Continued
What is alarming is that the 2009 language of RERA - written when CBS 60 Minutes was not following the trail of desktop CRT monitors to Guiyu, and when several universities and a Secretariat of Basel Convention was about to disprove - now has no OECD language. It is OEM language now. OEM can export used secondhand wherever they want, independents like Good Point Recycling cannot even sell to CANADA under this law.
Gee. Thanks to two reps from Texas.
https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2022/05/25/dell-offers-end-to-end-device-management/
The current language is now proposed in the Senate. It doesn’t ban exports, it just controls who is allowed to export. Manufacturers can do it. Shredders can do it. The bill just makes sure that only the manufacturers have the keys to their subcontractors…
What most Americans don’t realize is that manufacturers like Dell and HP never made a computer monitor, or at least never employed an American to make one. Most electronics have been assembled by Asia or South American subcontractors like Wistron, Foxconn, or Proview. Under the proposed law, OEMs can still sell off lease or returned or takeback equipment to those factories. They just don’t like it when one of those factories - such as Wistron - decides to put its own brand (Acer) on remanufactured goods.
The history of RERA, SEERA, and Section 30612 of COMPETES starts with a Dell lawsuit in 2008, against a Taiwan based dealer, Tiger Direct. Another Asian subcontractor had sent over $300M Optiplexes, made in China, that had bad little capacitors which overheated, causing the Optiplexes to fail. The Taiwanese realized that was a really easy fix, and began buying back used Optiplexes in the USA, replacing the capacitors, and re-selling them.
This type of refurbishing factory is commonplace in all industries around the globe. The USA also has refurbishing factories, like Cummins Engine in Memphis. Remanufacturing is the best case, the “Upcycling” of electronics. It extends all of the carbon and pollution costs embodied in the previous manufacture, and makes affordable devices. Usually those remanufactured laptops, phones, computers and printers are sold in less wealthy markets, where brand new is not an option. But SEERA et al imagines that our used TV parts are being counterfeited into guns and supplied to American soldiers. That’s right… Read it again. That’s what the lobbyists claim is the “security” problem.
This is basically using export laws to act like the chips that keep recyclers from refilling ink cartridges. It won’t create a single new American job, it won’t save a single soldier, and it doesn’t even prevent exports. The America COMPETES Act is being used to stifle competition with Americans who sell electronics back to the factories that made them… only the OEM brand is explicitly allowed to do that.
The Optiplex Plague and the Tiger Direct lawsuits of 2008 coincided with another False Flag… CBS 60 Minutes “Wasteland” episode. A Seattle NGO and Anchorman Scott Pelley circled CRT monitors at a Hong Kong port, and then claimed to “follow the trail” to Guiyu. But the monitors never went to Guiyu (which is an integrated chip sorting market)... they were being purchased by OEM contract manufacturers, and re-made in the same factories that originally assembled them, remanufactured, and sold to developing nations. I took the CEO of the Seattle NGO’s own E-Steward contractor to visit the factories with me the year before CBS began filming the 60 Minutes episode (along with University of California Berkely Recycling director, Lin King, as translator).
Today, factories like these are no longer buying CRTs, but they are remanufacturing monitors and mobile phones and PCs to sell to the “Good Enough Market”. And America is the preferred source of used goods, because we are richer and electively upgrade them more often.
In 2007, EPA was trying to create a USA policy to regulate so called “e-waste”, or Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) scrap in particular. Analog TV broadcasts were being phased out, and Americans were buying LCD and LED displays rather than adapters to receive digital signals. A huge export market for the older displays existed.. But what were overseas importers doing with the CRTs? Was this globalization a success, or a failure of environmental “cost externalization?”
As a former division director at Massachusetts DEP, I’d studied the markets for used CRT devices, with a team of researchers (NERC, UMass Amherst, and others), in advance of MA DEP implementing the first CRT waste disposal ban in the country. In the course of that research - and as a former US Peace Corps volunteer in Africa - I knew more about the export market than most people did. In 1980, the African continent had over 300 television stations. In 1999, households in China had more televisions than the USA. The idea that 80% of the used equipment poor nations purchase was not reused, but dumped, was obviously false to those of us who had visited the buyers overseas.
In 2006, I brought a Lin King from the University of California, Davis, and Craig Lorch of Total Reclaim, then a never-exporter, to visit a handful of factories in China that were buying used CRT monitors. These factories were the original assemblers of the original CRT monitors, subcontractors for Dell, HP, Viewsonic, etc. The factory heads explained to Lin, Craig and me that they CRT tube lasted nearly 25 years (depending on hours of use) and was the most expensive part of a monitor or TV - costing over $100 each. They explained that if their factory could buy them after 3-4 years of use for $10, that they could lower the cost of the TV or computer monitor they remanufactured, creating an affordable “critical mass of users” to support investment in TV stations, internet cable in Asia, Africa, and South America.
To me, it was a Peace Corps Volunteer’s wet dream. Jobs in China extending the lives of goods, creating affordable internet for emerging markets, without the carbon or pollution from mining, and reducing the cost of recycling the used electronics the USA was generating. Pinch me.
But that’s not the way the export market was being depicted in the press. The obviously false 80% waste statistic was attracting attention from Western press. And the success of the refurbishing factories was attracting the alarm of OEMs.
This reuse market was actually so sophisticated that it was creating a threat to some original equipment manufacturers. Factories were refilling ink cartridges for pennies and selling them back to the USA at half the cost of cartridges in the USA. When Dell of Texas suffered a $300M recall of Optiplex computers due to faulty capacitors, Taiwanese factories began to buy as many Dells as they could find - and replacing the 50 cent capacitor and selling the Dells for use. Even at half price, the value of a refurbished computer was far more profitable than Dell’s new manufacturing.
This led to the first draft of RERA - the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act of 2010. The underlying justification for the act was to save foreigners from unethical dumping of waste - which the bill’s proponents claimed was 80% of exports.
Look at the photos of the computer monitors in the port of Hong Kong, circled by CBS 60 Minutes, which Basel Action Network director Jim Puckett claimed were going to Guiyu. Guiyu never imported a single CRT monitor - Guiyu’s business was integrated chip harvest and reuse.
Look at the photo of Jim Puckett’s which was used to market RERA - an African youth using a white 1970 kitchen table Magnavox TV housing to carry auto harness wire. That same TV was, in 1978, featured on the cover of Prince Nico Mbarga (Nigerian Pop Star) album with the top hit “Sweet Mother” - still the highest selling single in Africa’s history (the “White Christmas” of African pop). The fact that that TV was finally being scrapped 40 years later is testimony that Africans are really really good at reuse.
Researchers from Memorial University, MIT, USC, and others dove deep into the research of the export market, and found that of course poor countries have problems… but they don’t need white people to make up fake ones. Africa has over 170,000 mobile phone towers today, most of which were erected before even 100,000 new cell phones were sold there. The entire infrastructure was based on “unwanted” flip phones - again with no harm from mining, extending the life of the phones to create a mass communications infrastructure from scrap.
So the 2010 RERA bill had no traction. EPA, US Trade Commission, and other experts had ready the studies from MIT. Even Katharina Kummer-Peirry, director of the Basel Convention Secretariat, came to Vermont to thank me for showing the good news. SBC went on to fund a study showing that 85% of the used electronics imported to Africa were reused or repaired (legal under the Convention), and that the 15% kept for parts or recycled was a lower rate of returns than brand new (cheaply made) electronics being shipped to Africa.
But some OEMs - and some of the same lobbyists who today oppose the Right to Repair - didn’t want to give up on the export ban. So RERA was, in 2015, re-branded as SEERA. It had all the same controls and definitions, but instead of claiming 80% of exports were dumped, the OEMs gave it a new mission: “To control the export of electronic waste in order to ensure that such waste does not become the source of counterfeit goods that may reenter military and civilian electronics supply chains in the United States, and for other purposes.”
So if you sell an African a flat screen TV, you may be sabotaging American servicemen?
This was aimed at the remanufacturers. Former contract factories which assembled goods for name brand OEMs. Tiger Direct Optiplexes. Refilled ink cartridges. Jazz cameras (rebuild “single use” film camera remanufacturer sued by Kodak).
The vast majority of goods refurbished go to countries that cannot afford new electronics. I never saw evidence that any of the goods exported for refurbishment and reuse were being re-imported to the USA - or incorporated into weaponry used by the American military.
RERA and SEERA are a “false flag” operation. They pretend to be solving a problem of pollution, or counterfeiting, or compromised military hardware. But the bill’s authors know the history of contract manufacturers like Wistron and Foxconn and Lenovo. These Chinese firms went from assembling electronics on behalf of USA OEMs, then transitioned to refurbishing (reusing expensive chips - or CRTs - for poor consumers in emerging markets). And as described in the 2007 Harvard Business Review article “The Battle for China’s Good Enough Market”, became larger and more modern than their former USA contractors.
Jackie Robinson, and the integration of white and negro baseball leagues, was certainly a competitive threat to the weakest which player on the bench. But America Competes very well in sale of used electronics overseas - our used goods are the best in the world. Shredding those up prior to export (as SEERA instructs) will sacrifice a lot of value. And where exactly are the new electronics being manufactured today? In China. So the Competes bill sacrifices American reuse jobs to support manufacturing in China. If that’s our goal, it is an Own Goal, to be sure.
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