My company has long flittered around like a Red Oxpecker Bird, landing on the shoulders of great
investors in the USA "E-Waste" industry. We are occasionally recognized, allowed to sing, and hop about conferences looking for parasitic ideas in the ears of our industry. But the worst thing to happen in 20 years may be buried in the text of a major House bill, H.R. 4521. (annotated text link)
(helpful hint, don't open US Congress bill in Chrome, use MS Edge, there's a Chrome bug)
Here is the 2009 Version HR 2791 (don't try in Chrome) H.R.2791 - 113th Congress (2013-2014): Responsible Electronics Recycling Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
Here is the 2016 Version HR3559 (don't try in Chrome)
And Here is the current Recycled Version, which finally made it out of the House of Representatives.
Notice the 2022 bill, which passed the House, is buried inside the language of a much longer bill. This was not able, in 13 years, to survive on its own. This is Jedi Lobbyist, not NGO. No Senate member has heard any testimony This is an unmarked land mine.
Because the USA has strong OEM warranty laws (Magnusson Moss Warranty Act of 1975), OEMs have for years used more copper, stronger materials, and extra testing. Our electronics, internationally speaking, have "bullet-proof" reputaton. USA Home-Used is a stronger brand in Ghana or Cameroon than brand new from China. The USA has no competition in used goods. Our used goods are sought out, "solid state", it's a unique advantage USA consumers have if they want to sell their used goods abroad.
"America Competes Act" should recognize that simply by DEMANDING a #Right To Repair, we are bolstering our competitive position in the secondhand goods market.
This may take a few blogs but for the Swordfish Readers who follow the history and origins of these anti-reuse, anti-repair, anti-DIY, anti-#RightToRepair, Pro-Obsolescence, greedy mess makers behind this bill, some history boxes need to be checked.
The "short answer" to the Senate reconciliation or Conference Committee is why allow this RERA, SEERA, 13 year old land mine to enter the Senate version of the bill without ever a discussion or debate? Why does the self-same restrictive language supported by #ProvenFalse 80% bad export claims, #ProvenFalse bad for USA recyclers claims, suddenly get branded as a "national security" concern? The argument seems to be that if TV parts are allowed to be exported, that they might wind up as a reuse chip embedded in a US soldier's walkie-talkie. This absurdity is why the language of the bill, which has barely changed even as it's justifications could fail a high school creative writing class, is suddenly buried 13 years later, like a forgotten land mine.
It's the Anti-Reuse-Terminator 13. I'm 60 years old now, and it keeps reaching out and grabbing me like an unfriendly anti-Iron-Giant (classic animated movie about fear used to justify violence, and the potential for self-repair is the silver lining as the destroyed robot's screws, chips and pieces are seen to reassemble the friendly giant at the closing credits).
First, your honor, let me represent my credibility. I've been accused of "lying through my teeth" (Chicago Patch, BAN spokesperson, 2012) about refurbishing factories in Asia. Even when I provided photos of them, with photos of BAN's idealized recycler from Total Reclaim posed inside the factory. Facts don't matter. This is about money, so it's time to follow the trail.
How did this idealist hippy turned MBA kid from the Ozarks wind up standing between the Terminator Lobbyists and the Geeks of Color (including White, btw) who live on the Value Added of repair, reuse and recycling?
I got a place at the table by having the ear of regulators in DC, now retired policy writers like Bob Tonnetti, Clare Lindsey, or the late Marilyn Goode. The federal CRT Rule was my biggest success because it preserved the right to reuse - and sell, and buy, and trade - used electronics which we now know were responsible for the critical mass of users in rapidly emerging markets.
The Oxpecker bird is a small animal that flies from giant to giant, picking parasites for a meal. My small Vermont company was an Oxpecker in the hallways of influence over the Recycling and Electronics Industries.
In those hallways since 1996, when the US passed the Telecommunications Act to auction analog TV signals to the cell phone industry, the stakes were high. There were big investors, industry rhinos and elephants.
Some, like David Ritter of Florida, came from the breakup of AT&T (Ma Bell), which was mostly a story of making a million dollars selling equipment that was best written off the books by the Baby Bells. 1G and 2G mobile phone towers were sold for billions of dollars, underwritten by IMF and World Bank loans. Today, the number of mobile phone towers in Africa is estimated at somewhere between 170,000 and 200,000 -- only increasing every year. The first 50,000 were financed when Africa barely bought enough NEW mobile phones to finance a single tower. Ah, the incredible flip phones that the West imagined were being burned by brown children actually made the biggest Mass Communications connection amongst the poor in the history of the planet. BUT NOTE THAT THE REPLACEMENT OF USA'S 1G and 2G CELL PHONE TOWERS IS THE OPENING STORY OF AFRICAN MASS COMMUNICATIONS.
So in the interest of credibility, your honor, let me call David Ritter as a witness. And Another large elephant of a man, physically and intellectually, also came out of the ATT breakup days. Joseph R. Yob created Creative Recycling, at one time the largest recycler on the East Coast. Joe "Trombone" Yobb spoke 100 words a minute, learned Chinese, laughed like a trombone, and truly knew the history of reuse, of SKD and re-manufacturing, and was initially a supporter of my Fair Trade Recycling and Re-Use plans to extend the useful life of mined and refined and manufactured goods. Ken Taggart and Dennis Meyer of Totall Metal were other beasts of the industry whose shoulders and ears I Oxpeckered, and whose advice and history I fed and grew upon.
Ask them where America's telecomm equipment would be if the RERA/SEERA/HR 4521 law had been in place in the 1990s and early 2000s. How much money would have been lost to the USA World Trade Economy? And how many mobile phones would Samsung be selling in Asia, South America, and Africa today if those continents had been barred from reuse ("counterfeiting" is the new "death tax" amygdala term), or barred from used phones which provided the critical mass of users to fund the purchase of legacy towers?
The oxpeckers are two species of bird which make up the family Buphagidae. ... Oxpeckers are endemic to the savanna of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Both the English and scientific names arise from their habit of perching on large mammals (both wild and domesticated) such as cattle, zebras, impalas, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and giraffes, eating ticks, small insects, botfly larvae, and other parasites, as well as the animals' blood. - Wikipedia
Here's the dilemma... without the used equipment that was exported in the 1980s and 1990s, recognized by world trade associations and academic giants like Dr. Nabil Nasr of Rochester Institute of Technology for creating the masscomm infrastructure, everyone's sales would be less and everyone's phone would be more expensive.
But here's the deal. Asians and Latin Americans and Africans were ALSO getting rich in the trade, and starting to invest. Reuse was for some OEMs - especially HP and other toner cartridge magnates - becoming more difficult to compete with.
In fact, this Oxpecker found that the largest experts of the late 1990s and early 2000s were Taiwanese sub-contractors, contract manufacturers. And as Time Went By, this Oxpecker learned to also listen to and sing with the Buyers in Asia. Rowell Yang, Allen Liu, Gordon Chu, Jimmy"Floppy Drive" Wu, Su Fung Ow Yung, Helen Su and others spent hours and hours sharing their techniques, their history, their advantages. Good Point Recycling was usually too small to seem important to them, we couldn't manage huge quantities. But I formed the World Reuse Repair and Recycling Association in 2007 to create a brokerage to supply high quality used goods.
When I was first invited to testify to the US Trade Commission in Washington DC, it was over a debate in congress on the importance or restriction of Secondhand Goods Exports. Ed Brzytwa, I think, had made the introduction from a project WR3A had done on a grant from the CES Show in Vegas - where I had been invited to sit on a panel of elephants of the OEM industry. Our grant was to take a dozen Flip Cameras - a handheld USB connected pocket movie camera that was about to be crushed by the iPhone. Using the connections and Guangxi relationships (friends, guangzi is when the relationship has more value than the business discussed), we managed to collect cheap film of legitimate reuse operations.
But there was another herd of beasts of the E-waste Industry, and they had a different plan.
Trombone Joe Yob's Creative Recycling was over-leveraged, in trouble, and his little brother Jon Yob was having to bail him out and take over. Little Jon Yob didn't have the ATT equipment auctions or overseas experience of Trombone Joe Yob. But he - and other Brave Young Giants of the industry like John Shegarian, Bob MITS Erie, the younger Taggarts, and others who had trouble competing against the biggest Kahuna - Al Boufarah of Supreme Computer Recycling - had a new plan for America.
America was competing then by the virtue of our wealth... the secondhand goods economy, worldwide, was 7 times the size of the new goods economy. USA was the "Saudi Arabia" of reuse. But it was very difficult to scale, and notoriously picky. Asia didn't buy used goods unless it was profitable to do so, and that meant either chip and parts reuse or, in Africa, whole goods reuse.
That problem would be solved the way the auto industry solved its scrap metal bottleneck in the 1060s. As author Adam Minter described in his first bestseller, "Junkyard Planet", a big enough shredder can render raw material at mining capacity.
Their tool? Jim Puckett, Basel Action Network, and the fake statistic about exports... hyping poverty porn to cut off competition with the reuse market, certify and raise the threshold to entry. They came up with a plan, which Michael "Optiplex Plague" Dell could get behind during his lawsuit with Dell Reuse Seller Tiger Direct.
CBS 60 Minutes would get a Pelly (or Polk?) award for not fact checking Puckett. I have the emails where I sent the photos of the refurbishing factories to Mike Rey and Nichole Young and Solly Granatstein (Producers of Wasteland). 60 Wasted Minutes became the foundation of the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act of 2009.
Responsible Electronics Recycling Act | Congress.gov
Part II: Strategic Minerals and Metals - the National Defense Canard
In Part 2 I will try to connect the dots to how the 2009 Gene Green, Mike Thompson bill from Dell's Texas came up with language to control the market for secondary parts and used electronics. The very same people opposing the Right To Repair Act had a plan to save the big shredding investments of Jon Yob, John Shegarian, Jim Taggart, and Timo Kuusakoski.
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