5k, $7k) to fund proper recycling. African traders import from wealthy countries because the scrap is so much higher in (reuse) value, and OECD nations are foolish to shred that value. Keeping it out of the hands of African techs is a lose-lose proposition.

 Check. 

Earth Day 2014 - Searching for Africa's Bobby Fischer

Happy Earth Day.  If you have all day to read environmental blogs, I suggest a revisit to 2010s "Capacitor Heroes".  If you don't understand the last decade's capacitor plague and the good enough markets that replace bulging caps, you won't understand the economics of the export market.  IFIXIT gets it.  StEP and Interpol, I'm afraid, may not understand how supply and demand work, at least not well enough for a good cost-benefit analysis on exports.  

What drives demand in Guiyu?  Chip harvest and reuse.  You can "externalize pollution costs" much closer, in Haiti or west Texas.  Externalized pollution is real, and is a concern, but it's almost never the economic driver of the person paying for the product.

We need to listen to demand, and study it.  

EU E-Waste Policy: Disarming Friendly Fire & Environmental Malpractice (Part B)

In Part A, I gave RecyHub the review they asked for, suggesting they are trying to place themselves in a halfway point between fallacy and fact.   It's a slippery slope, being cozy with a fallacy.

Why RecyHub thought we'd applaud the webpage?  Probably because in Part B, they call for "improving the informal sector".  Sounds a lot like what WR3A called "E-Waste Reform" eight years ago, when we too tried to compromise with the Ayatollah of E-Waste.

B) E-waste is a source of income and an incipient local industry. Metals and plastics can be scrapped out of old electronics and be sold in local markets for smelting and recycling, closing the materials loop. In Ghana families from the North send their kids to work in the dump because they value more the scarce but regular cash they get for the metals recovered than the irregular income from agriculture. For some Western countries it doesn’t make economic sense to manually remove the metals from e-waste, because it’s labour intensive, while for countries with lower wages it’s more suitable. In contrast, components like printed circuit boards can only be recycled in a handful of factories in the global North (and now in India too, by Attero) and therefore could be exported back, following a philosophy called “Best of Two Worlds” (PDF, 1Mb.). Improving the informal sector, including its workers’ health and safety conditions, could result in a local industry of e-waste recycling.

What about the "worst of two worlds"?   In part A, @RecyHub implies that the worst is when Europe fills boats with toxic waste electronics and dumps the waste on primitive beaches.   I don't think that's the right diagnosis.   How about an alternative diagnosis?

The worst of the West is its willingess to assume the worst of the blacks.

The "White Knights" of E-Waste reform accept a comic, rude, and insulting premise.

With less of "the right tools" we can stop shredding value to begin with.  Below is my modest proposal, our proposed model at WR3A:

1. Start with carefully assessing the situation.   Start by asking questions, get a proper diagnosis.
2. Sell Africans what they want to buy - working and repairable displays and computers.  They prefer a 3 year old they can repair to a 6 year old "tested working".   The point is, give African buyers exactly what they want. Ask them why they want things if you are confused, but don't be condescending.
3. Once a price is agreed to (about $7,000 per container), offer the Africans a deal.   Give them back $3,000 of the containerload if they take back used electronics from African cities each time they sell one.  This creates a takeback infrastructure at the used retailers, just as used auto yards are connected to the auto scrap yards.
4. With the other $4,000 buy tools, buy better used equipment, do something to incentivize the proper management of used electronics.
5. Fly your Western staff to work in Africa (as Vermont does with its staff sent to Mexico), and fly African scrappers to cross train with your staff in Europe (as Vermont does with partners in Africa, Latin America, and Asia).

This does not presume a "best" or "worst", or even the geography of "two worlds".

This takes the $7000 which is WASTED in EU WEEE shredders and uses it to finance the simple hand-disassembly which you've already recognized is a darn good job for many Africans.  I don't label this as "inside the box" because the rest of the world doesn't live in the Basel Action Network's box.  This is the same "secondary market" economy that automobiles, ink cartridges, ships and airplanes "waste" comes from.  Waste is almost never generated from the first purchaser in the chain, unless a conscious decision is made to "obsolete" it.  Wealthy people tend not to drive their new cars into the ground, or their cell phones or PCs.

WR3A's Model Improves not just the environment (reuse saves more carbon and toxics than recycling), but the entire Social Progress Index in Africa.  Africa doesn't have to make a choice between barefoot-and-pregnant backwater and brand new product.  They should be encouraged to tinker their way through the same way that Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea did, achieving economic growth by repair, recycling, knockoffs, counterfeiting, reverse engineering and contract assembly.   Africa's got Terry Gous and Simon Lins and Rowell Yangs all over their cities.  They are in their 20s and 30s now.  Give them a chance.

The poor nations growth in internet outpaced the USA's by a factor of ten - using "discarded" CRTs

EU E-Waste Policy: White Knights Seeking Middle Ground On a Slippery Slope (Part A)

"Solving the E-Waste Problem"  (StEP) is a European association of highly respected professional and academic experts with strong policy pedigrees.   The "Problem Solving" effort is coming into its eight year.  American environmentalists are keen for European environmental leadership.   The electric windmills fanning the landscape are a testament to proactive policy.

StEP represents itself as a "middle ground" organization.  A lot of us have pandered for that position.  BAN labels us as "apologists".

It is natural to seek to leverage the sensational press around "ewaste exports" and the growing tome of facts about international city junkyards.  Agents of conscience naturally seek a middle ground between the Basel Action Network and...  Facts.  Or is it a middle ground between us and "The Other?"   Otherization, or exoticism, the "informal" six out of seven billion people, who have been labelled so likely to poison their children that it warrants a billion dollars in shredding machines and arrests of African traders.  Since BAN has imposed a kind of "original sin" on anyone who has ever purchased an electronic device, replaced one, or sent one for recycling, we begin with a sense of guilt.   "Agents of conscience" once included exporters, a previous generation of ICT and Internet Access "white knights", organized to heal the "digital divide".

These forces have given rise to another EU based organization seeking "middle ground" between internet access and environmental risk of computer waste.  RecyHub has posted an essay on ICTWorks which follows the path into the "middle ground", or "best of two worlds".  RecyHub has asked me, via Twitter, to review it.    ("They asked for it" is an English idiom).

On the one hand, they get the easy A.  A for "Applaud Anything" that moves Europe from the extremely bizarre far-left arrests of African businesspeople, geeks, and technicians.   Any correction from the 2009-2010 "years of breaking CRT glass", is a gift horse.  But since they asked, I have to tell them... they are at a halfway point between alter-globalization (WR3A) and racist slander.

"Electronic components contain toxics and their manipulation without proper tools can easily release them, resulting in environmental damage and health hazards. Up to now electronics have been mainly used in the most industrialized countries and dumped somewhere else when they reached their (perceived) end of life. Although this trade geography is slowly changing, some countries continue to be known e-waste recipients. Ghana, for instance, is trapped between the desire to modernise by acquiring and refurbishing technology and the damaging effects of it when it’s not reusable...

"After all, they don’t have the technology to process that material properly. E-waste exports must therefore end. That’s why a strict ban like the one proposed under the Basel Convention makes sense (taken even further to forbid any e-waste trade), and why the work of countering illegal trade must be supported. 

One thing I've always loved about Europe is the tradition of arguing sophisticated philosophical positions from a historical perspective.  The Europeans often assume Americans don't do that, that we operate in business from some kind of a "lizard brain", seeking efficiency and profit.

OK, Critique of Part A, in pure reason.

1. Toxics are not "easily released".  Europe had to build shredders, which certainly releases them.  Hand disassembly, harvesting parts and components (down the chips and capacitors and power supplies) is not going to yield toxics.  
2. Up to now electronics have not "mainly" been dumped somewhere else at the end of their perceived life.  
3. "Some countries continue to be known e-waste recipients.  Ghana, for instance, is trapped..."  This is absolutely contrary to the study RecyHub refers to, which says Ghana is NOT an "e-waste recipient" but is a 85-91% reuse recipient which generates 90% of its own "e-waste".
4. "Proper tools"?  A downstroke baler is the most complicated tool we use in Vermont.   The best one we bought used for $2,000.

On the third point, simply visit RecyHub's website, where an entire tab titled "Ghana" offers very scientificky looking "statistics".  It links to a Google Documents Page, with "comment function" enabled, which mostly takes statistics from the E-Waste Assessment (Ghana) study (they should also read the larger Nigeria E-Waste Assessment report).

"9% of the total imports of used equipment is non-repairable and is directly passed on to collectors and recyclers."

The very report they cite disproves most of the allegations.  Nigeria's Assessment was more precise, finding 91% repair and reuse, but we'll accept the 80% estimate from the Ghana study (statistics taken from interviews in the latter case, from actual sea container sorts in the Nigeria study).  In either case, brand new product is as bad or worse.  In either case, the studies explain how Nigeria came to have (World Bank 2007 statistic from 2006 assessment) 6,900,000 households with television.  And cities which have had TVs since Prince Nico Mbarga was on the top 10 are generating junk TVs, just as American and European cities do.

What do developing nations really need?  More development.  And taking away "trade" from the toolkit is exactly what they need least.

Where do "tinkering", "reuse", "recycling", "dumping" etc. fall in Harvard's new Social Progress Index?  If you spend time with people who live in the emerging markets, the developing nations, the cities of the "not yet OECD", their aspirations and measures of progress make Europe and America's obsession with "used electronics dumping" seem obscured by clouds of disinformation.

2013 Good Point Recycling End Markets: 6 Percent Reuse

Good Point Recycling of Middlebury Vermont is now preparing our 1st Quarter Report and Annual 2013 Report for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources.   Having just had these numbers audited under our R2 Solutions annual surveillance in March, we have more than enough data to demonstrate what kind of a company we are.

  2013 Outgoing Recycling:  Good Point Recycling

The most obvious change over the past 4 years was our decision to bring demanufacturing jobs in house, doing the television and monitor teardown here in Addison County.  Our payroll hit $26,000 per week, much of it in time-and-a-half (OT), and we hired more experienced people to do it.  So Red "CRT whole unit outsource" went down, and blue "Bare CRT tube glass", and associated plastic, went way up.

Something that surprises people is how little we export, and the reasons it has declined.  Good Point never exported more than 30% of the material, I think the peak (28%) was in during the years (2006-8) when we were buying and selling monitors from other companies, for refurbishing in Malaysia and redistribution in Egypt.

Why the decline?  Was it stricter EPA enforcement?  
Responsible Recyclers standards?  
Pressure from Basel Action Network?   
Strict Vermont E-Cycles Program standards?

No, none of these explains the fall from 28% export to 6%.  It's the marketplace.  And there's nothing ghoulish, witches brewy, noxious, or radioactive going on.  There's no Batman villian in the "e-waste" trade.  When the reuse market finds another source, no one wants to import it any more. It's scrap.  Metal and Plastic.  Recycling.  Boring.  Laundrymat scale boring.

Full Lunar Eclipse, Seen in Cameroon, Africa at Ramadan May 1985

Below is {recorded livestream?} of tonight's Rare Hybrid Lunar Eclipse, which in 2014 we can watch live online.  No need to worry about clouds, or to go outside.  Social Media has it covered.

It would be my second.  I will always remember my first.  It was in Ngaoundal, Cameroon, Africa, sitting on a bench at night in a small unlit bar run by Suzanne Ateh, my "African mother".  I ate at her place every lunch, and spent many evenings drinking mimbo (beer), around a short table with backs to the wall, or sitting outside and looking out at the street.  It was a paved highway with no traffic.  Virtually none at all.

That night was the full moon of Ramadan, which started that year on May 4.  The eclipse was May 21.  Ngaoundal was probably 60-70 percent Muslim, and about 1/3 Baya, 1/3 Fulani, and 1/3 mix of other areas of Cameroon, brought there by a military training camp.  I lived near the military camp, which is where the bars and prostitutes were.

(Original Livestream video link ended without recording, but here's a good link from Mexico.  Fast forward to the first hour, hour ten minutes or so.)

Your Choice of Complex Human Names: Minority = Majority

http://news.distractify.com/people/complex-humans/?v=1

Future warrior?

Future dictator?

Future recycler?

Network Solutions (Netsol.com) Sends Email Written Like Phishing

Incredibly aggravating.  Netsol sends an email with bad grammar that looks like a phishing post.   I go directly to Netsol.com and find a message "this is not phishing" but that Netsol will be down for 10 hours tomorrow night.  The language in the Netsol email looks almost identical to this Netsol Warning blog about a fake email (phishing attack) in 2009.

"Dad only knows how to talk about things that interest him."

My dad only knows how to talk about things that interest him.

If you tried to talk about something unique to you, he'll listen, but he is casting hooks, looking for things that would bring the conversation back to his list of topics.

It sounds horrible?  But wait.  Among the things that interest my dad were Greek logic, Roman history, mid-20th century psychology research, Russian literature, Dickens, John Jacob Niles, and 20th century India.  To name a few.

He has no email address, no Facebook presence.  For someone who taught "mass communications" (MassComm), he's uniquely unplugged.  But as his kid, growing up in the '60s and '70s, I would say I was exposed to more things than the kids across the street.

I confess I'm a lot like my dad in regard to listening.   The things that interest me are less historical, more future oriented.  Sustainability.

Some of us who are agents of conscience find ourselves less interested in other peoples mundane problems, or in discussions about the weather.   I don't share my mundane problems either.  Nor does my dad, so much, except to fit in with other people talking about their mundane personal problems.  He'd rather be speaking about his personal heroes, the people who shaped him, than about his ills and setbacks.  We'd be better communicators if we split our time equally with everyone else in society, worrying at least half the time about things that worry other people in the conversation.

Worry comes from cognitive risk, and if you are talking to other people who want to spend half the time talking about "shark attacks", rare and unlikely fears, turned into obsessions, you are supposed to compromise.  The likelihood that a sea container exported by a Nigerian from the UK is going to be burned by kids at dumps is pretty low.   But if that fear, that message of export impropriety, has been marketed everywhere to everyone, a polite conversationalist will want to give it equal time... But there I go again.

Dad was really good at watching cartoons with me.

Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets 9: Deliverance from Comics

"Dueling Banjos" composer Arthur Smith passed away this week, at the age of 93.  If you call me on my cell phone, the (originally titled "Fueding Banjos") song slowly erupts, and builds crescendo the longer I wait to answer.  When Arthur Smith was born, few Americans lived in cities.  When I was born, more than half of Americans lived in cities, and my Ozarks family was already in the minority.

I grew up very aware of the "cultural gulf" between USA's urban and rural families, at a time too many of us got our news about the world from comic books.   My future wife studied "Snuffy Smith" and "L'il Abner" from her home in Paris (Rosny was considered a kind of ghetto), and I learned about urban life from "The Cross and the Switchblade" comic, and "learned about" Europe from Richard Scarry, and about Africa by reading "Tintin".



Today, you no longer need to go to a college library to find out about what the world is really like.   But many of us hold onto our simplified stereotypes the way we hold onto comic books, hoping they'll become vintage collectibles.

The term "lesser developed country" or "LDC" was retired, and "emerging economy" is much more in vogue.  The same transition which occured in the richest nation on earth, the USA, is occuring everywhere.

"The world is undergoing a sustained urbanization process that's pulling more people into city centers and turning more places from rural outposts into denser urban organisms. A new report [PDF] from the United Nations projects that the world's urban population – roughly 3.6 billion in 2011 – will grow by about 72 percent between now and 2050, bringing the urban population up to 6.3 billion. That's about the same amount of people on the entire planet in 2002." - Nate Berg, The Atlantic Cities Blog

Those of us who see the world first hand, who travel from city to city, comparing Kinshasa, Cairo, Paris, Singapore, Kansas City, New Orleans, Paris, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Lima, notice more similarity than differences....  we see the world is melding and growing and culturally merging and mingling.   The internet, stoves, and the city traffic have more in common.  The music is in a state of free exchange, Soukous has rap lyrics, rap has sampled bluegrass.  African, Asian and European visitors to my home in the Ozarks are sometimes a little disappointed how similar it is to Vermont.  Having spent all that money on travel, they want to point their cameras at a hillbilly, the same as I was tempted to take snapshots of 'poverty porn' in city scrap markets in Asia, Africa and South America.

Comic books and photos are not substitutes for policy data.  Fortunately, there are far more people studying cities and urbanization than there are studying "e-waste".  Electronic scrap is an intellectual policy backwater compared to projects like NYU Stern Urbanization Project.   Billions of people are consuming and discarding in ways which make Annie's Story of Stuff seem oversimplified to an almost Biblical degree.

NYU SUP has produced 4 short Youtube videos to show the growth of cities, like modern art ink spots bleeding onto a white canvas.  Paris, Chicago, Sao Paulo, and Los Angeles... from space, they grow like fungus in the fingerprint of a petri dish.  Cities as they would be visible from space.



Cities recycle, and cities finance extraction of metals from rain forests and coral islands.  Cities repair and reuse, and cities discard.

Cultural Gulfs in Emerging Markets 8: Tooth Repair in Kowloon's Walled City

33,000 people
8,000 homes
1,000 businesses
2.8 hectares

That's 1.2 million people per square kilometer (Manhattan is 27 thousand per square km)

The Wall Street Journal has a fascinating 18 minute video (Greg Girard and Ian Lambot) documentary on Kowloon's "walled city", the slum which formed outside of Hong Kong, as rural peasants and refugees sought shelter in a place that was closer to Hong Kong's growing economic power in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s.  It was condemned in the late 80s and torn down in the early 90s, as Hong Kong became too prosperous, land values increased, and people became embarrassed and self conscious of the towering slum, which typically housed four families to an apartment.

This fits with the "Cultural Gulfs in Developing Markets" blog series.  There are equivalents to Kowloon's walled city today, counterparts in Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa, Lima, and Mexico City.

The move from spacious rural poverty to dense urban poverty is a mind trip, an incredible social and cultural shock.  It explains the demand for hundreds of millions of SKD televisions (small TVs made from reused USA computer monitors in the 1990s-early 2000s).  It explains the growth of internet, ten times the rate of growth in nations earning 3,000 dollars per year as in the "developed world"

The documentary begins with some of the "bad jobs" the walled city became known for, and the early "poverty porn" (before the term) in kung fu movies and Jean Claude Van Damme and Jacky Chan films.

During my life, living and working with people who know these city-slums intimately, bringing my family close by or inside these places, or to eat with families who once lived in these places and have now moved up on on, I'm sad that there has been so little documentation of the "tinkerers blessing".   The WSJ documents heroin and opium trade, prostitution, and primitive dentistry (a form of repair)... though it does later briefly allude to how good the dentistry became, how the dentists progressed.

Laptop repair and cell phone repair is a form of bloodless dentistry.

Enough, click to watch.

Vermont Apple-to-Orange Software Validates CRT Recycling

(This is part of an April Fool's blog tradition, and I hope no one took it personally)

Small Northeast State Solves E-Waste Recycling Glut Profitably, with New Validation Procedures

[Middlebury, VT  April 1 2014]  It turns out there are two ways to solve the E-Waste Recycling Crisis.    In a stunning turn of developments, Vermont has validated a brand new way to recycle CRTs.


1.  Charge manufacturers more (42 cents per pound rather than 28)
2.  Demand less (allow land application)
3.  Profit!

Suppose there are two ways to do something.  One way takes a lot of labor hours, and then costs a lot to transport and treat the material.   The other way takes fewer hours of labor, but creates a mixed mess that is even more extremely expensive to transport and treat the material.  Normally, this is called "getting what you paid for".

But with an online thesaurus tool, Vermont "recyclers" are now "solving" this "e-waste" "problem".

Inequation disproved in 6 month study

"We were as stumped as the next state with the need to change our award winning state recycling program," said Vermont ANR Commissioner David Mears.   "But we made lemonade."

John Obfusca of Cali Waste Systems described the new development.  "One of our guys, at the end of the shift, just goes 'Hey, what if we just don't recycle it, but we call it something kinda alternativey?'  It turns out, you just have to name the process right to get it approved."

Diverting waste from a landfill into another landfill?  Land cover that fits the defination (per RFP) of "no land application"?   There's an app for that.