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.
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| 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?
We need to question the "informal market" theory that shredding a device to make reuse impossible is ethically superior to selling it to "Others" in emerging markets. The baseless claim that 80% of exports are "primitive recycling" has been exposed as fraudulent.
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| No apparent self awareness that BAN is "exposing reuse" not CRT dumping |
Banning plastic scrap exports will have the same perverse effect.
The more USA recyclers are willing to export, the better the choices in a buyer's market. This "war on reuse" didn't eliminate exports, it just made buyers accept worse material. War on Reuse was re-hatched 20 years ago to stop ink cartridge refurbishers in southern China, and spread to phones and laptops and display devices from there. Before that, the FTC had to be created to enforce warranty "avoidance", aka Planned Obsolescence. #RightToRepair is not a new problem.
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