"IT'S ALIVE!" Author Stephen King's Personal Vintage FM Broadcaster To Go Back Online In Ghana, Africa

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Vintage Stephen King FM Station Broadcaster “Rises Again” for Halloween—Bound for Accra, Ghana to Champion Reuse & Recycling

IT’S ALIVE!

Middlebury, VT & Accra, Ghana — [October 28, 2025] — In a season made for re-animation, a piece of broadcasting history is getting a second life. A 1980s-era FM radio broadcast station once used by author Stephen King has been recovered in Maine by Matthew Strong, a retired electronics recycler, collected and conserved by Good Point Recycling of Vermont, and purchased by BridgeSolarPower.com CEO Emmanuel Nyaletey of Ghana. The vintage gear will be co-owned by BridgeSolarPower.com and Good Point Recycling and installed in Accra for community programming that spotlights electronics reuse, safe recycling, and circular-economy jobs.

Broadcast Electronics FM10 10Kw FM transmitter with qty 4 4CX7500A tubes

“Finding this equipment felt like uncovering a time capsule,” said Matthew Strong, who recognized the significance of the station and preserved its key components. “It’s satisfying to know the next chapter won’t just be museum glass—it’ll be on the air, creating public value.”

The project pairs BridgeSolarPower.com’s energy-access mission with Good Point Recycling’s fair-trade reuse ethos. “Stephen King helped make Maine famous for stories that travel,” said Robin Ingenthron, spokesperson for Good Point Recycling. “Sending this gear responsibly to Accra—where radio still stitches communities together—turns a great story into a working system. It proves that reuse, when done right, is not a horror show—it’s the hero of resource conservation.”

BridgeSolarPower.com will host the restored studio as part of a public-interest broadcast initiative focused on right-to-repair, safe handling of end-of-life devices, technician training, and the economics of reuse in African markets. The programming will include interviews with local repairers (“the real experts”), call-in shows on product longevity, and segments demystifying environmental compliance and downstream accountability.

“This isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake,” said Emmanuel Nyaletey, CEO of BridgeSolarPower.com. “Ghana’s tech sector runs on ingenuity and repair culture. A functioning broadcast studio gives us a megaphone to share practical advice, highlight good actors, and inspire young people to turn reuse into careers. It’s about jobs, access, and dignity—and doing it transparently.”

To Matt Strong, it was not immediately evident that Stephen King’s broadcaster had survived since it was decommissioned.  “When we arrived at the transmitter site, it was obvious that nobody had been there for quite awhile… the door stuck… And as we got it open, it erupted into the Sargasso Sea of ticks. They were everywhere, outside, inside the equipment, and began to crawl all over us!  We all agreed it could be a theme for a Stephen King story.”

The partners emphasized that all international movements are being managed with proper documentation and that the equipment, once commissioned in Accra, will operate as a teaching platform for electronics testing, safe refurbishment, and compliant materials handling. “We want trade readers to see the model: verify demand, document flows, elevate local technicians, and measure impact,” Ingenthron added. “That’s how reuse outperforms disposal.”  The three businesses are aligned under the mission of FairTradeRecycling.org, an international NGO based in Middlebury, Vermont.

Specifications

STEPHEN KING’s Broadcast Electronics FM10 10Kw FM transmitter with qty 4 4CX7500A tubes, one installed and 3 spares (all filaments test good). Complete manual, large box of (new) spare parts, spare blower motor (new in box).  Tuned @ 103.3 (was WKIT in Bangor Maine) 

Made in October of 1987.

About BridgeSolarPower.com

BridgeSolarPower.com develops community-scale energy and technology solutions in West Africa, bridging access gaps with practical, locally serviced systems. The company invests in training, local supply chains, and circular-economy practices to keep equipment in service longer.

About Good Point Recycling

Good Point Recycling (American Retroworks Inc.) is a Vermont-based, ISO/R2-certified electronics reuse and recycling company known for Fair Trade Recycling partnerships and transparent downstream management. GPR supports right-to-repair, technician training, and data-driven environmental compliance.

Media Contacts

Good Point Recycling (Vermont)
Robin Ingenthron, Spokesperson
(802) 382-8500 | press@goodpointrecycling.net | GoodPointRecycling.net

BridgeSolarPower.com (Ghana)
Media Relations
info@bridgesolarpower.com | BridgeSolarPower.com

---

Halloween kicker: From the King of horror to the kings of reuse, this station isn’t haunting the attic anymore—it’s back on the air. In recycling, we don’t fear the afterlife… we call it a second life. 👻📻

Extended Producer Responsibility. Part 1: Define the Problem / Benign Neglect?

2009 The Watchmen

Adrian Veidt:
It doesn't take a genius to see that the world has problems.
Edward Blake:
No, but it takes a room full of morons to think they're small enough for you to handle.

"It doesn't take a genius to see the world has problems."

"It takes a roomful of morons to think they're small enough for you to handle."

So let's discuss EPR, or "Extended Producer Responsibility".  It's the most talked about recycling topic, other than "Plastic", at almost every recycling conference.

This blog is deliberately agnostic about EPR. Here is my critique.

1. Define the problem to be solved. Then don't neglect it.

The first ever bottle bill, in Vermont in the late 1950s, was passed at a time when "disposable" beverages was new. Most soda and beer at the time was sold in refillable bottles. Vermonters collecting litter saw that the new one-use containers constituted most of the litter, and the problem was "non-deposit container litter".

In the 1980s, when bottle deposit laws were proposed in several other states (including Massachusetts, which my division administered at DEP), there was a huge shift to single-use containers, and both rewarding refillables and recycling single use were part of the plan. The advocates conceded on putting the deposit only on carbonated beverages because bottled water wasn't common and the Cranberry Juice lobby in Massachusetts argued that (highly sugared) fruit juice was healthy. 

ChatGPT, Blogger, Digital Haystacks, Infinite Needles

ChatGPT flatters me when I'm arriving at "profound" questions while thinking outside the box, and admits that the limitations it places on generating responses to certain inquiries tend to privilege those in power or control, who are building guardrails for bad intentions that work equally well against hypothetical or actual socially beneficial intentions. It could be flattering - OpenAI's users are all above average, perhaps.

But with a little editing, this could be a Platonic Dialogue.

The dialogue below is between me and OpenAI.

Digital Haystacks Revisited: AI's new role in policing (CAPTCHA) intellectual inquisitiveness...

Outsourcing My Self Perspective to a Deadbot?

The Afterlife is digitized, and the revolution WILL be broadcast.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/26/nx-s1-5508355/ai-dead-people-chatbots-videos-parkland-court

I'm very grateful for Photos.google.com.  There are now decades of photos I can find very quickly. And it includes a lot of digital photos I took of hard copy photos.

And I'm very grateful that wonderful things from artists like Gahan Wilson and Gary Larson and George Carlin (whose comments on the history of the FCC were very topical again, this week. Freedom of Speech should be safe as long as we have volume, channel changing, and other knobs availalbe).

Less grateful that Blogger delists older posts which included hot links that are now dead links.  In 2008, if this blog linked to a current story of 2008, and that link (often to a youtube video, which is another google archive topic) is now 404, the blogspot post linking to that 404 effectively becomes 404.

Understandably, this may be a necessary way to prevent AI from generating millions of blogspot posts and billions of youtube videos. But AI will probably have more time to figure its way past the gatekeepers than I will have time for to go back and edit 17 year old blog posts.

This is the reason I'm now entertaining the idea of outsourcing my blog to my own "Deadbot".

So far, the digitization of thoughts and opinions and images and voice has been marketed as a way to preserve a dearly departed "dead" one - hence the term "dead-bot". And that raises questions - would my parents have wanted me to do that? My father Bill Ingenthron worshiped his grandparents - but they instructed him to burn their love letters (he didn't). So it's an "ethics of recycling" topic.

But I'm in a position to recycle myself. I could outsource my engagement with society - which has always been above and beyond the societal mean. There is a big digital record of my thoughts and opinions, starting with articles and editorials I wrote in the trade press (see academia.edu profile), continuing with the blog, and I'm always piping up on Linkedin and Facebook (to the alarm and consternation of my most significant other person in my life).

Glad to be on a Lucky Planet

Across the universe, the atoms and molecules are abundant. Our planet Earth is less than 1% of all of the matter that we see. A lot less than 1%.

So my body is made up of the same atoms and molecules that exist on billions of other stars and planets, but we have no evidence as of yet that there are other bloggers on other planets at this perceptible time. 

Time is a feature, not a bug. 

Time and space are understandable, thanks to Dr. Einstein, through the theory of relativity. I'm very fortunate that my late mother, Janeth K. (Fisher) Ingenthron, tried to explain Einstein's theory to me in like the sixth grade. And explained the concept of "infinity" to me even earlier, at 4 years old perhaps. 

Thinking about Infinity and the theory of time - that it is relative to the intelligence ability to receive it, like our human ability to read a book which exists in total on the shelf, a page or word or sentence at a time. We have little mouths to eat the Elephant of Time.

Back to Mom... she pushed me to learn other languages (her Major Degree was in German) and to visit other places. Murren Switzerland was my first work-vacation, with IBG which organized projects with 25ish volunteers from 12ish countries to do manual labor - YCC like - to carve hiking trails etc.

 So in Part 1 I told about my background, and how I was raised to avoid debt "at any cost". And digressed a bit to the great grandparents and grandparents who helped to raise me, and their skepticism of charity. 

So I was a bit shocked, in 1980, at the tuition and board cost at Carleton (and you can't really live off campus, so "and board" is priced into tuition). So I signed up for work to offset cost and was assigned, like most Carleton College freshman, to food service. I signed up for the food kiosk in Sayles-Hill.

When I showed up on time the first week of school, there was a sign that said the food service was on strike - Saga Food Service was the campus contractor, and their employees were on strike. The College had closed 3/4 food joints and everyone had to dine at Burton Hall.  So I went to Burton to start work.

It was a bit of chaos that day as all of the 2000+ students were dining in 1/4 cafeterias, but I elbowed my way in to ask about work.

Brian - I don't remember his last name - was the Saga Manager (the company the strike was upon).  As I recall he was six foot three and very fat - maybe 350 lbs.  Big guy. Intimidating. I asked him, in the chaos of fourfold feeding in a onefold cafeteria, where I'd be working.

Brian said sorry kid, all the positions are full. Come back next week.

This. Was. Not. An. Option. For. Me.

I was overwhelmed already by the tuition cost at Carleton, and my grandparents stories about jobs and wages and desperate tiimes in the Depression and "Dust Bowl" all lighted up within me.

Brian had turned around. I circled and pushed my chest right up to him and said I NEEDED THIS JOB.

Brian said listen kid, there are a lot of rich kids here who quit the first few weeks and I should just relax and come back in a week or two, there would be openings.

He turned away again. I got up into his chest again. I said with all my heart, PLEASE, I need to work, I can't afford this place. PLEASE.  LET ME WORK.

Brian looked down and made eye contact. He said that while he had no positons open ,that my insistance was something new. Something he didn't see often. And he said "hypotentically" that he needed another student manager. But that he had NEVER hired a student manager from a first week freshman.

I SHOUTED I WOULD BE HIS BEST STUDENT MANAGER.

I was hired with no experience as a student manager, working directly for Saga Food Service, which was a dollar more per hour but more importantly, not restricted by the student work office to 7 hours per week.  I frequently worked 20 hours, and stayed in that job 4 years.

My Freshman Job Interview at SAGA Food Service - my first week at Carleton College 1980: Part One

My father and my mother were the first people in their high schools (graduated 7 years apart, my dad was older) in Taney County, Missouri. 

My father was raised in a very self-educated household. William E. Freeland, his grandfather, and wife Minnie Freeland (Pawpaw and Mawmaw) whom I lived with for a few months every year, as a child, had hundreds of books he purchased on a government salary stationed in Four Corners - Shiprock, NM, today - before it was the USA state, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Where there wasn't anyplace to spend your federal paycheck, and nothing to do, so he and Minnie his wife (another family icon) spent their time reading and learning. 

* Pawpaw and Mawmaw Freeland were lifelong letter writers and retired with their friend John G. Neihardt in Branson, Missouri.  Black Elk Speaks was a seminal book I read and re-read in high school and afterwards, only later learning I'd sat on Neihardt's lap as a child... my Dad asked me what I was reading and I assumed he didn't know anything about Black Elk and was surprised when he pointed to the sofa where he and Pawpaw used to talk.

Pawpaw thought welfare and charity were corrupt and corrupting, and in the end thought BIA did more harm than good, "turning a culture morally opposed to hand-outs and charity upon its head".

My mom was raised on a subsistence farm in Taney County - Ridgedale, half a mile from the Arkansas border (she was born in Harrison). Outhouses using Sears Roebuck catalog pages for toilet paper. 

Premise: I was raised by people who didn't beg, borrow, or take family debt. And when I was admitted to Carleton College, the 1980s were when the colleges were absolutely soaking up debt like today's federal deficit. 

The financial aid officer at Carleton told me (and thousands of others) that there is "good debt" and "bad debt" and that a college education was the former.

Not convincing, as I was raised. I asked where the most work was on campus, and was told food service - SAGA. It didn't stand for anything - it was Saga Food Services, a chain providing college and institutional "turn key" cafeteria management.

In Part Two, I'll connect these dots.

3 Minute Middlebury College Blog

Yesterday we presented - in Espanol (I'm enrolled in a 7 week Escuela de Espanol) at Middlebury College.

There were four of us. Me, Kennii from Nigeria (and Stanford University), Bob from Brazil, and Jo - all Spanish 1.5 students presenting on environmental subjects to the students of Middlbury's prestigious summer language college (my wife is Director of the School of French).

Here is a link to my 5 minute presentation on "fotos falsas" and collateral damage.  I was joined by Technico Rudy of Queztatenaga Guatemala.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1drREMgKyYxSNks2prc0SutacLbUAAF5l/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108266863784829595501&rtpof=true&sd=true

It went over very well. 

People can tell the difference between photos taken in professional refurbishing and recycling factories, and poverty porn pictures of random children placed atop of home-generated junk.

Kehinde “Kennii” Ekundayo has become a friend in the class.  Her presentation was about use of art to draw attention to global warming etc.  Bob and Jo also spoke about warming.  

I spoke about NGOs creating an atmosphere to arrest smart technicians in poor countries doing what my grandfather taught me about - fixing a rich person's broken thing.

80% Ewaste Hoax is dead.

https://www.sdsu.edu/news/2024/05/sdsu-international-student-secures-coveted-spot-in-stanfords-art-history-doctoral-program

DNA Immigration

Most "Illegal" Immigrants to the USA have 40-60% Native American, Indigenous, DNA.

Most legal Immigrants to America have 5%-15% (or lower) genetic North American DNA.

Quantitative Estimation Group

Est. % Native American Ancestry (average)

Unauthorized immigrants (mostly Central America, Mexico) ~40–60%

Legal immigrants (global distribution) ~5–15% or lower

Humans whose ancestors lived in North America are being told to obey migration rules invented in Europe. Lines drawn on maps by white people are somehow sacrosanct. But a DNA map shows that native north Americans are given less access to North America.

In my opinion, what is going on with xenophobia right now started with California's first marijuana legalization for medical purposes. It created a wink-wink economy for pot without a legal source to grow it. Arizona wound up a transport hub, and narcotics followed.

Leftist activists who organized "caravans" under Obama created a wave of immigrants educated (marketed) on how to overwhelm the USA's asylum law system. The current Trump efforts are anti-marketing. Sure, there are real differences of opinion, in between. But the anti marketing made sense and is working, and the "overwhelm the system" marketers have some blame.

Robin's 35 Wedding Anniversary: A Memorable Insight (Holy Ghost Blog)

1. Will your unbaptised child burn in hell?

2. Will your uncertified laptop burn in Agbogbloshie?

The authorities certified my wedlock, and the authorities certify my reuse sales. Massive edifices of cathedrals were built on money from the paid certification of cemetaries, births, baptisms and marriages. 

Thirty five years is most of my adult life.  My partner is a Ph.D in francophone literature and director of the USA's most prestigious language institute. She also set up the Middlebury College language program semester in Yaounde, Cameroon (where I did my Peace Corps service from 6/1984-12/1986).  I'm enrolled in the Middlebury College Escuela de Espanol ahora mismo.  It's a small world.

When we were married in July 1990 in Toulouges, France (her parents Catalan hometown, outside of Perpignan) it was a long haul for a lot of Americans who attended, including my parents and my grandparents - Clarence and Lauradean Fisher of Ridgedale, Missouri.  Clarence is the inspiration for the chapter of Adam Minter's Secondhand - "A Rich Persons Broken Thing" - about the value repair can add. It was the thesis of  my international career, that knowledge to repair what someone else doesn't know how to repair is an honest economic tool, and the nations which exited poverty most quickly despite the "Resource Curse" were countries that repaired and refurbished and remanufactured at a mass scale.

But today's memorable insight from the wedding was another visitor from Columbia, Missouri, where I grew up until age of 5 (as my dad got his Ph.D in Mass Communications and Journalism).  I didn't know Pamela in Columbia, but met her in 1984 when we were both assigned to TEFL posts in the north of Cameroon (she was in the far north, Maroua, I was in the close north, Ngaoundal - 3 hours south of Ngaoundere by train. 

Pamela was my "best man".

So the anecdote from the wedding was about Pamela, an African American woman from Missouri, and her meeting my Mom, daughter of Clarence and Lauradean, who were all from Taney County Missouri.  And how much Pam and my Mom had in common from attending a Midwest/Southern American church.  Black church in the USA and Pentecostal Church from rural USA had a LOT in common.  Fire and brimstone, emphatic preachers, songs and clapping, interruptions of Hallelujah. From Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn we have a snapshot of the roots of these Churches....

"He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see. But it warn’t surprising; because he warn’t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too, and had a little one-horse log church down back of the plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense, for a church and schoolhouse, and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too. There was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South."

In particular, I remember my Mom and Pam both laughing about their earliest doubts about the church their parents were so intent on baptizing them into. In particular, the common practice of the "Holy Ghost" or "Holy Spirit" to inhabit the soul of a churchgoer who would rise, possessed, and speaking in tongues.

Mom and Pam both laughed about the same moments they asked themselves... "Of all the people in our congregation, why does God and the Holy Ghost always choose Mrs. Anderson to possess?  And why doesn't it ever 'possess; me or my parents??"

This was not a mustard seed of faith, this was the mustard seed of logic and reasonable doubt... and helps to explain why neither Pam (who also married a French citizen, Laurent, who also continued working in Africa for decades after they met during our PC service in Cameroun) nor my mother raised their own kids in a fire-and-brimstone church.

There's a pattern here, and it has a lot to do with E-Stewards and R2 Certification and the Charitable Industrial Complex - which this blog has always associated with temple of authority.

Unobtainium Critique of Renewable Energy by Black Hooded Mark Mills

"Life Impact of Renewables" by Manhattan Institute's Mark Mills is still being widely shared in the MAGA universe. It was forwarded to me a month ago It might be a good thought experiment to question what is the half-life of a half-truth in half of a polarized society? But let's stick to math and science.

Does X - any object or technology - have environmental cost inputs? Certainly. A gold ring or smartphone has more costly inputs than a plastic ring or a corded dial up phone. Solar panels and wind turbines are not immune.  Everything has a break-even point to pay off the cost of the inputs. It's a time and math equation.

https://youtu.be/JNRNK3ULLK8

https://youtu.be/JNRNK3ULLK8

ARS TECHNICA's Science author John Timmer already rebutted this insidious critique of investment in renewable energy in 2021.  So if you watch the cringy attack by Mark Mills on renewable energy investments, read Ars Technica next. But I have a few things to add third.

Should I keep going after Alexander Clapp? Or just accept his Waste Wars surrender? Nameless, Faceless Buyers to Him are My Peeps.

Nobody at last week's E-Waste World Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, mentioned Alexander Clapp or his "Waste Wars" book.

Jim Puckett was there, refused to speak about it.

Clapp cites me in 2006 as a source, but won't take my Linkedin invite, let alone speak about what I learned in the 19 years since (20 actually, since my 2006 quote was already dated).

I've got a lot of interesting new stuff to talk about. It's interesting how non-interested Alexander is, both in the sense of his lack of interest in the truth and African and Asians lack of interest in his racial profiling of their Tech Sectors.

Hopefully one of Alex's family members who wrote reviews of his book on Amazon (and transparently didn't hide their family relation) read this, by searching for him.

He's a total fraud. But probably unintentionally... probably meant well, probably yearns, as I do, to be an environmentalist.  But he didn't interview any buyers... they - the market - is nameless, faceless. But I really wish he had the guts to talk to me, like Oli and Adam and even Kevin McElvaney did. Clapp is the biggest intellectual coward of any person I've tried to confront. Sad. 

A Modest Hypothesis: Did Guiyu and Agbogbloshie Make the River Cleaner?

A professor visiting China emailed me this morning and jokingly asked what he should look for in Guiyu or Wuhan in his spare time.

Sometimes a pithy email response makes the best blog fodder. My response:

You don't need to really go to Guiyu or Agbogbloshie if you have Google maps. Just find press coverage of Basel Action Network or Blacksmith Institute's toxic River sample. Then identify the river and find a site a few kilometers upstream and then Google search for contaminated water samples upstream.  

Based on that evidence, Guiyu and Agbogbloshie are making the river cleaner (though of course that is because the samples upstream were taken years earlier when it was even worse).

Science!!!

I'm referring of course to the Guiyu river samples from the largest textile factory hub on earth, upstream from Guiyu, whose water samples are nearly identical to the Bangladesh Lourajong River samples downstream from the Bangladesh second-largest textile manufacturing hub on earth.  Surprise, Guiyu's samples look the same as the river samples of the textile effluent samples upstream from Guiyu.  

My Four Principles: Recycling Is My Karma Yoga

This is not a religious blog by any means. But my recycling career choice has an origin story. 

When my mother, Janeth Ingenthron (1942-2025), was pursuing a Ph.D degree at the University of Arkansas in World Literature, during my teenage years, she would finish an assigned reading and then knock on my bedroom door, throw it on my bed, and tell me briefly about why it was important.

Tao Tse Ching.

Plato's Republic. 

Steppenwolf, Siddhartha...

Bhagavad Gita...

Some combination of smoking pot and feeling guilty about it and being surrounded by Ozark Mountain Pentecostal relatives grew inside me... And I also read my pocket Gideon's Bible New Testament, and talked to Mom about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John... same story but different perspectives and lessons.

In a nutshell, cutting to the chase, I decided that becoming a hermit monk philosopher would keep my conscience nice and shiny, but that generations who would look back on us, the way I was looking back on these historical philophers, would care about what we consumed and polluted, and what we left for them.

That's why Recycling became my choice. It was a religious, philosophical choice. If I live on this planet, I will consume finite resources, and the best way short of asceticism was to justify my existence by saving waste. Recycling was my karma yoga.

Ten Years Since 2015: The Agbogbloshie Fever Broke

From 2015 to 2025, the story of e-waste exports has been more or less at an impasse. Academic peer reviewed research has supported this blog's thesis, which is that the e-waste filmed at Agbogbloshie city dump was domestically generated by the residents and businesses of the City of Accra. But sensationalists (like Alexander Clapp) still make money off of the easily told story of externalisation, in a world of Trump-Globalism-Is-Bad believers.

The role of journalism, and the role of the human amygdala ("if it bleeds, it leads") in selecting stories to report, is a frequent subject of the blog. I came from 3 generations of journalism on the Freeland (middle name) side of the family, my late father was a Journalism professor (fellow graduate of University of Missouri J-School, classmate of Jim Lehrer), and my long relationship with Emerging Markets (from the Nestle Boycott of 1982, which drew me into Carleton College Student Government to my International Relations degree and semester at the UN in Geneva, to Peace Corps and beyond) has frequently put me in a leadership position to call out false reporting about places like Agbogbloshie.

But it's also a challenge to keep this blog "fresh" and not to repeat myself. The Recycling Trade Press writ large eventually acknowledged it was participating in "poverty porn" for the sake of shredding equipment ad revenue and conference attendance (Editor Jerry Powell told me "it's not the steak, it's the sizzle" when - effectively - acknowledging to me privately that he realized Chinese recyclers were being racially profiled).

 https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/2015/11/10/exporting-deception-disturbing-trend-waste-trade-denial/

E-Scrap News not only printed this in 2015, but RE-printed it in 2018, by which point the Basel Action Network's own staff was quitting and the fever should have broken.

This is why I simultaneously feel obligated to continue blogging, and at the same time want to give up. It's harder and harder for me to repeat things that are obvious, but the defense of racial profiling is not exactly something other than what we are all called upon to do. 

The Prophesy: Great Grandchildren in the Future Will Care About Our Generations Consumption

The "Bene Gesserit" April Fool's Blog had a "prophesy".

PRESS RELEASE: Recycling Sisterhood Bene Gesserit of Sustainability Thwarting Harkonen Waste Management

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 1, 2025

Waste Arrakis: Elite Recycling Sisterhood Revealed as Bene Gesserit to Thwart Harkonen Waste Empire

BOSTON, MA – In a stunning development uncovered today (April 1st, obviously), a covert order of elite recycling professionals has been outed as none other than the secretive Bene Gesserit of sustainability—a powerful collective silently shaping the environmental future of the galaxy... one compost bin at a time.

The Prophecy: Children and great-grandchildren yet to be born will care whether we kept the water pure and made finite world resources last, and they will appreciate the sustainability we try to care about today.

Operating for decades under the guise of state officials, nonprofit leaders, and municipal department heads, this fearless group has been secretly resisting the expansion of the galactic menace known as Harkonen Hauling Waste Management, along with its sinister subsidiaries: Harkonen Mining (motto: "Strip it faster!") and Harkonen New Produce Obsolescence Corporation (creators of the 6-day toaster).

When the Harkonen Waste Wars latest battle brought on gaslighting of recycling participants, markets, businesses, and workers - with bold "RECYCLING IS A LIE" Blimps floating over Earth Day Festivities, it awakened a quiet set of sorceresses who have been supporting the environment for decades, as described in the Great Book of Recycling.

Meet the Sisterhood of the Circular Economy:

• Brooke Nash (MA DEP) – High Reverend Mother of End Markets and Master of the “Waste Not” Litany.
• Megan Schulz-Fontes (NERC) – Keeper of the Northeast Waste Path and Mistress of Materials Flow.
• Laura Olivier (Earthworm Recycling) – Whisperer of Compost, Summoner of Worm Armies.
• Reagan Bissonette (NRRA) – Wielder of the Spice of Source Separation; Prophetess of Post-Consumer Peace.
• Gretchen Carey (MassRecycle) – Queen of Education Outreach, feared for her deadly accurate eco-haikus.
• Terri L. Goldberg – Supreme Auditor of Hazardous Substances and Knower of All That is Buried.
• Kathi Mirza (MA DEP) – Code-breaker of Collection Data; her spreadsheets strike terror into the hearts of cartels.
• Waneta Trabert (Newton MA DPW) – Commander of Municipal Resistance, known as “The Waste Whisperer of Walnut Street.”
• Abbey Massaro (MassRecycle) - Vision Mother of the Context.

The Prophecy: Future generations around the world will benefit from one person's impact - each of our impacts. What we are doing today will matter.

The Conflict:

As Harkonen forces spread cheap plastic packaging, fake recycling apps, and new operating systems that turn working laser printers into boat anchors, the Bene Gesserit Recycling Order has activated their plan: The Great Diversion. It includes zero-waste Jedi training, organics mind-melding, and an AI-powered Extended Producer Responsibility sandworm.

“We must conserve for the next generation, the prophesized children of the future,” said Nash during a recent council. “We will not permit the waste stream to flow unchecked.”

Sources say the Sisterhood has infiltrated multiple board meetings under the cover of “public comment periods” and is rumored to have hypnotized several corporate executives with repeated chants of “Reduce, Reuse, Refuse.”

The Prophecy: Mothers will see the importance of the world their children's children will inherit.

"Extract! Carbonize! Brickware! Dispose!" - Harkonen Waste Motto

What’s Next?

A climactic battle is rumored for Earth Day, in which the Sisterhood will ride in on solar-powered e-bikes to challenge the Harkonen clan at their last known landfill stronghold, armed with reusable tote bags, carrot peels, and a binder of intergalactic waste bans.

When asked for comment, Harkonen CEO Vladimir Dumpstrakh simply muttered, “Curse those witches of waste... they sorted everything.”

The Prophecy: A kinder, gentler, more sustainable Sandworm can be nurtured and bred, to make our Spice more sustainable...

Anne McGovern, Christine Beling, and Susan Cascino, Laura Dubester, Lynn Rubenstein - and many others whose claims that the Sisterhood existed were scorned as Recycling Lies - are passing out the Prophesy Popcorn.

@AlexanderClapp Officially Blocks My Twitter X Posts

After hearing about his book interview on an NPR podcast, I tried to suggest he take a look at dozens of taped interviews I made with importers in Ghana and scrap workers at Agbogbloshie between 2010 and present day.  When trying to introduce him to Olu Orga, who gave Adam Minter and I our first tour of Agbogbloshie in 2014, and to share my interviews with Olu in 2017, I found Alex has blocked me, so cannot see any of my posts or replies.

I haven't said anything impolite, though I tried to ask about his book's misapplied quote from me here in this blog.  But here's a screenshot.  

Followed by a link to just one of Olu's interviews I wanted to share with him.

If you want to leave readers a review of his book on Amazon, here is a link.  Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash

Here again is Olu Orga's description of his years working at Agbogbloshie, where he specialized in repairing thirdhand goods discarded by wealthier homes and businesses in Accra, Ghana.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qQM3WLdYR8&list=PLZQiwXcn3NV9ohL-tYCTdGdXH9b1ohBX_

Recycling Is Not a "LIE": Part 3. Alexander Clapp says I'm an Expert?

 

Waste Wars: A Journey Through the World of Globalized Trash

Forthcoming from Little, Brown & Company

Try out this logic.  

"Health Care Is a LIE, because everyone receiving health care will eventually die".

So I just found out that Alexander Clapp, author of the NYTimes Opinion editorial saying that Recycling Is a Lie, quotes me personally as an expert. Page 135. 

Yet, he does not respond to my direct messages, offers to dialogue, or follows (Linkedin, BlueSky, XTwitter)... So I'm following his posts and will buy a used copy of his book when it is available, but this "Health Care Is a Lie" logic is patently false.  

The 2006 NIH Report by Charles Schmidt, where the misleading quote is pulled from, was based on a trip I made to Asia 20 years ago with Total Reclaim of Seattle president Craig Lorch, and native (2nd generation) Mandarin speaker Lin King of WR3A.org and University of California (recycling program manager).  I had not been to Africa since 1987, and was trying to explain to Mr. Schmidt that the HUGE CONTRACT MANUFACTURERS IN ASIA - SUBCONTRACTORS FOR DELL, HP, ETC. were certainly not importing 80% waste. When he asked about Africa importers, I knew that they were not running 50+ huge factories with up to 1500 employees, 3 shifts a day, seven days per week.  And during that interview, I was also trying to remain friends with Mr. Jim Puckett who was making the (false) claim that 80% of used electronics trade violated the Basel Convention.

AFTER this interview with NIH Schmidt, the following occured.

1. I went to visit our buyers in Africa - with my whole family - and learned that they were Tech Sector professionals who knew WAY more about the electronics they were purchasing than USA recyclers did.

2. I sent multiple emails to the 2006 study author between 2006 (when I complained about the coverage even then) leading right up to 2013, when I invited him to attend the Middlebury Fair Trade Recycling Summit. See email to the author at bottom, with the list of speakers and experts meeting to discuss the "e-waste hoax" BAN had by that time created.  

3. 2013 was the year Jim Puckett of BAN disavowed his own claims in the 2006 Charles Schmidt NIH study - actually claiming he had never ever made the 80% illegal export claims.

In a sample email to Schmidt copied above, I was imploring him to update the 2006 study I'm quoted from, and he submitted my offer to his editor at NIH, who in 2011 turned it down.  Instead, Adam Minter that year visited multiple importers (and domestic Chinese e-waste buyers) for his book, Junkyard Planet.  Which like his second book, Secondhand, interviewed me and our WR3A members directly and on multiple occasions visited them.