I started this blogspot in 2006. 

The “E-Waste” That Built China’s Good-Enough Computer Market

I started this Blogspot in 2006.

At the time, blogs could still attract professors, journalists, regulators, recyclers and overseas buyers into the same argument. Some consequential things happened here. The blog helped expose the “80 percent of e-waste is exported” statistic as a press-amplified hoax. It documented the African technicians and importers whom Interpol’s Project Eden treated as environmental criminals. Eventually, those arrests stopped.

Today, attention spans are shorter. Most of my new blog posts are little longer than a weekly LinkedIn or Facebook post. Worse, because embedding a funny or provocative YouTube music video was considered clever 15 or 20 years ago, Google now appears to penalize or de-link many of those older posts. I may have to revisit hundreds of them and remove the dead or distracting video inserts.

Honey badger don’t care.

The evidence in those posts still matters.

Two stories about China that no one connected

In September 2007, Harvard Business Review published an article by Bain & Company chairman Orit Gadiesh and Bain partners Philip Leung and Till Vestring titled “The Battle for China’s Good-Enough Market.”

The authors described a rapidly expanding Chinese middle market for products that were reliable enough and affordable enough for consumers who could not—or would not—pay the premium demanded by Western brands. Chinese manufacturers were learning to serve that market at enormous scale and could eventually use the same skills to compete in India, Brazil and even developed economies.

The Bain article understood something that most Western environmental journalists did not: “good enough” was not a euphemism for garbage. It was a sophisticated manufacturing strategy.

But Bain told only half the story.

Two years earlier, at RECCON-05, Helen Su had presented slides showing one of the supply chains feeding that Good-Enough Market: semi-knockdown, or SKD, factories purchasing used CRT monitors as reusable manufacturing cores.

These were not primitive dumps where Americans abandoned unwanted computers. They were factories testing imported monitors, recovering functional cathode-ray tubes and combining them with new or replacement electronics, wiring and plastic cabinets to manufacture affordable displays.

The Bain consultants saw the Good-Enough Market from the boardroom.

Helen Su showed us what it looked like on the factory floor.

Almost no one connected the two.