My Brief Hypothesis On China and Africa - Virgin Production vs Reuse

A brief blog on how Twitter works. 

Here are 20+ year old photos on mass-reuse of CRTs in Asia.

Tweet 1/3

20+ yrs ago, no one said a peep about China buying Thompson, Corning, & Sony CRT furnaces - enough capacity to mine and manufacture hundreds of millions of CRT TVs and monitors per year, necessitating lead/zinc smelters which had multiple spills.https://t.co/6po1yoPene

— Robin I (@WR3A) February 23, 2023

Tweet 2/3
That same year, an NGO accused Chinese buyers of secondhand monitors and TVs of being "primitive recyclers"

The #press was tricked into attacking reuse, the very years virgin CRT manufacturing was relocated there.

Today China is recycling billions of CRT TVs made in China.

— Robin I (@WR3A) February 23, 2023

Tweet 3/3

My fear is that sheer incompetency of the do-gooder establishment concerning #ewaste may try to make reusable solar panels and EV batteries into another case of environmental collateral damage.

The world has real actual environmental problems and doesn't need pretend ones.

— Robin I (@WR3A) February 23, 2023

WasteDive Asks: Are Solar Panels the Next CRT Recycling Problem?

 Our small Vermont company gets 2 big stories in July.

First, Recycling International is publishing a 2 page interview with Yours Truly, whose small Vermont Recycling Company has catapulted to #36 on the Magazine's list of Notable Recyclers worldwide (and that's not just "e-waste").

Do we belong on a list that includes Robin Weiner of ISRI at #15, or author Adam Minter at #6?

My only explanation is ironic - compared to similar lists a decade ago, Recycling International now realizes there are hundreds of well-managed recycling companies in places like Ghana, India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore.  After reading their interview of me, I realized the irony that a) thanks to us (and this blog), the list is much harder for a white American to get onto, and b) we are deliciously placed several rows above Basel Action Network (screenshot below), which tried to get me labelled as a pariah after being called out for profiling Joe "Hurricane" Benson as a "primitive recycler" (rather than a 25 year expert at reuse export) based on his nationality.

But before I "bury" the lead about solar panel recycling ---  it's been my honor to put together an esteemed panel on how Solar Panel Reuse in Emerging Markets may offer the same solutions as it offered SVGA computer monitors 20 years ago... Register at NERC.org for a front row on Zoom, as I participate with Emmanual Nyalete of Ghana, Lennart Banaszak of Germany, and Good Point Recycling's very own Solar Nerd Trevor de Young (who's trailer home is almost completely "off grid" with salvaged solar panels - including some deliberately smashed by the solar de-installers in an botched "end of life" crime).

(see hammer marks, which rendered this panel 50% efficient. If it is relocated to Ghana, the 50% efficient panel will produce more KWH - due to abundant sunlight - than it produced in Vermont before it was "sabotaged" to prevent reuse).

Katie Pyzyk's interview in WasteDive explores our pilot program for solar panel reuse... and finds parallels to the CRT Reuse concerns that resulted in California SB20 and piles of shredded leaded CRT cullet across the West.

Farwell Chicas Bravas: How Bureaucracies, Virus and Bias Sunk a CRT Glass Solution

In My Opinion: Published in E-Scrap News

Photos below, article in link above.

#CircularEconomy? Beware of Virginia Recycling Companies Bearing Gifts

Shared by an old academic pal this afternoon.... This news story "speaks for itself" even if no one interviewed seems to understand the massive cost diversion.

The disguised recycler not only gets out of paying for the dismantling and recycling of the CRTs, he'll potentially be paid a second time to recycle them again.  That's one evil Santa.



The solution is not dilution.

Regulatory Gymnastics: Officials' Time Out for Recycling Waste Offset

Hey, just a quick note to those of you who have been asking what the latest is with the Fair Trade Recycling Offsets.  I remain really excited about this.  But we had a little setback which has stalled the project.

Here's the history, the latest roadblock in RED.

1. Fair Trade Recycling started with Purchase Orders and Fair Trade Contracts.  When we wrote down what overseas buyers DID NOT ACCEPT, it became pretty clear very quickly that they were not buying stuff to burn it or to operate a "Pollution Haven".  Someone paying us 10 times more for a CRT than it's worth in scrap, but paying ZERO for the same make and model which has damage (disqualifying it from the purchase order) is presumed to be a good actor.

regulatory gymnastics (Labadi Beach Accra, Ghana)

The Spiraling Economy: Double Regulations of A Circular Economy

Here is the recycler's recurring nightmare...

"We'd love to keep using 1,000 tons per day of your recycled material instead of mining and extracting it from forests and mountains. But EPA says we'd need a Waste Facility Perimit in addition to our clean air and water permits.  If we mine from the mountain, we just need 2 permits, not 3"

No good deed goes unpunished. Regulators of city waste insist on tracking processed recyclables in the industrial mineral market, even when they compete as "furnace ready" feedstocks with materials mined from mountainsides.



The best hard rock mining is worse than the worst recycling. And this week, the Wall Street Journal's reporters Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin and Joe Parkinson show us what some of the worst (gold) mining looks like.

2002 Article In Recycling Today Foreshadows WR3A, IFixIT, E-Stewards

While looking to upload some papers in Academia.edu, I ran across an article published by Recycling Today magazine in 2002 - by yours truly.  "Setting a Higher Standard" explained that boycotting the export market would be a "war on drugs" approach, forcing legit oversees reuse and recycling operations to meet demand via "back alleys".

Here are 3 conclusions about e-waste export policy at the end of the article (edited by Brian Taylor).

Looks sound.

1) Send Quality.  Meet the customers and find out what they want.  Just export that.  Don't throw a piece of junk on the container that you don't know what to do with.  This would become the foundation of WR3A.org and Fair Trade Recycling.

2) Support Reuse and Repair.  This forshadowed Ifixit.org, was influenced by repairfaq.org's Silicon Sam.  I'd used Sam's repair instructions while reviewing Chinese purchase orders, and found the Chinese buyers were giving instructions that would eliminate non-repairable units.  This led to the realization that China was not buying ANY CRT Televisions, only specific 15" and 17" CRTs, which meant the trade was not driven by cost externalization.  California SB20 went off a cliff that year.

3) Support Reputable USA companies.  This forshadowed R2 and E-Stewards.

Basel Action Network attacked me for writing the article, personally, and that is how I met Jim Puckett.  He blasted a response to the article via "Microsoft Outlook" and cc'd dozens of people whom I'd never met, but with whom I'd become acquainted over the years.

The article was sent to some folks at US EPA, who later hired me as a consultant for the 2006 Federal Register CRT Rule, which funded my second trip to Asia - this time bringing Craig Lorch of Total Reclaim and Lin King of UC Davis, to visit some of the "Big Secret Factories" that BAN was racially profiling as "primitive rice paddies".  (If you are researching MIT Senseable City Lab and BAN's Monitour project, there's a chestnut about this at the bottom of this blog).

How To Pay For Africa E-Waste Cleanup?

15 years later, let's just ask what he imports

After 2 weeks back in Ghana, the #1 Finding of our research still stands.  E-Waste NGOs made up fictitious numbers about the percentage of imports to Africa that are "waste" and the percentage of waste in places like Agbogbloshie that come from faulty used good imports ("Exaggerations have been made" said Jim P. on our Salzburg panel).  Photojournalists flew to Accra (Agbogbloshie is about 20 minutes from the airport, 9 minutes from Accra's finest hotel), and took close-up photos of Africans in exotic poses.  And EU policymakers got project funding to "save" Africans from e-waste dumping.

Neither the NGOs, nor the journalists, nor the EU Policy funders checked out existing data on Accra stormwater runoff (the water quality at the Odaw Korle lagoon was hideous in the 1970s), the number of households with televisions in Accra 15 years ago, or the number of people employed in the scrap industry generally as compared to the number seen in Old Fadama slum of Accra. They didn't even find it on mapquest, which would show it's at the center of Accra, not a remote fishing village on the outskirts (as should have been suggested by the cab ride from the hotel). They would have found the phrase "Sodom and Gomorrah" appears in a 2002 AMA publication calling for razing the slum to build shopping malls and parking lots.

There was no basic secondary research.  No control group.  No null hypothesis.

#Ewastetracking Project by MIT and NGO Discovers Analog Television (exists) in Pakistan

According to the opening page of Massachusetts Institute of Technologies Senseability City Lab's expose on second hand electronics, transboundary movement demonstrates likely environmental harm.

A joint project between the Basel Action Network (BAN) and the MIT Senseable City Lab has led to the discovery of previously unknown international electronic waste routes departing from the United States.

Printer, and LCD and CRT monitors were embedded with GPS trackers capable of remotely reporting their location from overseas locations. These trackers were then delivered to recyclers and charities around the country. 65 of the first 200 trackers deilvered as part of the Monitour/e-Trash Transparency Project went offshore, mostly to Asia. 

On-the-ground investigations in Asia by BAN produced a clearer picture of these trade routes. Results of this study can be found here on this site in graphic form and will also be released in a series of reports by BAN. These can be found at: www.ban.org/trash-transparency. 

While legitimate e-waste recycling helps reduce landfill contamination and raw material extraction, the export of hazardous electronic waste is most often illegal trade under the Basel Convention and moreover, the management of toxic electronic waste in the informal sector damages human health and the environment. 

The Monitour/e-Trash Transparency Project demonstrates how relatively new technology can generate unique data needed by civil society, law enforcement and enterprises to better track what until now have been hidden flows. Since the time of our experiment, the UN Organization on Drugs and Crime has confirmed that the Mong Cai border is a primary corridor for e-waste flowing from the US and EU into China, part of an estimated US $3.75 billion market for illegal e-waste. 

Learn more about e-waste tracking here: Video.

- MoniTour E-waste Transparency Project, MIT

"On the ground investigations in Asia by BAN produced a clearer picture of these trade routes."  Really, MIT?  Just how clear?  Analog or high definition?  Seriously, this is from Media Lab of all places?

As I showed last week, the screen shots of the MIT's tracking project are difficult to see at proper resolution; you can't zoom in.  Instead, you must copy the longitude and latitude and paste it into google maps, or rely on whoever is writing written descriptions of the sites on MIT's website.

Then you find places like the Hafeez Computer Center in Faisalabad, Pakistan.  It's near the center of a dense city, blocks away from one of Pakistan's largest universities.  It is a long way from the port.  Screenshot below.

We are writing to MIT to offer to assist them in interpreting several tracking devices locations.  In particular, I'm focusing on CRT devices, which are governed by USA EPA law.  That law does not ban export for reuse, or even export for recycling, but requires that export to be declared and investigated by EPA prior to export.

The reason for EPA's restrictions stem largely from the Basel Action Network (MIT's "joint partner") declarations in 2002 and 2005 that the "vast majority" of CRTs are not recycled, but are dumped overseas to avoid high USA recycling costs. Overseas, BAN announced, the CRTs were most likely going to be beaten by children with hammers to remove "valuable copper".  It is certainly true that CRTs are the most expensive type of electronic waste to recycle, and it's true that any which are diverted for continued use represent an avoided fee.  It's also true that working display devices have been in high demand for reuse and repair markets.  Billions of people owe their "teledensity" (mass media, internet, etc.) to used and rebuilt CRTs sourced from wealthy nations.

Save The American Children! Shocking Expose on USA's Car Repair Market

Just sayin'...



The point is obviously that:

1. Abandoned or slow moving "waste" is more persistent and easily photographed
2. Manufactured goods kept for part sales is different from shredding, different business
3. Sometimes business owners die or get in trouble or screw up
4. Outliers in an industry should not be used by photojournalists to racially profile geographies
5. No one knows, really, what's going on without data journalism.

Hopefully Germans don't see this video and decide to boycott car sales to Florida.  Fortunately, there are no brown children close up photos to trigger an NGO fundraising campaign.

Q: Are Millions of Tons of Western "e-Waste" Dumped in Agbogblshie, Ghana?

No.

There is more and more "e-waste" in Africa.  But the West (Europe and USA) are exporting fewer and fewer containers of used electronics.   The implication is obvious... used electronics DID work for 5-15 years after they were imported - Africans are finally replacing TVs and computers they imported more than a decade ago.

There is no big story here, other than the fake news was faked and Joe Benson is in jail because of it.

More African city households have had multiple televisions since the 1990s.  But the "sources" for the foreign dumping claim have all dried up.

John Henry:  "Where did that @#$% statistic go?"

Containers of used equipment being imported into Ghana's port (Tema, not Accra) are not going directly to the Agbogbloshie scrap yard. That can be disproved from any editor's desktop, or by looking carefully at photos purporting to show it.

And there is no evidence of widespread violations of international law.  15% waste is the margin of accidental breakage, electrostatic discharge, human error, etc., and it's as likely (or more likely) to come from brand new product lots as from used.

The discussion is not about what happens to used electronic scrap.  This is about is how to feel about people, and how those feelings promote a political agenda with multiple stakeholders, winners and losers.

How to feel about poor people, how to feel about non-profits, how to feel about ourselves when we consume more goods, how to feel about ourselves as do-gooders and non-profit founders..?  That's far more interesting than which type of video display (used CRT or new LCD) an African with $3,000 annual income should invest in.

[Addendum 6/23/2015 - After forced evictions begin, Discard Studies essay by J. Lepawsky and G. Akese explains history and land politics]

Monkey Zoo Matrix Math: 2010 Okopol Study Crowned Oracle of E-waste

I have been trying to find a way to address last weeks UNEP Report... It's extremely frustrating because the report says next to nothing.   It's full of qualifiers and half statements and CYA.  So frustrating to see the headlines reporting that UN says 90% is dumped, when the actual report "says" next to nothing.  It implies, it insinuates, it uses racist photographs to depict Africa's tech sector.  But it says nothing.

Terrablight relies on Okopol's Oracle

But here's the nutshell.  It claims "e-waste" trade is worth $19 billion dollars.  And the way it comes up with that number is by capturing the legal and legitimate reuse and repair trade in its "waste" numbers.   It blames Africa's Tech Sector by shaming Africans who work in recycling.

So really, it is more useful to go to another 100+ page report written by some of the same actors, back in 2010.  A report which actually DID present numbers, and drew conclusions.

The 2010 Okopol Report.  
An apparent number crunching, quantifying treatise.   Which repeatedly cites Mike Anane, the "reporter" in Ghana, and surrounds his quotes with numbers that completely contradict Mr. Anane in every single case, leaving him without a single factually correct quote... but fails to throw the bum out.  Instead, it granted Mr. Anane a cloak of vettedness.   It made him the Oracle of the E-Waste Matrix.

The year Joe Benson was accused in the Independent, Guardian, BBC, and Daily Mail of exporting waste electronics from Europe and dumping them in Nigeria and Ghana, the following study had just come out... Mr. Anane was interviewed on BBC Panorama, showing "lead dust" (aluminum phosphor) inside the broken panel of a CRT.  Next Month, Interpol has invited Mike Anane (and paid his consulting fee) to address a roomful of Interpol Enforcement Staff, telling them about the E-Waste Matrix, where 75%-90% of goods Africans test and pay for are bad.  Even when most random tests in Germany find that more than that is good, Anane will tell them that somehow the African businesses, like Joe Benson's, are able to sense and pick out the bad ones to export.

Here are key sections of the 2010 Report which
A) Grant Credibility to Mike Anane, and
B) Prove His Claims to be Completely False.

| TEXTE | 22/2010 ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH OF THE FEDERAL MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT, NATURE CONSERVATION AND NUCLEAR SAFETY Project No. (FKZ) 3708 93 300 Report No. (UBA-FB) 001331/E Transboundary shipment of wasteelectrical and electronic equipment /electronic scrap – Optimization ofmaterial flows and control by Knut Sander Stephanie Schilling Ökopol GmbH, Hamburg On behalf of the Federal Environment Agency (Germany)

"(Abstract)  In the countries of destination, the equipment encounters recovery and disposal structures, which are not suitable to ensure the protection of human health and the environment as well as the extensive recovery of resources."

This chestnut of a research paper tried to explain the "e-waste crime" and incentives of African "waste tourists" to export loads of WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment).  In the Abstract, the authors don't even feel a need to cite the percentage of used electronics which are "bad", it's apparently taken for granted.

The Truth About Used Electronics Exports

These shots of CRT Display Imports, taken between 2002-2007, were for reuse.  They were sustainable.  No mining or refining, the carbon and toxics and pollution made them the best way ever that three billion people could get online between 1995 and 2010.

It wasn't perfect of course.  More controversial "gray market" wasn't photo'd.   One Contract manufacturing plant, assembling brand new CRT monitors, also had a used SKD operation on another floor.  They insisted it was a different floor and that a used CRT could never be swapped out with a new one.  But of course that's how the whole sector started, bleeding used ones into new lines in the 1990s until there were actually more used ones than new ones in the early 2000s.  By then, 100% used refurbishing factories were the norm.  

CRT manufacturing for the West was in decline. Fortunately, there was a new "good enough market" where professionally assembled used goods became the most profitable in the sector.

Most of the buyers for these cheap, durable, affordable display devices has been in places like India, Egypt, and Indonesia.  The 3B3K, three billion people earning $3 thousand per year, who were getting telecom and ICT and satellite TV at 10  times the rate of growth of the rest of the world.  CRTs were on fire - in a figurative sense, not a literal one.

While the environmental NGOs were playing games with "percentages" understood by laypeople, some of us were actually travelling around the world documenting the purchase orders and uses of the export market.  The percentages make a lot more sense when you actually know what you are talking about, rather than making things up as you go along.

How do display devices move, geographically, around the world?

In the big geographic picture, here are 5 import-export scenarios:

Import 1. Reuse of secondary CRTs (Tema Port, Ghana)

Import 2. Raw materials for new CRT factories (Videocon, India)

Import 3. Clandestine reuse of 'passable' used CRTs into new CRT assembly lines (China 1990s)

Import 4. Whole 100% semi-knock-down (SKD) reuse factories, often converted from closed #3

Import 5. Import for recycling of junk CRT displays (Calexico, Mexico).

Import 6. Mixed lots of used electronics to be assessed in country or scrapped on receipt

Below is the evolution of the smallest cause - #6 - and how it grew to swallow our attention and become reported in the press as the largest illegal envionmental crime of our time... #ewastegate.

I'm working on the Agbogbloshie Report, and there's a lot of background that I can't really fit into it.  Since I haven't published on the blog in over a week, I thought I'd share some of the edited references which provide some history and perspective to #ewastegate.

People who don't know what they are talking about, making it up as they go along, get much farther if they festoon their reports with imagery of poor children.  It's like UNICEF, except not a penny, not one tiny penny, goes from E-Stewards donors to the poor in the photos.   It's macabre poverty porn, the Charitable Industrial Complex, and the history of the credible, peer reviewed reports which got us here are profiled below, so that we hopefully won't make the same mistakes again.

While I was producing this chart in 2008, I made a serious blunder.  It doesn't have any children's photos.

Forget the Word E-Waste: World Bank's "Critical Mass of Users"

Here is a link to just one very interesting World Bank metadata paper...

Ghana Country Study: A roadmap for the strategic application of information and communication technology (2011)  

Report prepared for the World Bank by 'Balancing Act'.

It explains something I observed in Cairo.   Before an internet utility wants to invest in providing internet, it requires a "Critical Mass of Users".   You can't build cell phone towers if no one has a phone.   Unless you have the Tennessee Valley Authority (USA project to provide electricity in areas people lacked critical mass) or Marshall Plan, you depend on the "Good Enough Market".   The "GEM" is the definition for basically affordable goods that function well enough.   A 17" CRT monitor sold in Cairo for $21 will be available to 1,000 times more people than a $400 new flat monitor.  It is the 1,000 people who own the $21 CRT monitor which make it possible for private enterprise to run internet cable or sell satellite dishes.  It takes 1,000 people with the $20 used cell phone to make it possible to provide enough cell phone towers that people can talk to each other.

Agbogbloshie (the red dot below) is a tiny neighborhood in a very big city (Accra) which has hospitals and highways and factories and universities and TV towers and radio stations and nearly universal access to cell phones.  The World Bank is concerned with the entirety of the economy below.   And there are scads of newly published Metadata now public at World Bank.   You don't need to narrow your view to Mike Anane, Greenpeace, Jim Puckett, Kyle Wiens and SkyNews images of burning wires.  There is a massive, massive city here, and as Hans Rosling showed us, the news is mostly good.

I'm advising everyone to get outside of the word "e-waste", the very word has a fetish attached to it which I believe has created fear and group-think.  Look at the photos of the Green Advocacy report below.   While the reports show 85-91% reuse of imports to Ghana and Nigeria, better than new product, the report is decorated with photos of "poverty" and "pollution".  It is a mindset around the words "e-waste", even people telling good news feel obligated to take pictures of poverty to prove they were in the same place as the other e-waste reporters.

Regulations: The Purpose of Rules

When there are Guidelines or regulations, there are reasons to follow them and enforce them.

1. There is a positive environmental effect to the rules (or negative impact from not following the rule).
2. "Rules are Rules".   If Rules are not enforced, other meaningful (see #1) Rules will also not be enforced.

If it is #1, there should be a science or test to demonstrate and constantly improve on the rules.  If for example there is a different rule (Universal Waste vs. EPA CRT Rule) in Vermont vs. NH, MA, NY (our three border states), enough time has passed to know the pros and cons attributable to the differences.   It's not about the alleged ego clash between 1990s MA DEP David Struhs vs. EPA Region I's John DeVillars.

If it is #2, I can accept that... So long as the Rules are applied evenly and to everyone.  If Vermont has a different rule from NH, MA, NY, and is applying the rule for consistency, you expect to see the same citations to my list of 9 other electronics processors in the state.

Environmental Morality Debate: ADC is Landfilling. Exporting is Dumping. You're Throwing Away. Garbage!

1980s Moral/Environmental Superiority

"You threw your television away??  I reused it.  I sold mine at a yard sale, or donated it to a charity.

Yours went into a landfill where it will be blown in the wind and seep into the groundwater!"

1990s Moral/Environmental Superiority

"You threw your television and computer away??  I reused my computer, and the television was recycled back into a new television, the plastic, metal and glass reused.

Yours went into a landfill where it will be blown in the wind and seep into the groundwater!"

2000s Moral/Environmental Superiority 

"You threw your TV, PC and cell phone away??  I reused my cell phone.   The TV and computer were recycled back into new metals, plastic and glass products.

Yours went into a landfill where it will be blown in the wind and seep into the groundwater!  Or worse, got shipped to a country with poor people."

2010's  Moral/Environmental Superiority  

"You threw your TV, PC and cell phone away??  I sent mine to a shredding machine.   The metal and some of the plastic were recycled back into new metals and plastics.

The leaded glass from mine went on top of yours, as wind cover.  Like yours, it will be blown by the wind and seep into groundwater.

But mine will be on a layer on top of yours today.  Tomorrow, when the landfill reopens, another CRT will be dumped on top of my "yester-daily cover".  And another layer of shedded CRTs will be placed on that.  And so on..."

Environmental Moral superiority just ain't what it used to be.

In certified programs, almost nothing gets reused anymore.

This is "moral relativism" not across geographic boundaries, but across decades and their relative economies.

What does this "moral environmentalist standards evolution" tell us about Environmentalism?  Harken back to the Priestatollah Blog ("E-Waste Whiplash").  Beware moral fetishes attached to scientific environmental problems.   Environmental health studies, like human health and medicine, need to stay firmly in the science camp, and let's keep our ears, eyes, and minds open to scientific method, healthy reasoning.

Vermont Apple-to-Orange Software Validates CRT Recycling

(This is part of an April Fool's blog tradition, and I hope no one took it personally)

Small Northeast State Solves E-Waste Recycling Glut Profitably, with New Validation Procedures

[Middlebury, VT  April 1 2014]  It turns out there are two ways to solve the E-Waste Recycling Crisis.    In a stunning turn of developments, Vermont has validated a brand new way to recycle CRTs.


1.  Charge manufacturers more (42 cents per pound rather than 28)
2.  Demand less (allow land application)
3.  Profit!

Suppose there are two ways to do something.  One way takes a lot of labor hours, and then costs a lot to transport and treat the material.   The other way takes fewer hours of labor, but creates a mixed mess that is even more extremely expensive to transport and treat the material.  Normally, this is called "getting what you paid for".

But with an online thesaurus tool, Vermont "recyclers" are now "solving" this "e-waste" "problem".

Inequation disproved in 6 month study

"We were as stumped as the next state with the need to change our award winning state recycling program," said Vermont ANR Commissioner David Mears.   "But we made lemonade."

John Obfusca of Cali Waste Systems described the new development.  "One of our guys, at the end of the shift, just goes 'Hey, what if we just don't recycle it, but we call it something kinda alternativey?'  It turns out, you just have to name the process right to get it approved."

Diverting waste from a landfill into another landfill?  Land cover that fits the defination (per RFP) of "no land application"?   There's an app for that.

Rank The Environmental Atrocity: Is Fraud Visible from Outer Space?

Multiple Choice:  If you could correct one thing, to protect the planet, sustainability, endangered species, and the planet, what would you choose?

• Hard rock metal mining?

• Mining Indonesian coral islands for tin (to replace recycled lead batteries in electric solder)?

• Diverting Interpol enforcement from Ivory poaching, to arrest African internet cafe investors?

• A pile of inert silicate leaded flux (slag), sitting by a smelter for 80 years?

• A pile of CRT tubes, diverted from reuse, sitting in a warehouse in Yuma?

To the degree the last one belongs on the list, it's because of fraud.   The first fraud was BAN and SVTC telling California that the CRT monitors being shipped in 2002 were destined for dumps. They were being purchased by SKD factories.

The second fraud was, again, BAN and SVTC telling California that diverting those CRTs to "recycling" companies represented international law or environmental progress.

The third fraud was allegedly committed by the cathode ray tube recycling company ("Dow Management" in Yuma) which evidently took money for the tubes, stuck them in a warehouse, and ran.


Our war should be on fraud.

First do no harm.  Be true to thine own self.  Truth is not conservative or liberal, blue or red or green, truth is transparent, and only environmental and recycling systems based on truth will be sustainable.

(By the way, I had access to other 'close up' photos with children in them, but believe it contributes to poster child exhaustion, we all need to de-escalate the emotional button-pushing)

Bullboys 11: "My Generation Did WHAT??" to CRT Glass Markets

So I used to sell to Egypt, now I don't.

I used to sell to Indonesia, but it's illegal now, so I stopped.

And for years I exported to Malaysia for refurbishing, and that factory - which recycled 100% of accidental breakage at the CRT glass furnace in KL - no longer speaks English.  We gave them a price cut in return for their obtaining ISO14001 certification.  They began a takeback program, creating a domestic Malaysia CRT recycling infrastructure...

It's all dead.  Supply and demand.

The E-Waste Industry, at the EScrap Conference in Orlando, will be talking about there being no demand for CRT glass, cathode ray tube cullet.   But that's not exactly what there's no demand for.

There's no demand for self-righteous bigotry and b******t.

Back to the drawing board.  I can cross off lots of places that are expensive to visit, expensive to audit, and give R2 Auditors the heeby-jeebies.  Turns out, the heeby-jeeby feeling is mutual.  In Vermont, we have practically eliminated CRT export for reuse.  I could become an E-Steward right now, if I was willing to pay the dues.  I'm not doing anything they don't want me to do.

So gee... I should look back at the invitation to join E-Stewards, the gracious invitation extended to me last
winter.   Sure, I'm qualified now to be a "steward".  But, it's wasted on me.  See, I'm really not into calling innocent people guilty, and the whole making myself look like a better recycler by making other people look worse.   If an all white country club chased off my colored fiance, and said now I could be a member, I wouldn't be too keen with all that.  

I'm E-Steward qualified, E-Steward eligible, E-Steward compliant. I'm a good ole e-waste steward boy. Just got to show them my downstreams and write them a check.

CRT Glass Market Murder Mystery: Killing with Friendly Fire

"I have to say something." 

We have a really, really immature CRT glass recycling industry.  With a couple of exceptions like Dave Dlubak, who knows how to keep quiet after 3 generations of managing scrap glass, we have a lot of people who think that negative campaigning against each other is the way to put themselves ahead.

"There is a time to laugh and a time not to laugh, and this is not one of them."

Our "e-waste" recycling industry, in general, has made a mess out of "investigations" and "diligence" (or dis-lingence) of cullet end markets.  Having put the word "waste" in the title of our commodity, we were off to a bad start.  And it got worse.

We had a very, very low bar to meet, environmentally.  Provide leaded silicate in a way which is safer than virgin lead mining.  100 years of environmental science were behind the "hierarchy" of reuse, recycling and mining-for-disposal.  Stand at a mine like OK Tedi in Papua New Guinea, where cyanide tailings rush out of the rainforest, killing all the coral reefs.   Stand at a lead mine in Peru, or Kabwe Zambia (the most toxic place on earth).  All we had to do was take lead and silica which has already been mined, already been refined, and deliver it to replace the virgin raw material.  The worst recycling beats the best mining.

But greed for competitive advantages between recyclers has gotten in the way, and "inspection costs" are now perceived by the buyers to outweigh the financial and environmental advantages of CRT glass recycling.

2005:  I worked very, very hard in 2005 to open up the Samsung, Klang, Malaysia CRT furnace to secondary cullet.  That means recycled CRT glass.   We worked with one of the largest CRT contract assembly companies on the planet, who purchased $200M in new CRT tubes from Samsung Klang in 2003, to use their purchasing influence to open the door.

2008:  Someone in the USA, I won't say who, but in our industry, was upset that Samsung was taking "unwashed glass".  The Recycler had put in an investment to wash the phosphor. So they told a certain NGO in Washington to contact the Malaysia EPA about Samsung taking in unwashed glass to recycle it.

"Could you give us a statement please?"
"Yes. 'Chocolate makes one very thirsty.'"