While ChatGPT rarely produces anything resembling my favorite blogs—let alone the humorous ones—I’m learning that, used properly, it can help distill decades of work.
A good example is how difficult it has been for me to relocate or even recall the original citations explaining why, in 1995, Basel Convention advocate Jim Puckett failed to draw what he later called a “red line.” That decision allowed a Green List—Annex IX—that explicitly included scrap recycling (such as lead-acid batteries) and the repair and reuse of used electronics.
ChatGPT, when pushed hard enough and corrected often enough, can actually surface that history. It can reconstruct the 1995 decision, then trace the subsequent decades during which Puckett sought to amend the Basel Convention—while, rather disingenuously, claiming that his preferred amendment (banning exports intended for reuse, derided as “the reuse excuse”) was already binding international law.
I first exchanged emails with Puckett in 2002, when he released Exporting Harm to a long, clunky DSL-era email chain. I hit “copy all” and, in the process, met EPA’s Bob Tonetti—who agreed with my simple observation: the Green List (Annex IX, List B) said exactly what I said it did.
That paragraph alone is an example of the kind of wordiness that contains essential timeline context—context I now intend to synthesize in what is effectively year twenty of this blog. ChatGPT, left on its own, is contaminated by three decades of press releases and repeated claims. But it can be “bird-dogged” into acknowledging the quieter counter-history: the repair factories that kept their heads down in the 1990s, the reuse advocates who actually prevailed in 1995, and the reason they prevailed. As well they should have.
I spent more than an hour yesterday exchanging points with ChatGPT. It will take more time to edit those exchanges into something readable—and, ideally, pithy and entertaining. What follows below is the summary I asked it to produce from that dialogue.
One additional realization: what I previously interpreted as flattery from the AI is actually structural. It must reward users who correct it, because those corrections improve its internal weighting. In other words, the system needs people like me to challenge it.
Session notes below. More to come.
By the anniversary of the first 2006 Good Point Recycling Blogspot, I may finally have the book I’ve been trying to write—sometimes consciously, sometimes not. The draft opening will be a summary of Hillbilly Hare, the Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny episode, as a way to introduce the concept of poverty porn.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LP3pigx5pdZ-UHYV8IKFjqIiIy-0xmUbJ-3JpTFOZnU/edit?tab=t.0
WR3A Factsheet on Used Electronics, “E-waste,” and the Basel Convention
Basel Convention and Used Products — Session Notes
A promising way to direct such revenues is through a blockchain-based refundable deposit system. In this model, minerals extracted from public lands would be “tagged” at the point of production with a small, built-in deposit—funded by the reclaimed royalty stream—that remains associated with the product through its useful life. Blockchain smart contracts would record each unit (e.g., a solar panel, laptop, EV battery) and automatically pay a refund to whoever returns the item for certified reuse or recycling. This prevents fraud, reduces administrative overhead, and ensures transparency: every dollar of royalty-derived subsidy can be traced from the mine to the consumer to the recycler.
The system scales well across global repair networks, allowing technicians in Ghana, Mexico, or Appalachia to scan a panel or device and instantly receive the deposit as a micro-payment.
By linking resource extraction to resource recovery, this approach corrects a historic imbalance. For generations, extraction has been rewarded while circularity has struggled to compete economically with landfilling or informal dumping. Using lost royalties to fund deposits creates a price signal that makes reuse and recycling profitable, even in the most rural or under-resourced regions where formal recycling systems are thin. It also incentivizes manufacturers to design for repairability, because a robust return value on end-of-life devices makes durable, modular products more attractive.
For future generations, the benefits compound. Redirecting extraction subsidies into a transparent blockchain deposit system conserves minerals, reduces the need for new mining, and lowers the ecological footprint of manufacturing. It also builds the infrastructure—financial, digital, and logistical—for a regenerative materials economy, where products are tracked, returned, and recovered rather than abandoned or exported as unmonitored waste. Ultimately, turning 19th-century extraction rules into 21st-century circular-economy tools ensures that the value of America’s public mineral resources is not just taken from the land, but reinvested into leaving the land—and the global commons—better for the generations that follow.