Google Warning - retroworks.blogspot.com losing 592+ Posts

Well, it was a depressing email in my gmail box this morning.  Google will stop indexing a huge number of posts from this blogspot.

I've always been aware of my mortality, and of the mortality of my ethical recycling messages. I have books on my shelf which are long, long out of print, which are both central to my morality and my thesis, and which I know are unlikely to ever be read again, much less appreciated by mentorees.

But the first one I looked at in the Google Indexing purge kind of stung.

It was from autumn 2009, when I had been a background check source for CBS Sixty Minutes producer Solly Granatstein, about Scott Pelley's notorious "wasted" minutes flying around with BAN.org's Jim Puckett, who was describing huge imports of CRT desktop monitors (purchased for $10 apiece, bearing only $2 of scrap copper) as being "primitively" mismanaged in Guiyu.

http://retroworks.blogspot.com/2009/08/cbs-60-minutes-wasteland-unseen-footage.html

Solly and Michelle Rey had stopped responding to my emails asking them to run a follow up or correction to the story, which had shown no evidence of CRTs processed in Guiyu, despite the claim "we followed the trail".

So I checked that one, and because the film evidence of the factories that had actually purchased the monitors circled by helicopter were posted in picasaweb, a google product offered to bloggers like myself for photo uploads, and Google has since stopped supporting picasaweb, that the blog will no longer show up in searches.  So if you are a journalism student looking for CBS Wasteland's Polk Award on CRT disposal allegedly occuring in China in 2008, you won't find me.

A lot of people I met - "Swordfish" - in my career met me through the circulation of that specific blog. Author Adam Minter for example asked what to look for when he visited Guiyu (the three-story integrated IC chip market - Guiyu was a reuse-of-CPU and chips market, not a CRT monitor refurbisher. And what is upstream of the river where BAN's "samples" showed poisons more associated with textile manufacturing than e-waste). Adam later visited CRT remanufacturing factories. He's a journalist with actual knowledge of recycling. But the blog that connected us is now gone unless Google accepts my correction (now linked to photos.google not picasaweb).

But am I going to take the time to re-edit 520+ blogs? I had to find the one on CBS Wasted Leads via the Wayback Machine site to locate it and find the dated address to correct it on blogspot.

Poison Apples 3: Uptick in Lithium Battery Fires & GPS Ewaste Tracking Devices

Our company sends about 30% of the used electronics we receive to "big shred"... companies that invested in labor-saving mechanical shredders with eddy-current-separators, magnets, optic sorters, etc., to turn things like printers (notoriously low reuse value because the dollars are in the ink cartridges, not the device) into streams of raw material.

Those shredding companies are our friends.

We offer to take back stuff they can't shred responsibly - like display devices.  Ideally, we'd be taking back, ton-for-ton, the 30% stuff that should be hand-managed, like CRTs and LCDs, Plasmas, OLEDs, etc, for every ton of shreddable e-waste we send.

Our friends at the shredders have a problem. One friend, ECS of California, went out of business this year. I've known the owner, Jim Taggart, since my Massachusetts DEP days in the 1990s. He was not the first "big shred" investor to get sucked  under.

This video doesn't show you any specifics about why, but it does show a big, big problem for Big Shred.  It features our old pal Scott Pelly of CBS 60 Minutes (the guy who impugned our geek pals based on Jim Puckett ewaste statistic "fakenews").

Study Says CBS 60 Minutes, BAN, Wrong on E-Waste Exports

Another factual study, another blow to the E-Waste Hoax.   Basel Action Network has already admitted they made the statistic up, that 80% of used TVs etc. are exported for dumping.  It was never economically possible (see Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo), it was not supported by BAN's own study (Kenya 2006), USITC and UNEP studies in Africa found it bogus. The "kids at dumps" are best explained by the cities, like Lagos... 6.9 Million households with TV in 2007.  China throws away far more, and exports used CRTs to South America and Africa.

Now yet another very long and arduous study (to read that is) has come out, from MIT, NCER and StEP.

Quantitative Characterization of Domestic and Transboundary Flows of Used Electronics   12/2013


Huabo Duan, T. Reed Miller, Jeremy Gregory, Randolph Kirchain 

"The results show that approximately 258.2 million units of used electronic were generated and 171.4 million units were collected in the US in 2010. Export flows were estimated to be 14.4 million units, which is 8.5% of the collected estimate on average. On a weight basis, 1.6 million tons of used electronics were generated in the US in 2010 and 0.9 million tons were collected. Of the amount collected, 26.5 thousand tons were exported, which is 3.1% of the weight collected." 

- Conclusion

Once again, the facts say that exporters WERE PROBABLY INNOCENT. The methodology by Interpol's young Emile Lindemulder, in the infamous 2009 "Matrix" Report is prima facia silliness.  "The Africans PAY for the TVs and the Shipping, payment shows organization, and since 80% is criminal dumping, it's organize + crime = ORGANIZED CRIME!"   Along with the "Away is a Place" halloween language by Jim Puckett, the anti-ewaste-export hoax has been blown out of the water by the MIT study.

It's a late footnote to the "Bullyboy" series of blogs.  What in the heck is "E-Steward" besides a whites only country club?   If 80% of recyclers were indeed primitive dumpers, the badge had meaning.  Now all we have are people organized to beat an old war drum about "e-waste" exports, with no habeus corpus, no crime to speak of, except that anything above zero is suspect.  It's easier to do a DNA test than an export certification.  CBS 60 Minutes created this mess, and won't go back to correct it.

Daisey Chain, Foxconn, and Export Policy

I want to strongly recommend listening to the podcast (or at least reading the PDF) from the retractions in This American Life.

Ira Glass of This American Life has done a good job of trying to undo the ficticious Mike Daisey reporting about Foxconn.  In this episode, they try to correct the mistakes without excusing past abuses, or defusing legitimate concerns over fair trade with the workers who make Apple and other products.

The moral, to me, is that if an accident happens at a different factory in China (not Foxconn), 1000 miles to the west, two years ago, that it's not ok to say that you eyewitnessed the same accident happened at Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen.  This undermines the good factory, by making them the same as the bad factory.  The fact that both factories have brown people in them does not really excuse the shortcut.  The lesson is that if you are a journalist, and you give someone a soap box, you have to act swiftly to prevent a daisy-chain of bad journalism from taking route.

This is what CBS 60 Minutes allowed to happen, relying on Basel Action Network's Jim Puckett, in reporting that CRT monitors were scrapped in Guiyu, China, and not at the refurbishing factories I showed them pictures of.  They set into motion a chain of daisey-claims, infecting PBS Frontline, and Terry Gross' Fresh Air program, with fake statistics about e-waste exports.