Good Point: Ethical Electronics, Recycling "e-Waste" Blog: Power Books: Conflict and Controversy over Recycled and Non-Recycled Content

At the October Session on the Resource Recycling Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, the editors and reporters of Resource Recycling were introduced as a Panel by MassRecycle Board President Gretchen Carey.

Be a Recycling Resource: How to Engage with the Media and Fight Disinformation

In this session we heard from Resource Recycling's editorial team and SRO leaders on how to engage with the media to be a resource for dispelling dis/misinformation and how the media can help share your message.

Part one is the lead in to how EPR has made the "P" - producer - into a brand name. What recycling is actually about is raw materials, and the "P" Producer is the mine. The strip mine. The fracking. The petroleum well.

Recycling defends itself best when it's not comparing one recycler or process to another recycler or process, but when we describe the only alternative - EXTRACTION.

In parts 2, 3 and 4 the plan is to cover three recent books published about EXTRACTION. But first, lets visit the topic of disposal one more time, since it is the only lens the press looks at recycling through.

The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives

Ernest Scheyder

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-War-Below/Ernest-Scheyder/9781668011805

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Siddharth Kara

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250284297/cobaltred

Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that Will Shape the Future

Vince Beiser

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709947/power-metal-by-vince-beiser/

Here is a link to a great WSJ article about how a P Producer - Glencore - is willingly in the EPR business of recycling used electronics, or "e-waste".

This is obviously an important topic. As the last @BillMaher blog post described, lies about recycling travel halfway around the world before the Facts can tie their shoes. "Lies, damned lies, and Statistics" is and old saw popularized by Mark Twain which describes the bane of journalism worldwide. Press reporters are asked to report on claims every day on topics that rotate in and out of our consciousness, and unless they are in the narrow field of data journalism it can be hard for them not to quote a statistic out of a press release, and harder still for them to resist the most shocking interpretation of the stat that makes it "newsworthy".

Newsworthy, of course, is "Man Bites Dog". "If it Bleeds It Leads". Who wants to read about something normal and everyday that we all take for granted? When I was Director at Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s I often described the challenge to Recycling was that if it works, it's as boring as a laundromat or gas station. We risked being addicted to the attention-getting controversies about recycling.

So the problem has been that recycling is as old as the second arrowhead, and for most of the course of human history materials were reused almost automatically. Prior to the industrial reveolution and the universal living standards that were considered affluent just generations before, it was impossible to throw away a rag without a rag picker putting it in his cart. Even today, in most places in the world, copper and steel and aluminum never stay in a landfill. In the global south, if someone tries to discard an aluminum can, there are tent cities at the landfill and street carters racing to grab it before it gets there.

So there was ten thousand years of habit washing and reusing containers and recycling them if necessary until the "throwaway society" - a phrase created sometime in the 1950s when marketers started to associate wastefulness, elective upgrades, replacement, with affluence. And "fast fashion" followed. Environmentalists were alarmed, and by Earth Day 1970 most people, and the press, began to feel concern where this was headed.

I certainly felt it, back in the 1970s, the sense that something was really not sustainable. To this day I'm motivated to work for children I will never know, generations who will live decades after we have passed. And so, in the 1970s and 80s, perhaps we felt justified in producing environmentalists own Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.

No time to go through all of them. But, for example, under Jimmy Carter we were told that the world would run completely out of petroleum in a couple of decades. The Mobro Barge became a "garbage crisis". When RCRA required very small town dumps - "unlined landfills" - to stop accepting waste and cap with clay to prevent leachate and seepage, recyclers reported that "two thirds of landfill space is closing" despite the fact that one large modern landfill was being built that had more capacity than the closed landfills, combined. Environmentalists who had been protesting nuclear power (a mistake I made in my youth) began protesting waste-to-energy by creating fears about childrens health - justified in older incinerators but a bit of an "overblown concern", so to speak, at NIMBY rallies.

So the truth is that human's capacity to dig up all the ore and coal and cut down or just burn every tree is absolutely an emergency. An emergency that justified a few creative "statistics", perhaps. But the journalists and Gretchen had to address the backlash of anti-recycling stigma that was an unintended consequence of exaggeration.

Gretchen's opening piece about showing the recycling happen, taking reporters to the MRFs, was a great example. That's how we managed the fake 80% poverty porn e-waste story - taking professors, researchers, and reporters to meet Geeks of Color in the global south, who don't have any intent or means to import electronics they cannot use. And the electricity usage, reported by World Bank, says that of course the devices work because they are running out of electricity every day.