Vermont #RightToRepair S.180 Bill - Wall Chargers, Ink Cartridges in Chamber 35

The session on Vermont S.180 was crammed into one hour and fifteen minutes. I sat on a cushioned wall shelf in chamber room number 35.  Twelve committee members and staff. Three witnesses in favor of the Right To Repair Bill (VPIRG's Dan Brown, EFF's Kit Walsh by phone, and Michael Duplessis, of SunCommon, Apple repair guru). I was a wallflower.

You wouldn't think that the most important e-waste legislation in the United States was being discussed here, unless you counted the manufacturing lobbyists.  Not that the 3 anti-S.180 witnesses were over the top. They'd travelled to talk against a bill that was already defanged. Neutered. Eviscerated.  VPIRG told me it was effectively killed in the previous chamber.

The remaining "debate" is whether the Vermont Legislature should even form a task force or committee to further review the Right To Repair.  The lobbyists were there to strongly advocate not to have any discussions about it.

A lobbyist for the medical equipment manufacturers seemed to insinuate that people could die if finely tuned medical instruments are improperly reused.  A lobbyist for farm equipment dealerships said the line had to be drawn below dealerships.  His members were currently satisfied. (One legislator correctly pointed out the Ag Dealerships were protected by similar legislation when manufacturers prevented them from servicing multiple brands some years ago.... the lobbyist nodded, yes, that's where to draw the line)


The strategy of industry in opposition to discussion of the Fair Repair Act is obfuscation.  They left the impression that the Task Force would have to cover a pandora's box of questions.  The House Committee on Commerce and Economic Development Chairman, Bill Botzow (D-Bennington), was genuinely daunted.  "Which bite of the cake do we eat first?"

How about the icing?   15 U.S.C. § 2301  Because this cake was already baked 40 years ago.  The debate was held between 1972 and 1975, all the cautions were weighed and balanced.  This is an act to establish a Task Force to review an old law and see how it can be updated.  Easy peasy...

Ask about the wall chargers.  Europe already passed rules making them universal, and no airplanes fell out of the sky.

By Evan-Amos - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16128583

Defending the 20 Percent: LET'S INTEGRATE RECYCLING

American Retroworks Inc. is a USA corporation based in Middlebury, Vermont. Established as a consulting company in 2001, ARI developed one of the first electronics take back and recycling ventures in the USA (Good Point Recycling), which now employs 30 staff. ARI has recycled, or diverted for reuse, over 20M kilos of “e-waste” over the decade plus we have collected in New England.  We create blue collar jobs in Addison County, we train our staff to meet new opportunities, and almost all of the $40M we have brought into the county came not just from out of state, but from big manufacturing companies - OEMs, steel and copper smelters, plastics molders - in other countries.

This blog is about the 20%.  Of people, partners, and product. 

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.

Waste Perception Creates Image Problem

Last spring Resource Recycling published an article following WR3A research into leaded silicate mining.  Long before my days as a regulator (Massachusetts DEP 1992-99) I had noticed how recycling happens in cities where property values (NIMBY) made compliance expensive.  Virgin mining and forestry, while far more damaging and polluting, happened farther away from property values, and was thus less regulated.

Here in Ghana, we are looking at lead and zinc mining streams as a way to "piggy back" CRT glass back to secondary primary ore refiners.  Rather than try to construct a "takeback" program aimed at manufacturers (popular because they are extremely costly, charging high fees in a bargain with Planned Obsolescence to squash the secondary market), merely cite the "circular economy" and toss the CRT tubes back into containers bearing Pb Ores.  Africa mines primary leaded silicates for export to refiners in wealthy - and less wealthy (China, India) - nations.  And some of those ores are chemically identical to CRT glass.

And there is no "EPA-EU" "Waste" "speculative accumulation" paperwork or R2 or E-Steward #bs to make it economically unfeasible.  I keep hearing in the west that CRT glass is "impossible" to recycle in Africa, a continent where primary ores are frequently the number one export.  This is a clear case of the EU and USA shooting itself in the foot, and then demanding Africa, Asia, South America follow "equivalent practices" prior to engaging in strategic metals trade.

The difference between recycling and mining is largely an image problem.  It doesn't take much imagination to solve problems like CRT glass recycling markets.  It means being willing to listen to people outside of your "circular economy" box.

USA Election: Proposing a Free Market Solution to Electoral College Dilemma

Free market solution to Electoral College dilemma.

Corporations and their shareholders should make major investments in the counties (Maine and Nebraska) whose Electoral College representatives are allowed to vote outside their state "winner take all" system. Like a "magnet school", these counties economic benefits would create incentives for other states to slowly loosen the "winner take all" system which is responsible - twice in 2 decades - for promoting a candidate with fewer popular votes to Chief Executive. Detroit should be the first. Had Michigan allowed the City of Detroit to cast its own proportionate electoral votes, investors would be saving the city and politicians wouldn't appeal solely to the Michigan rural majority. Whichever Michigan governor pulled it off would be credited with healing the city, which has become the very thing that "white" Michigan cities (Howell etc) fear in its current state.

I'm constantly asked to explain the USA's Electoral College whenever the topic of a USA election comes up. It's a civics lesson about a rational decision by smaller state actors. Here's how I explain it to Europeans.

Imagine if Europe were to try to elect a President of EU. Its "United States of Europe" constitution would require the buy-in, or joining, of individual member states with their own cultures and languages. Those states would, in a completely free market, face the same market forces as urbanization. Money is more efficiently concentrated in one place. Smaller nation-states would fear being lost in the shuffle.

Why build a bridge or an airport or a stadium in a small state, like Vermont or Belgium or Denmark, if the marketplace and political (voter) economics reward spending that infrastructure money in a big city like London, Paris, Milan, etc? If you were a President, you could always win more votes by spending every federal dollar in the cities and states with the most votes. If you were an EU state like Belgium, you'd be about the population of Michigan in the USA (in proportion to USA/EU population). That fear created the "winner take all" electoral college, and Luxembourg would as likely want "all its votes" cast on one candidate, to ensure candidates don't just passively take 45% of their votes and move on.

Breakup of Europe's E-Waste Armada? EU WEEE Agenda Shift

Our expectations couldn't be very high.  But whether because of our pressure, or despite it, Europe has blinked.  Bullied for years by Basel Action Network to implement the "Ban Amendment", Europe had shown a pattern of stimulus-response which I had failed to note ten years ago.  So WR3A got less diplomatic in our language, to match the "ghoulish witchy skeleton toxic" language of Basel Action Network and Greenpeace.  Where they claimed "Stewardship" we called out "Africa Boycott".  Where the NGO's called out "waste tourists" we gave voice to "geeks of color".

"Most of the illegal e-waste trade is taking place next door rather than far away in Africa," said Jaco Huisman of the United Nations University, scientific coordinator of the project that included police agency INTERPOL and other partners.

Come again?

That's right.  Europe finally got a clue this summer.  It took awhile, but the Dennis Moore analogy holds.  This redistribution of environmental costs was trickier than thought.

Amazing grace.

European Environmental Advocates really must be "word war weary" at this stage.  Poor Pascal LeRoy and David Higgins couldn't help but bristle at being named personally in blogs to account for the environmental malpractice of the WEEE Guidelines, as implemented.  Basel Action Network is known for developing "tests" which appear to allow trade - like allowing laptops with batteries that show 80% of original charge - a charge gone on many laptops after a few weeks.  Or like allowing SKD factories to buy "fully functional" CRTs with parts removed.  The proof in the pudding was that exactly 0% of their E-Stewards would export a CRT monitor, they were all pounded into toxic rubble following the breakdown of the California Compromise.  But the point of sharing these technical anecdotes is to show the level of obfuscation faced by UNU, UNEP, PACE, StEP and other Euro Acronym Agencies in the Puckett Armada.

They believed the lead ship knew where it was going.  But after 10 years, short of supplies and weary of the "collateral damage" of Africa's Tech Sector, Europe today has blinked.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.



(Soweto South Africa choir)

Europe Virus, European blog update

I think I picked up a virus in Sweden.

Not that.  NO.  I mean I used a wifi server to open my blog page, somewhere by cell phone, and now it's getting tons of incoming hits from an icky website and I have to go through it and see if I got something contagious.  If I open the site at retroworks.blogspot.se (Sweden) it opens ok, but .com opens something different.  Don't go to the website tao of bad donkey, it may have infected the Radisson hotel website (run by ESM).

Europe has not been easy for wifi.  Most of the free wifi sites require you to enter a EU cell phone number and then a text is SMS'd to you to enter and validate.  I've got no EU phone, had planned to make all my calls on internet while here.

I've got another Europe travel blog started but have to make it to the plane.  I see a huge drop off in all visits to the blog in the past few hours except for my own and the SPAM icky site, so I hope I don't have to start over.  I'm in Sweden by the way.

I can't say anything really meaty yet about this week's meetings with Interpol staff in Lyon or meeting former Basel Convention sec staff in Geneva and Fribourg, or today's meeting with Hurricane Joe Benson at Heathrow (my first such honor).  There is a lot of meat on the stove.  This was a big, big trip.

From the desk deck of the Scandilines ferry, facing west, it occured to me that a road trip in Europe, not by train or Ryanair or Virgin express or Easyjet, has been unique.   I've driven from New England to Arkansas many times, and from Arkansas to Mexico, but this is my first multi-day (5 driving) trip through 6 countries in Europe.

Our Dane friends, the French family, the Swiss, the Dutch, etc. who I've spoken to it's funny how everyone things my road trip, by car, from Copenhagen to Perpignan and back, seemed a very American way to travel.  FrWhat I can say is that it's the least American road trip ever in Europe.  I meet no Americans, no one but Europeans, in the gas stations, on the roads, in the restaurants.  I stop in tons and cities whiech either cont have trains or no gare close to the highway

OK, have to go rescue the car from European parking ticket spiders.  At 9 AM they crawl out of alleys and behind bushes and simultaneously parking ticket 100% of street parked cars.  Kidding, actually I haven't gotten a parking ticket.  I don't think I got a speeding ticket on the autabahn, either, but my wife says they have speed cameras (like in Arizona two years ago) and snap you and mail you the ticket.  If that's true, I may break the European banking system.