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

• Gretchen Carey, President, MassRecycle

• Marissa Heffernan, Associate Editor, Resource Recycling, Inc.

• Dan Holtmeyer, Managing Editor, Resource Recycling, Inc.

• Antoinette Smith, Reporter, Resource Recycling, Inc.

• Colin Staub, Associate Editor, Resource Recycling, Inc.

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".

What Poor People Do, Rich People Define?

The "Informal Sector" is a term I have never seen among the 6 billion people in the market it refers to.

The big mining companies are all in the "formal sector".

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6960944556800385024?utm_source=linkedin_share&utm_medium=member_desktop_web

vocabulary lesson - of unwitting racist environmentalists... Your antithesis of recycling is mining, forestry, fracking... all of which earn gajillions from unearned public royalties.\

14/15 Superfund sites were the opposite of Recycling.

Footprints Vs. Fingerprints: Example of Environmental Own Goal (leadfree solder)

 My generation became invested in Recycling before the "Mobro Barge" and garbage crisis (closing of small unlined landfills under RCRA). 

The energy, carbon, environmental harm, habitat depletion, species loss, toxics, everything in mining and petroleum pumping, was the reason to recycle. We made a calculated bargain to put recycling into the waste management business, to benefit from rising landfill costs, but I have argued we lost our way.

Mining and forestry build roads into forests, which expose humanity to #bushmeat trade (illegal poaching). That brings endangered-species-platter to so-called "wet markets", which brings us HIV, AIDS, and Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) through chimp and pangolin and bat hunting.  

FOOTPRINT:  We pierce habitats because we don't recycle enough, and we need the supply of virgin raw materials.

FINGERPRINT: We obsess over our recycling - the costs, the quality, the access - losing site of the fact that recycling has always paid for itself if the cost of mining, forestry, and oil drilling have to pay for themselves as well.

Here's a reminder of our #owngoal, a Midgely-esque policy still championed as environmentally sustainable, which failed to do the math. ROHS, or leadfree solder.

Tin mining in SE Asia was practically extinct by 1980 (a high school friend's dad in Arkansas had lost his job because "bi-metal cans" demanded so little tin by then). We environmentalists re-opened this mining business because we were more obsessed with the quality of our waste than the recycled content and repairability of our electronic devices.