As I wrap up the blogs for 2022, I wanted to share an alternative source of blog authorship - Artificial Intelligence. https://chat.openai.com/chat allows you to create an account and then, like a word transcribing program on steroids, the AI generates dramatically impressive text.
This morning I had to announce layoffs for 5-8 staff at Good Point Recycling in Middlebury Vermont. These will only affect Vermont employees, our Brockton MA facility, which does 95% of the recycling (not reuse) for our company is unaffected. Good Point has been threatened denial of payment and threat of environmental enforcement by Vermont's Agency of Natural Resources. The "crime" is removing T-con boards for reuse, and hard drives for recycling and data security, at a change of address (down the street) which we notified ANR of 6 months ago after our landlord declined to give us an extended lease.
We informed ANR in July that we were moving the removal of TV boards, to test for reuse and resale, to a different building. We showed that we sell approximately $50k per month to USA repair shops - individually tested and inventoried circuit boards for $30 each. ANR said then that we had to change the address on the recycling insurance policy - which lists no address and covers pollution anywhere it's released. ANR said we must change the address on the bank financial mechanism - at a cost of $1500 - despite the fact it lists NO ADDRESS and covers recycling tonnage anywhere we might abandon it. Despite these two crystal clear evidence of incompetence or bias by the ANR staffer, the Secretary and administration has taken no action except to send another ANR staffer to inspect us in October. He said he saw zero evidence of any environmental violation under RCRA, and said that the administration of our recycling contract might be her issue (how she withholds funds).
That contract does say we must be R2 certified. We explained the move during our R2 audit and the auditor and SERI told us that so long as all the same downstreams and management systems were in place, that the change of address would be done at the anniversary of the next audit. If R2 does disqualify the same person from reusing the same TV circuit board, removed solely for the purpose of reuse, and the Vermont state statute clearly says that a device removed solely for the purpose of reuse is NOT recycling and is NOT governed by the statute, then R2 would be messed up.
None of our competitors in the ITAD and hard drive destruction business - or Vermont's own Surplus Property office - is required to have any of these insurance or certifications. Karen explained that is because the "purpose" of the drive removal is for "data reasons" and when our staff do the exact same action, it is for "recycling" reasons.
Hey, Governor Phil Scott, cleanup in Aisle 9.
Raise Your Hand if you know who STEVE JOBS is.
Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who Jim Puckett or Basel Action Network is.
Now, Keep your hand raised if you know who TERRY GOU is.
Keep your hand up if you know who Simon Lin is.
Keep your hand up if you know Dr. Graham Mytton is.
Keep your hand up if you know who Prince Nico Mbarga is.
Keep your hand up if you know who Awal Muhamed, Yaro Muhammed, or Razak of Savelugu is.
Keep your hand up if you've ever been to Savelugu.
Now unless you are author Adam Minter... my guess is your arms are back to your side. You'll need both of them when I conclude this talk.
The technology for "touch-screen" information feedback - sending data via touching a display device - was originally developed for cathode ray tube CRTs in Germany in (I think) the 1960s (based on my interview with Allen Liu, retired CEO of Net Peripheral, in 2016). That patent was either abandoned or purchased by the Taiwanese engineers - graduates from University of Taiwan in Taipei - decades later. These tinkerers* applied to very small handheld touchscreen devices. The "patent claims" by Apple and Samsung over smartphone touchscreen technology went nowhere 15 years ago (if anyone remembers those court cases, keep your hand raised) because neither invented it. Taiwan was the Cyrano of electronics invention, rising from "contract manufacturing" to schematic design wizards. Terry Gou is the Taiwanese CEO of Foxconn, which manufactures most iPhones. Simon Lin is the Taiwanese CEO of Wistron and Acer.
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| Author, Author! |
The seat next to me is empty, because those of you who lowered your hands might think I'm an expert. But everything I'm telling you today is either public data, available from World Bank and IMF loans for electric grid and hydroelectric projects which provide electricity to more than 90% of people in the world. And if you had not interviewed fake experts like Jim Puckett of BAN, or Sasha Rainbow (Placebo MTV documentary director), or photojournalists like Kevin McElvaney and other "poverty porn purveyors" who got their information from Mike "Fishing as a Boy" Anane - that the center of capital city Accra was a remote fishing village in the 1990s... etc.
For twenty years, what I have learned by listening to the Tech Sector, listening to importers, listening to the founders of great OEMs, was derided by a lot of idiot white people who were given the privilege to sit before conferences in that chair. People from Greenpeace, from European institutions, people like Interpol's Cornelius... people who probably meant well, but who were completely responsible for the false arrest, denigration, defamation, discrimination, and imprisonment of Tech Sector workers like Joe "Hurricane" Benson, an African who may well have become the "next: Steve Jobs, the "next" Terry Gou, or the "Next" Simon Lin. (Keep your hand raised if you remember Steve Jobs second company, "NEXT").
Getting to know Megan Fontes, the new Executive Director of the Northeast Recycling Council this week. Lynn Rubenstein is retiring - Lynn and I worked together in several capacities over the decades (she came with me on my first visit to China in 2002).
Via LinkedIn, Megan just shared this article to ask my thoughts. Plastic – Fact over Fiction
Written by Chris DeArmitt. He's a paid "expert witness" who's got industry connections, but I guess I do too, and have seen my articles dismissed based on my "recycling business". The article makes several of the same points made in the Oregon study from a couple of years ago.
Part 1, History 1999: When I left my position as Division Director at the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, I got a one-year special assignment to orchestrate the first CRT waste ban and recycling program in the USA. I got to promote/appoint my most talented staff... That is the thing I'm proudest of from that time. It wasn't "recycler of the year" or the state legislature commendation, or the state employee of the year recognition, or increasing my program budget from $1M to $10M, or my own promotions. I'm proudest of the demotion year, because that elevated people like Brooke Nash, John Fischer, and Greg Cooper (two of whom began as interns) to my empty chair. Anecdotally, I got a pay raise (how demotions work at Mass State Employees Union) and three-day a week (to commute from Vermont), to focus on ONE big special project - cathode ray tube recycling infrastructure - which essentially became the Massachusetts "infrastructure business plan" for a TV and computer monitor waste ban.
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"Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" is an idiomatic expression for an avoidable error in which something good or of value is eliminated when trying to get rid of something unwanted.[1][2][3] A slightly different explanation suggests this flexible catchphrase has to do with discarding the essential while retaining the superfluous because of excessive zeal.[4][A] |
Vermont Agency of Natural Resources and its DEC initially gave me a nod and showed respect when I left Massachusetts DEP and invested my sweat equity to start a consulting business on electronics recycling. I got to meet with Bob Tonetti and Marilyn Goode at EPA in Washington, and they codified the Massachusetts DEP CRT recycling rules into Federal. I got to meet Michael Dell in Texas, I got invited to present to the California Resource Recovery Association CRRA Conference.
My message was reuse. Repair is the hospital, and Reuse is the orphanage, for used electronics. Recycling is the Morgue. Little did I know that to Vermont ANR, reusing a computer part to fix another computer would one day be presumed to be a murder of the first computer. The burden of proof is on the doctor saving the patient.
Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, to date, has appointed a RoboCop who doesn't care about orphanages or hospitals to throttle my company. It has been all about the morgue, and only the morgue. And they sent an inspector to investigate my company's reuse of solar panels last month... The problem was that they are not a problem yet... I've been predicting that solar panels are the "next CRT", and ANR acted too swiftly. And so I listed our 50,000 s.f. facility for sale, and moved half of my operations to Massachusetts in 2019. I remain with a foothold in dear old Vermont, but I see storm clouds in places far north of Puerto Rico...
But back to history - Why are we still talking about CRTs? Because all the orphan CRTs created the critical mass of users for Asia and Africa internet cables. All of the orphan flip phones created the critical mass of users for 170,000 mobile phone towers operating today in Africa. And secondhand solar panels are about to be the babies boiled to be boiled in the bathwater. For that reason, Vermont will not be my place to invest in solar panel recycling. Two reasons - "No" and "Hell NO!" I'm not killing orphans, and will go to prison rather than build a business overseen by baby killers. Vermont can't get it right, because it has no spine to correct regulators, because stopping regulators from killing reuse orphans is "anti-regulator" and that is "bad". Orphanages and Emergency rooms saving patients are "anti-cemetery" and are presumed to be dumping the bodies on roadsides. Here in Vermont, we can't have that.
Wouldn't we be frustrated if NPR did a story on low health and safety standards of vegetarian restaurants in Indonesia, and made the story about vegetarianism without comparing the standards at meat-centric Indonesian restaurants? This is an example I use of critical thinking when I give a talk on recycling markets. I'm not against improving them, and shining critical light on them may be helpful. But isn't associating poor hygiene with vegetarianism and not visiting a control group of meat restaurants a rather cringeworthy example of #gotchajournalism clickbait?
Note to all editors of all news organizations.... Always compare recycling to virgin material production, please, and not to an idealized image of recycling.
There's Always Market Demand for Rational Critical Thinking. It's just undervalued. The problem has plagued Journalism ever since newspapers lost the one-third of revenue from classified ads... if only News Corp or New York Times had purchased / invested in eBay 25 years ago...
The drop in revenues continues as journalism competes with online advertising, targeted to unique consumer data from Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. And "free content" abounds - woefully edited or fact-checked - via links to fake news shared by "friends of friends" online.
That's a long way to approach the reporting on the state of plastic recycling by NPR's Laura Sullivan. She has made her biography synonymous with a story that Plastic Recycling is a big lie... Either she can fix this herself, or we need tenure-seeking professors and graduate students to lay some math and control group facts on her "conclusions".
"Sullivan won her third duPont in 2022 for her Planet Money podcast WASTE LAND, an investigation with Frontline into Big Oil and the myth of recycling plastic. The California's attorney general opened an investigation into the oil companies citing NPR's reporting, saying the companies participated in a "half century of deception" perpetuating a myth that plastic could be recycled in an effort to manipulate the public to buy more of it."
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| Michal Manas, Baled PETE in Czech Republic, Wikimedia Commons |
"Notably, while the Aluminum Association has reported a 45.2% consumer recycling rate for aluminum cans, the RRS analysis uses 38% as the national baseline to reflect the percentage of aluminum that actually makes it to remelting facilities, after material losses that occur during collection and sorting." 2022 Press Release, Ball Systems and RRS
"As of 2015, approximately 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated, around 9% of which had been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment." https://lnkd.in/e_wN-t5j
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Special to the Miami Herald
January 28, 2005
Scare tactics, disinformation go too far
I am often asked why I broke ranks with Greenpeace after 15 years as a founder and full-time environmental activist. I had my personal reasons, but it was on issues of policy that I found it necessary to move on.
By the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. I became aware of the emerging concept of sustainable development: balancing environmental, social and economic priorities. Converted to the idea that win-win solutions could be found by bringing all interests together, I made the move from confrontation to consensus.
Since then, I have worked under the banner of Greenspirit to develop an environmental policy platform based on science, logic and the recognition that more than six billion people need to survive and prosper every day of the year. The environmental movement has lost its way, favoring political correctness over factual accuracy, stooping to scare tactics to garner support.
We’re faced with environmental policies that ignore science and result in increased risk to human health and ecology. To borrow from the vernacular, how sick is that?
For years, Basel Action Network has insisted on fake statistics about e-waste "loopholes" in the Basel Convention. The original Basel Convention, in Annex IX, explicitly exempts reuse and repair of electronics from "waste" definitions (list B1110).
BAN's Jim Puckett was a film major, and when he advised someone I was taking with me to see reuse factories in China, Jim told him to "take pictures of children on the scrap". His other tactic was to make up statistics that were so alarming that they made people accept that it must be terrible. If 80% of X results in something bad, there must be something wrong with X.
- homosexuality, atheism, swimming.... if 80% of it is bad, make it illegal?
https://resource.co/article/basel-convention-require-informed-consent-e-waste-exports
Depressingly, Ghana (which never signed or ratified the Bamako Convention, and consequently benefited by massive mass communications investments, leapfrogging Mali) has its name on a Ghana-Swiss proposal to finally change the Basel Convention to make import of used electronics de facto defined as "waste". See my comments to Resource Magazine, (Amelia Kelly) which made the mistake of interviewing Basel Action Netwwork but not the Tech Sector importers who are capable of speaking on their own behalf.
"There are 170,000+ mobile phone towers on the African continent today, thanks to the "critical mass of users" of flip phones which BAN tried to stop the export of a decade ago. The privileged wealthy white guy gets to define what is "waste", and the African tech sector experts who made the mobile phone tower investments possible are profiled as "Primitives" or at best "Informal Sector" (as if not knowing how smart they are is a reason to prosecute them). Free Hurricane Joe Benson." - Robin Ingenthron
This guy loses his job, and the displays get ground up for raw materials... and doesn't get to reply to Jim Puckett's quote (below the fold)
The photo below is actually related to blog 2, the problem of under-investment in recycling rare earths. $300 million for EV battery recycling may be too much, but $0 for indium may be too little.
Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 2: Lithium and Indium
We need to be "small c" conservatives. "It doesn't take a genius to see the world has real problems, but it would take a whole roomful of morons to think [throwing government money] can fix it." (paraphrase from The Watchmen, 2009). Or better yet, yes, do fund these programs (at least to the degree government has subsidized mining and nuclear energy development), but make sure you have conservatives managing conservation.
The Rare Earth Mineral / Metal Mining and the Recycling Dilemma 1 took a critical "what could go wrong" with well-intentioned environmental policy to supply Electric Vehicles with recycled content Lithium batteries, focusing on a Wall Street Journal article on the shortage of Lithium batteries for planned "recycled content", and a more detailed focus on the need for more mining by Hans Eric Melin.
Government funding of Lithium recycling capacity ($200M in the "Inflation Act" budget) may not make a lot of sense if there's a shortage of batteries to recycle... or if it requires cannibalization of reuse markets. The hospital shouldn't build a morgue so big that it needs to toe-tag every patient to feed it.
But the history of nuclear power - funded enormously by government research - may make a different case.
To make the case that it does make sense to invest SOME government funding in recycling, I'll now focus on the opposite problem - I can't find a buyer for indium bearing "black glass" from our Good Point Recycling flat screen TV reuse and recycling program.
But the dandelion motif of the blog remains important. "Fishing for swordfish while surrounded by perch" was a label given to me 23 years ago, which I've embraced (or sometimes substitute dolphins for swordfish and tilapia for perch when it's a international audience)... the blog is sometimes discovered years later by someone important who will never see the Tweet or Linkedin hashtag. As bad as my blogs suffer from too many to sort, there are important reporters, researchers and policy makers out there who rely on Google or DuckDuckGo rather than the equally important Twitter search box.
The previous blog, my public submission for the General Mining Act, was important enough that I don't want to write anything to compete with it. The MassRecycle Podcast with Aaron Mintzes of Earthworks (the most important Mining Reform NGO) was also more important than much else I have to say.
But let me put two very important Mining / Recycling dilemmas on the Blog for September. Both are current. Lithium and Indium.
I'll briefly link the Lithium debate to better written posts by experts, but Adam himself helped promote my Lithium Battery WSJ article Linkedin post and Recycling International asked me to turn it into a guest editorial. Hans Eric Melin also wrote a more astute post on the dilemma, which is as follows.
1. The carbon / global warming challenge demands more Electric Vehicles #EVs*(see footnote)
2. The EVs demand Lithium Batteries
3. There is not enough Lithium refining to manufacture the currently planned EV manufacturing.
4. Europe and USA (Biden's "inflation bill") are trying to solve the shortage by investing in RECYCLING of replaced electric vehicle batteries.
5. The batteries are not there, largely because they are being REUSED, and the investments in meeting demand with recycling reflect the same false assumptions Europe and USA generated for CRTs in the late 1990s and flip phones in the first decade of Y2k.
6. The wealthy OECD nations buying most of the #ElectricVehicles demand the two tons of car travel 150 miles between charges - and the battery is replaced because it goes less than 100 miles between charges.
7. A Secondhand Lithium Battery that will push two tons of metal a mere 75 miles between charges has WAY MORE REUSE LIFE and demand than the battery recycling investments will be able to pay.
8. Just as "Big Shred" funded reuse of flip phones and CRT monitors as "primitive" and "polluting", the new Lithium Battery Recycling industry will probably feel forced to denigrate the secondhand solar panel recycling market.
Here again is a 42 year old solar panel put to reuse by Good Point Recycling in Middlebury Vermont. It's powering a radio (symphony cuts out when my shadow passes the panel), a desk lamp, and is charging a mobile phone. It would make zero sense for the homeowner not to replace this with a newer more efficient panel, AND it also makes no sense to ban it from reuse in Africa. The millions of solar panels that will be upgraded will drive demand for used, secondhand EV batteries. COUNT ON IT.
more...
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/07/15/2022-15114/request-for-information-to-inform-interagency-working-group-on-mining-regulations-laws-and
While on summer vacation at my parents place in rural Arkansas (Buffalo National River, the only river managed by the US Department of the Interior - please don't issue mining and fracking rights here), I have a chance to reflect on journalism, and my critiques of lopsided and inaccurate reporting over the years.
Talking with Mom on the apparent loudness of politics, and tribal journalism, and bias confirmation... We settled on risk analysis, and how so many people believe in conspiracy theories.
Around here in the Ozarks, the "deep state" conspiracy is admittedly popular. I was informed yesterday (indirectly from a confidential source) that a contractor lady for Mom - sweet gal, hard worker - informed her that the Republican staff and White House lawyers who testified to Representative Thompson and Cheney's January 6 Investigation committee were "paid" to testify against Trump. By whom? Didn't get to ask.
Now I do know on firsthand that this can happen. Conspiracies can definitely happen. But the rumors of conspiracy travel halfway around the world while the Truth is still waking up to a hangover.
"Going Out On a Limb" however is a lot easier for a blogger than it is for an institution. It is rare that a blogger like myself should be a better source than any of the journalism institutions or international agencies that gave Anane's wildfire story on illegal e-waste dumping the oxygen to burn people like Joe "Hurricane" Benson. So today I'll reflect on how rarely anti-conspiracy experts get it right.
"Do Unto The Others Yet To Be Born As You Wish Your Ancesters Would Have Done For You"
I have finally gotten my motto. This is a philosophy I landed upon as a teenager - to see the world from the vantage point of future children I'll never meet.
Let's label this the "Lithium Rule"... Since if it isn't searchable, it hasn't been labelled as of yet. It helps that I misspelled "Ancestors", of course.
"Do unto the others yet to be born as you wish your ancestors would have done unto you"
Surely I'm not the first one to come up with this? But Google suggests I may be the first to publish it online (which I'm quite aware isn't all 8 billion of us with that privilege... and also this is in English). I searched it both ways, done for you or done unto you... first dibs. It is...
The Lithium Rule.
Do not do to future generations that which you wouldn't want previous generations to do to ours.
The "Informal Sector" is a term I have never seen among the 6 billion people in the market it refers to.
The big mining companies are all in the "formal sector".
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6960944556800385024?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web
vocabulary lesson - of unwitting racist environmentalists... Your antithesis of recycling is mining, forestry, fracking... all of which earn gajillions from unearned public royalties.\
14/15 Superfund sites were the opposite of Recycling.
Elective Upgrades Supply Good Enough Markets
Is imitation the sincerest form of apology?
There is a guilt dilemma in "First World" aka "Wealthy" aka OECD consumer markets. While there are repair and delayed gratification reuse trends (my company sells about $25k per month worth of TV parts to USA repair shops), there is also a lot of guilt about "elective upgrade", which remains the driver of most new sales.
Organizations like Basel Action Network and Greenpeace made a false assumption about 2 decades ago that "e-waste" was a product of equipment failure and inability to repair. That Americans, Japanese, South Koreans, Germans, Brits and Italians patiently wait for their CRT televisions, flip phones, and Pentium 4s to become hopelessly unrepairable before buying a plasma TV, smartphone, or i-Series laptop.
The fact that it is patently obvious to nearly everybody that it was not the case, in hindsight, has been a point of reflection of this blog since I started it in 2006.
Unnecessary elective upgrades, if indeed they are discarded as "waste" (or sentenced to a desk drawer, attic, or file cabinet) are indeed a wasteful use of mined, refined, extracted raw materials. But if they are reused, they create access for poor people to establish a "critical mass of users" to justify investments in TV broadcast, internet cable, and the estimated 170,000 mobile phone towers today that connect the continent of Africa... all financed by secondhand flip phone sim cards, replaced by black technicians on streets like Lagos, Accra, and Kinshasa.
The video above is a 42 year old solar panel sent to Good Point Recycling for end of life recycling. It's widespread "truth" that panels function for 30 years. But that "30 year estimated life" statistic was put in print before any panel was more than 10 years... it was (like "80% of ewaste" stats) made up by someone with zero knowledge of the future life of the panel... ostensibly I'm told it had something to do with a procurement specification or waranty request. But "30 years" is hocus pocus, not reality.
The European theory of the "circular economy" focuses on the final value of metals, minerals, and petrochemicals. Today I'll try to explain, as succinctly as possible, why this "Ptolemy" circle (stuff revolves around us) wasn't recognized in Emerging Markets.
While researching the CRT Recycling Infrastructure for the Massachusetts DEP's first-in-the-nation statewide e-waste disposal program in 1999, I was told about Dr. Yuzo Takahashi (by Panasonic rep and Japan history buff David Thompson). Dr. Takahashi had published a brief book titled "A Network of Tinkerers: The Advent of the Radio and Television Receiver Industry in Japan."
Thesis:
The threat of bans and regulatory EPR expenses passed to Petrochemical Companies can be bargained to improve ocean plastic outcomes if the Industry is allowed to "offset" plastic sales (e.g. plastic bags, straws, scrap exports) by paying very low wage countries to pick up plastic litter before seasonal rain washes gutters and canals into the sea.
