Sheer Bias and Racial Profiling: H.R. 4521 Disgusting Section 30612 is Based on Old Slander

Here is a link to the sad ending of a 13-year old women's recycling collective in Sonora, Mexico. It was profiled, vetted, and visited by NPR (Living on Earth and Marketplace), by Adam Minter (Bloomberg), and PBS (AZ).

My opinion Op-Ed about Retroworks de Mexico ran in Resource Recycling in late 2020. The "Chicas Bravas" were cheated out of their winning bid for the City of Tucson, accused by Arizona-based recyclers of using "primitive practices" including testimony at the Tucson City Council that they were "burning the CRTs in barrels". Tucson Clean and Beautiful visited Retroworks de Mexico and fought valiantly against the slanderous claims. But they never did get the business from Arizona afterwards. Scared of "exports", Arizona instead trusted its CRTs to a domestic solution... and wound up with tens of thousands of trashed CRT piles in the city of Phoenix (the infamous "Closed Loop" site). The Chicas Bravas in Mexico, by contrast, left the floor broom clean, having recycled every ton of CRTs they managed since opening in 2007.

https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2020/09/24/in-my-opinion-how-bureaucracies-and-bias-sunk-a-crt-solution/

The House version of the America COMPETES Act is mostly full of good ideas, but the anti-"ewaste"-export Section 30612 doesn't simply ban junk going to non-OECD countries. OECD isn't mentioned. In fact, the section brands not only Mexicans, but Canadians and Europeans and Japanese and Koreans - as security threats if allowed to buy a used television or computer monitor, or toaster.

The Racial Profiling is the history of this bill since it was first introduced in 2010. CAER members have blithely portrayed the Tech Sector outside the USA as "primitive", using photos of junk TVs imported to Africa in the 1970s as perverse evidence of current export and use.

Today's blog is about photos and captions of the 13 year history of this anti-export language.

The opening language of Section 30612 has all been disproven in this blog. But as importantly, the text of the bill doesn't address any of the reasons. OEMs can still export their own used product to China, and as described above, seek to prevent us from selling it to Canada, France, or Japan.

SEC. 30612. Controlling the export of electronic waste to protect United States supply chains.

(a) Findings. Congress finds the following:

(1) It is in the national security interests of the United States to ensure that the export of electronic waste does not become the source of counterfeit goods that may reenter electronics supply chains in the United States, and for other purposes.

(2) A 2012 Senate Armed Services Committee Report discovered counterfeit electronic parts from China in the Air Force’s largest cargo plane, in assemblies intended for Special Operations helicopters, and in a Navy surveillance plane among 1,800 cases of bogus parts.

(3) Further, exporting such material has often resulted in environmental damage because of illegal dumping or inadequate environmental regulations in other countries for ensuring their safe and secure disposal.

(4) China, the single largest producer of electronic waste, is on track for its e-waste industry to total $23,800,000,000 by 2030, given its high supply of used products, demand for recycled materials, and capacity to transport these materials.

(5) As the second largest producer of electronic waste, the United States has a strong economic and national security incentive to enhance domestic e-waste recycling capacity rather than exporting to China and other countries.

(6) Given China’s lack of regulations and worker protections, workers in the e-waste industry have been exposed to over 1,000 harmful substances, including lead and mercury, endangering the health and wellbeing of workers.

But note, the bill from Texas congresspeople makes a "carve out" exception. Brand owners, like Dell, are going into the export business, and language in the bill exempts them!

My Opinion Op-ed in today's SAME E-Scrap News points out this duplicity.

In My Opinion: Allowing exports is how America COMPETES best

The recycling proponents of the bill have their own false flag on the website. The upper photo (taken by Jim Puckett of BAN.org, fair use cited for rebutting it) shows a 1970 kitchen table Magnavox loaded with automobile wire. That type of TV is not being exported anytime within the last 20 years. The lower 1977 album by Prince Nico Mbarga of Lagos featured that TV.

The same photo was used when the first version of RERA was introduced to ban "developing nations" from buying used equipment... which we have proven is almost SOLEY for reuse.