For me, the rules of Pecha Kucha are a bit like Fight Club... I was so nervous after this 2018 presentation in Burlington, Vermont, that I have never told anyone about it, or mentioned that it's recorded online. I went home and resolved never to watch it.
But I just did... and really, it's not that bad. *continued
Building A Solar Power Economy in Africa via Fair Trade Recycling and Secondhand markets: BossBaby Part 1
September 2021 lone blog (forgot to publish)
Long running theme - how I learned as an Environmental Protection Regulator that Enforcement does NOT correspond so much with toxicity as it does with land value.
Dollars spent on pollution abatement and policing come from property taxes. Environmental Justice advocates are correct in this sense - that in "melting pot" societies like the USA, lower incomes correlate with lower property value.
There's a natural free market "valuation" in play. Junkyards are better for future generations than hard rock mining. We applaud reuse and recycling rates, as we know that the carbon and habitat and water use from recycling is less than we spend mining raw material out of the earth.
But as much as a real estate agent will avoid property next to a Superfund CERCLA copper mine, they don't much want to represent property next to a junkyard, either.
What I care about most are children who will be born centuries from now. People I will never meet, or see.
What they will learn about is the mass extinction underway.
They will see how human society of today was motivated by money. Even when problems like climate change and extinction and deforestation were well understood, the solutions posed were to throw money at it. People whose opinions about the topic were politically correct would get nice jobs to phone in their outrage.
Less Blogging. Less Tweeting. Less Opining. More Doing.
World Reuse, Repair and Recycling Association - dba "Fair Trade Recycling" doesn't do much fundraising. But I'm extremely proud of our contributions.
We have launched the next phase of the Fair Trade Recycling "Offset". My company has exported approximately 100 sea containers of working and repairable electronics to Africa since 2001. At approximately 15 tons per containerload, that leaves 1,500 tons of waste generated in African cities like Douala, Limbe, Accra, Lagos, Dakar, Kinshasa, Nairobi to now fund with the profits that both Africa's Tech Sector and OECD Reuse companies made through trade.
The Tech Sector in Africa is not "primitive", and I've long bristled at the fake claims that 80% of what they buy was not reused, but dumped. The photos NGOs used to promote that belief CLEARLY show electronic imported 30 years earlier, collected by the scrap sector from African consumers after decades of repair and maintenance.
That said, Africa has a problem with LITTER COLLECTION. WR3A has funded this study to see how many tons of ocean-bound plastic can be diverted from gutters before rainy season comes. Very proud of our collaboration with Dr. Asi Quiggle Atud - who was 4 years old when I said goodbye to him in Ngaoundal, Cameroon, in 1986.
Reviewing the report this weekend. Thanks Maia Nilsson and Sean Plasse and Laura Dubester for contributing to last year's GoFundMe campaign - and thanks to American Retroworks Inc and other WR3A members for raising the balance.
In phase 2, we'll pit Dr. Q's team of researchers against city scrappers in a contest of who can divert the most litter from city gutters and canals, before the monsoons come. My hope is that Plastic Manufacturing companies will then pitch in, and help "Offset" the packaging Africans rely on for food and drink in Emerging Markets.
#circulareconomy #fairtraderecycling
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Less blogging. Less tweeting. More doing.<br><br>Fair Trade Recycling Offset entering phase 2. Impressive report by Doctor Q - Asi Quiggle Atud of University of Cameroon.<br><br>I'm committed to offsetting 1,500 tons of waste from African cities.<a href="https://t.co/RBE7kjd5p2">https://t.co/RBE7kjd5p2</a> <a href="https://t.co/EW4u01BMwN">pic.twitter.com/EW4u01BMwN</a></p>— Robin I (@WR3A) <a href="https://twitter.com/WR3A/status/1444319882837995520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 2, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>