Elective Upgrades Supply Good Enough Markets

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.

It's a story older than this bad head gasket... sold to a Cummins motor geek in Florida, who re-exports trucks to rapidly emerging markets. Roads were paved in Appalachia and Ozarks by hillbillies like my grandparents, who could only afford vehicles they were smart enough to buy and fix.

If secondhand was obvious to everybody, why did our industry and press waste so many years telling a false history of "Stuff", said to be "eighty to ninety percent" destined for burning in "Sodom and Gomorrah" (Agbogbloshie)?

We learned that earnest and heart-felt environmentalists are not immune to racial profiling of Africa's Tech Sector and Chinese contract manufacturing factories. CBS 60 Minutes said if "followed the trail" of mountains of desktop CRT monitors to Guiyu... and painstakingly watching the episode frame by frame, anyone can see not a single CRT monitor anywhere in evidence in Guiyu, let alone the thousands per day that were being purchased - not for scrap, but for reuse and remanufacture - at the very factories that assembled the monitors under contract to firms like Dell, Apple, and HP.

Where the trail-er of CRTs from Hong Kong really went, 

"But what about after it's no longer repairable, won't the device eventually be externalized waste?" I always get that question in presentations about reuse. But we don't hold ourselves to that standard now do we? If we don't prevent white people from buying a Tesla or a solar array until there's an established recycling system, why should we hold back 170,000 mobile phone towers from Africans?

The real story is about SKD or semi-knock-down operations, often at the factories which once assembled the equipment... doing the same thing that Cummins Motor does in Memphis... replacing rings and head gaskets in their own buy back motors... just as the Florida Cummins mechanic does with export markets. The same ink and toner cartridge manufacturers who paid BAN to impugn Foshan refillers now have their own ink refilling factories in Malaysia.  Is imitation the sincerest form of apology?

Some of those Asian "contract manufacturers" in fact became so profitable from reusing components that they led to major OEMs - Lenovo, Acer, and Foxconn - that compete now fiercely with Apple, Dell, and HP. The trail of BAN.org donations can be followed to OEMs who knew full well that toner cartridges were being refilled, not burned, in Foshan, Guangdong.

Poor people are smart to reuse - sometimes smarter than the Original Equipment Manufacturer. 

And now, our Massachusetts state senator Mike Brady of Brockton is leading the way to establish the "Right to Repair" for Massachusetts citizens, who have something in common with geeks of color around the world. We have the right to be environmentalists, to reuse and repair. More on this in August blogs.