Can You Lose 50 Pounds In 12 Months?
Technically, I'm not sure I make it. I've only lost 46 pounds, to be honest (that's strictly going by my physical medical exam, not home scales).
The Editor of Resource Recycling Magazine, Dan Lief*, told me that the staff (Cara Bergeson, Bobby Elliot, Colin Staub, Rick Downing, Jared Paben, Jef Drawbaugh...) had assigned me a nickname of "Clickbait Robin". That was a gentle chiding, suggesting that some of my stories - like Retroworks de Mexico, perhaps - were more fluff than substance. Low-calorie fare.
Coming from a journalism family (Dad was Mass Communications Professor at U of Arkansas, his parent and grandparents worked at / owned a County newspaper), I don't take it as an insult that I get my point of view out there any way that I can. Chaz Miller, Jim O'Keefe, Brian Taylor, DeAnne Toto, Rachel H. Pollack, Dan Sandoval, and even Cole Rosengren know that I can be tongue-in-cheek, and deadly serious, at the same time. If you are going to use a weight-loss, or journo name-drop, as your clickbait, you better have really lost the weight, and be truthful if it's 46 (this AM, seems 47 lbs) and not 50 pounds you've lost.
(Mark Hickey at Waste360... have not met anyone there yet, and the trade paper's silence on the controversy over racial profiling of used electronics traders really should be addressed)
There is actually something to the #Ewaste Diet, however. It's this - concentrate on how much you consume, not how much you sh*t.
E-waste sent to the dump isn't a good thing, but it's not a key factor in the earth's environmental health. The mining and refining of the electronics we purchase is about 80% of the environmental impact our dollars made. That makes total - should be obvious - sense. When you spend $1000 to buy a new TV, computer, or mobile phone, that moves a lot more finite environmental resource impacts than when you spend $10 to recycle or dispose of it.
What Industry has done is the crying Indian play. Keep America Beautiful was born as a reaction to bottle bills. Bottle deposit laws impact both the residential waste stream AND the commercial waste stream. Most single-serve containers are consumed - and redeemed by janitors etc. - in the latter. But focusing on "litter prevention" shifted the concern to the consumer, and seemed to show concern by the industry for the environment even while taking more than 50 percent of the single-use containers off the table. I'm one of the few recycling policy gurus to have called that out. It's boring. So to make such a point, if you are really sincere, you sometimes have to use name-dropping and clickbait.
The crying Native American (actually, an Italian) play in e-waste is to constantly externalize the ACTUAL environmental damage, moving hard rock mining first from the populated cities to the General Mining Act of 1872 federal desert lands out west. Then, when Bill Clinton, Senator Dale Bumpers*, and Bill Babbit found a way to use EPA mercury effluent controls to raise the cost of copper, gold, silver, and lead/zinc mining, the mining was externalized further, to South America, Africa, and Oceania countries like Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and Malaysia.
Toxic Copper/Gold Mine Tailings, visible from outer space
Diets are about consumption, not the Metamucil Dumps you take. Reuse and repair is the effort, the workout, the exercise. How many calories you expend is like how many years you use, repair, re-use, and repurpose the "waste calories" you originally consumed.
So if you are following my "environmentalist recycling diet" logic, what you need to do is buy fewer extracted things. And if you do (as I have done this year) indulge in buying new electronics that could have waited, donate or give away the one you replaced ASAP. If I buy french fries that I don't need, and feel guilt or concern afterwards, I offer them to my dining mate. It's the same with electronics. Like french fries, it's best to give up the extra ones while they are still hot, while someone else still needs or wants them, rather than let them sit inside a closet-load of cognitive-dissonance litter of e-waste fetish.
The term "fetish" is thanks to some other name-drop clickbait opportunities. Dr. Graham Pickren wrote a thesis which was shared with me by Dr. Josh Lepawsky and Charles Mather from Memorial U. Pickren (who once cited this blog, despite it not being technically peer-reviewed) had made the point that it is the consumer's SPENDING which impacts the environment, not the final disposition of the DEVICE that was purchased. By focusing all the cognitive-dissonance, weeping-Indian, press-to-middle-class-guilt upon the replaced device, environmentalists are essentially assigning a "fetish" to an object rather than to their dollars. The price of that is an expensive anti-reuse, anti-export campaign which hinges of pics-of-kids at dumps.
Industry has totally distracted us from the environmental impacts of mining, refining, and extraction. They have used the same "liability" legal methods used against themselves to make middle class and relatively wealthy people destroy hard drives with expensive software. Despite the Morgan Stanley fine for not proving a negative (no one found the servers WERE a source of data theft, only that Morgan Stanley issued a warning that they had not PROVEN that the drives were destroyed), the only actual liabilities out there are based on falsehood.
Let me distinguish for a moment between the engineers, designers, and sales people at "industry" like Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Samsung, Siemens, Cisco, etc. There are a lot of wonderful "white hat" employees, stockholders, and inventors at those companies. Many espouse the same globalist sharing that I do. But within many or most of these corporations is a "black hat silo", people who are waging a war of #plannedobsolescence, #costexternalization, #liabilitydodging, etc. Too many liberals take on the latter without acknowledging the good that communications-hardware industries achieve.
GEEP, Total Reclaim, Brian Brundage/Intercon, and the Colorado #Ewaste Guy on 60 Minutes 2008 (not clickbait name, don't bother, mention Scott Pelley instead) were never convicted of environmental crimes, or exporting. They were all convicted for lying to their clients about it. Even if my company exports less than 10% of the used electronic devices we receive from clients, I want my clients to be fully aware that we will partner with the smartest people who know how to reuse and repair "a Rich Person's Broken Thing", even at the risk of being falsely profiled as "exploiting" the very people that anti-export advocates falsely define as "primitives".
My blog is about defending the Geeks of Color, the Tech Sector in Emerging Markets, who do NOT, as accused, import used electronics in order to dump 80% of them in order to externalize environmental costs as some kind of a favor to OECD environmental industries. That theory was bogus to begin with, it never made a lick of sense. It was clearly racialized poverty porn, a way to both distract caring consumers from the impact their purchasing dollars make on rain forests and coral reefs during the mining, refining, and manufacturing practices, AND to intimidate the Secondhand market so ably described by (clickbait) Adam Minter.
As millions of Asians reach the middle class, they will be able to afford expensive dishes like shark-fin soup in Chinese restaurants. That has a tragic, and enormous, impact on the shark species. The impact of the diet is not at all about the dishwashers in the restaurant, or even the leftovers. If leftover shark fin scraps are not composted becomes a headline, the press has been #RickRolled.
Dan Leif and company (um *yep, I misspelled your name deliberately at the top), I confess to the #EWaste #Diet #Clickbait strategy. But, I trust you know that unlike companies convicted for fraud, I do NOT do it for the benefit of profits for my company. In fact, you all know that calling out the systemic bias, racism, and bigotry in the press coverage 15 years ago (when I started this blog, jeez!) was at the peril of putting a target on my company's back. It was NOT widely understood then that Africans and Chinese had owned millions and millions more TVs than USA and Europe since the late 1990s. Their landfills and dumps photos were never going to be banana peels and coconut shells.
The story of recycling is the story of consumption. The number of devices our dollars buy, and the number of people who benefit from the purchase, the number of years each device is actively used. Whether the old computer is in your closet or in an incinerator or being disassembled for metals in Asia is not very important to the environment. What is important is the next one WE BUY, or - because we have hoarded and shredded working units - we force OTHERS to buy. If you bought a shark fin soup by mistake, pass it to someone else, while it is still hot. It's the EWaste Diet Plan. Lose 50 ugly pounds without cutting off a limb.
Responsibly using #clickbait to promote an important message, about racial justice, falsehoods, efficient environmentalism, sustainable development, for 15 years.
*(based, possibly, on hand-written letters from and Garden Club speeches by a certain Arkansas high school student around 1980)
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