Plastic Waste Is A Biproduct - of Growing World Consumer Affluence (and Petrol Refinement)

Based on Twitter, Quora, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as a growing number of press releases issued by Basel Action Network (the worst run NGO on the planet, manufacturing disinformation and reckless ad hominem and warrantless accusations and collateral damage for 2 decades), the plastic straw in the turtle's nose continues to churn affluent (#wguilt) attention.

This National Geographic Ocean Plastic Graphic is the best graphic presentation of an environmental problem since EWaste Republic.

The problem of ocean plastics is real.  It is so serious that we cannot afford to waste time on false causalities.  There is a cognitive dissonance growing in the environmentally activist community.  We don't want our heart surgeons to be displaying emotional breakdowns. Virtually ZERO of the Ocean Plastics Waste can be attributed to Western recycling programs, and virtually NOTHING can be accomplished by ceasing production of plastic at the source.

1) Plastic is itself, by and large, a recycled byproduct of gasoline refining.  When petroleum is pumped from the ground and refined to produce diesel or petrol or kerosene, a fatty polymer rich byproduct is produced. Plastic was a great invention to reduce the need to burn or dump that byproduct.

2) If Plastic was eliminated, it might give us a warm feeling that won't last long (like peeing our own pants). The energy needed to transport waste from food spoilage or metals and glass manufactured to replace it, and the weight of the new packaging, would create greater demand for fuel derived from petroleum.  The more cheese you make, the more whey you produce, the more milk you make, the more butter fat you produce, the more gasoline you make, the more polymers you produce. Banning whey won't spare any heifers. 

3) Ocean Plastic waste is, according to the very interesting internet presentation by National Geographic, produced by nations which are growing the most quickly in per capita income. As Africans and Asians have eliminated starvation, disease, and poverty over the past 50 years, they can afford the same stuff (gasoline engines and packaged water and packaged food) that "wealthy" countries have been buying.

BusinessInsider: New Zealand Company Extracts Gold from PC Boards Using Microbes (and...)

This Business Insider video on gold recycling just came out on Youtube.

I haven't even finished watching it yet, because the opening minute uses footage of African city junkyards to repeat perposterous claims that African are using a toxic leachate chemical process to extract gold from circuit boards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yGPm1U7U6s

Look, if you are claiming to make a engineering or scientific breakthrough, don't start with a blatantly false and discredited claim.  I've been visiting African scrapyards for years.

The gold bearing printed-circuit boards that come from hand-demanufacture and disassembly (an honorable process, superior to Western "Big Shred" machines designed to avoid labor) are sorted by type and either a) reused in ubiquitous repair shops in Africa, or b) sold to Chinese buyers who harvest integrated chips from the boards for remanufacturing (e.g. into lower scale toys and appliances).

The whole "acid bath" claim was bogus since Guiyu reporting in 2002.  The claims made about Agbogbloshie and other African dumps (that they import EU and USA electronics for scrap, rather than collect from generators in African cities after decades of re-use) were disproven by multiple research papers over the past 10 years.

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@BusinessInsider is ordinarily a great journalism organization, and the rest of the story may be quite interesting aside from the postulation that white people have better processes. 

E-Stewards Webinar on SEERA #ewaste legislation today. 8 Questions for 3 Privileged Boomers

Three experts - Jim Puckett, Bob Houghton, and Niel Peters-Michaud are three Boomer White Guy Experts who will tell us all why people should be arrested if they sell used electronics to a willing buyer from Emerging Markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 

Most of those people who sell there are part of the diaspora - expatriate Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans (like Joseph "Hurricane" Benson). Nobody like that is represented on this panel of experts.

Here are some questions in advance:

Last Chance to Register: ANNOUNCING a new E-STEWARDS WEBINAR

1) What is the average years of use of new devices sold to ("rich nation") OECD?

2) What is the average years of use of new devices sold to ("poor nation") non-OECD?

3) What is the average years of use of used devices in OECD?

4) What is the average years of use of used devices in the non-OECD?

In the not-so distant past, Jim Puckett and Bob Houghton both claimed that 80% of exports of used devices (#4) to Emerging Markets was waste.  After every single study showed 1) that's not economically even possible, and 2) no sample comes remotely similar to Jim's claim, and 3) Jim's source for Agbogbloshie (Mike "Fishing as a Boy" Anane) was making everything up or citing Jim.

Confronted in 2013 with the Big Lie about 80% of E-Waste, Jim changed his answer to "no one knows, but it is illegal".

So a few more questions:

Patent Law Gambits For Simpletons: Patent Exhaustion Remedies

* Note - this turned out not to be as simple as I imagined at 4 AM this morning.  But I'll revisit to plug in stick figure cartoons to make the wire analogy easier to follow.

Metal Wire manufacturing was patented in England in 1565, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

It marks one of the very first uses of patents, as understood by the founding fathers of the United States. This 1909 historical text explaining the history of the 1565 patent is past its copyright and may be freely copied and pasted.  By contrast, for some reason the image of the painting of Queen Elizabeth is listed as a modern copyright on Wikipedia... that's obviously an erroneous claim, you cannot take a photo of a portrait long past copyright and claim that anyone using the image of Queen Elizabeth is infringing on your photo copyright.  But I digress.

What's useful to understand about the difference in copyright and patent law is how much of the precedent involves the science and applied engineering of metal refining. Mining metal ores, and refining them in furnaces, was long established (think of the Iron Age and Bronze Age), and no one could successfully patent the extraction of ore and manufacture of metal. 

They could, however, patent unique methods and improvements in furnaces... one of which resulted in the 16th century in making metal so refined that it remained useful even when it was made very, very thin. Wire was very high tech, back in Queen 'Liz's period. The Tech Sector of the middle ages - that era's valedictorians - were adept at making metal into weapons and useful items in commerce. It also establishes an interesting string to follow for electric appliances, electronics, internet cable, etc. But I digress into the present.

Author: Viscount James Bryce
Author: Frederic William Maitland

Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, by various authors, compiled and edited by a committee of the Association of American Law Schools, in three volumes (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1909). Vol. 3.

Nos. XIII, XIV. 1565. Sept. 17. Two licenses to Wm. Humfry and Christopher Shutz to dig (1) for the Lapis Calaminaris, the manufacture of brass and iron wire and battery wares, (2) for tin, lead, and other ores. These grants covered geographically those parts of England not included in Houghstetter’s patents and the Alum patent of De Vos. Calamine or zinc carbonate is an essential in the manufacture of latten or brass, which it was proposed to use in casting ordnance (S. P. Dom. Eliz. vol. 8, No. 14). The mineral was discovered in Somersetshire in 1566, and the first true brass made by the new process was exhibited in 1568. The patentees also erected at Tintern the first mill for drawing wire for use in wool-carding. In 1568 the Company was incorporated by Charter as the ‘Company of the Mineral and Battery Works,’ and remained under practically the same management as that of the Society of the Mines Royal (Stringer, Opera Mineralia Explicata). In 1574, and again in 1581, the assignees of the patent obtained an injunction against several owners of lead mines in Derbyshire for using certain methods of roasting lead ores in a furnace worked by the foot blast and other instruments invented by Humphrey after the date of his patent. The Court of Exchequer ordered models to be made, and after repeated adjournments a Commission was appointed to investigate ‘the using of furnaces and syves for the getting, cleansing, and melting of leade Ower at Mendype, and the usage and manner of the syve’ (Exchequer Decrees and Orders). The depositions in this case are still preserved, but it is impossible to trace the history of the case to its completion. Coke informs us that as regards the use of the sieve, the patent was not upheld on the ground of prior user at Mendip. It is a peculiarity of the grant that it covered all subsequent inventions of the patentees in this particular branch of metallurgy. The hearth was invented after the date of the patent, and one of the questions to be decided was whether a subsequent invention could be covered by letters patent or no. See also Hyde Price, pp. 55-60.

Recycling Vocabulary: Environmental Fetishism vs. Informal Markets

Recycling Vocabulary: Environmental #fetishism is a term to describe a structural bias of high-liability laws in OECD nations. Our well-off sensitivity has a perverse effect. Rich nations demand to KNOW FOR CERTAIN a surplus iphone was shredded rather than accept a probable - but undocumented - reuse fate in emerging marketplaces. Tech Sector in Africa and Asia is obviously buying for so-called "informal" (not recorded) reuse.

Environmental laws are enforced to protect real estate value. This was observed as "environmental injustice" three decades ago - but that term has been misapplied to denigrate scrap reuse and recycling (which moves to poor neighborhoods with lower labor costs and higher repair skills) in urban areas, at the expense of virgin mining and extraction in even lower-land-value forests and deserts.

The legal liability created by RCRA is all downstream, no upstream. You can buy packaging made of baby seal pelts, but cannot export highly recyclable PETE plastic to some overseas markets.

It made no sense that Joseph "Hurricane" Benson would pay for hotel CRTs during a flat panel display upgrade, and rather than dispose of bad ones for free in the UK EPR marketplace, pay an additional $10,000 to export them to Ghana and Nigeria, to be busted apart for $2,000 worth of copper. No matter how lax the environmental laws, there is no incentive, which is why academics discovered that it never happened. Raphael Rowe of BBC Panorama served a decade in prison for the same false accusation as he made against Joe Benson.... All that is now exposed. But the EU Charitable-Industrial Complex has now moved the goalposts.

Some never even bothered to show a single piece of e-waste in their "expose"

It's not that Benson's market was dumping 80% of anything. It is the fact it was unknown, "informal", undocumented, which creates a sense of wealthy liability.

What is the purpose of "informal market" vocabulary?