@RecyHub: The Case for Reformed Electronics Recycling Exports

  White's move...  


In the comments section on Sunday, reps from @RecyHub posted the following questions about the Fair Trade Recycling Model.  As a reminder, WR3A/FTR encourages export of used electronics to Africa, hand picked by Africans, under defined purchase orders and contracts, to meet the desire and needs of African cities.

EU RecyHub writes:

There are some issues in my mind that I think are not cleared out by your model:

- Child labour. In Agbogbloshie there are kids working with the e-waste, burning cables. Somehow, they should be considered in a model that takes into account human development, not only economical development. 

- Non-recyclable parts. Not 100% of the components are recyclable. There are hazardous parts that need to be removed and treated separately, and there are plastics that don't have any secondary market value. Those parts will be travelling together with the reusable electronics. 

How do you approach these two issues?

First, it is now very well established that the junk show in primitive scrap yards is primarily generated by Africa's cities themselves.   The two problems - child labor and difficult-to-manage components - are products of the emerging nations themselves.   A trade ban does nothing to address these problems.

Second, and on the contrary, the WR3A / fair trade recycling model uses the value of the goods to create incentives to address these problems. Instead of paying $7,000 for a containerload of televisions, the African trader could pay just $4,000 in return for a contract to eliminate child labor, recycle the plastic, etc.

This is the only model which creates $3k (or $4k, $5k, $7k) to fund proper recycling. African traders import from wealthy countries because the scrap is so much higher in (reuse) value, and OECD nations are foolish to shred that value. Keeping it out of the hands of African techs is a lose-lose proposition.

 Check. 

Monkey Zoo Math: Reprint of Basel Action Network Fingerprints

In July of 2010, I wrote the post with the most reads to date.  Some have suggested that it was too long and buried the lead, but the people I met after writing it encouraged me to write more, and not to be afraid to write longer.

Below (more:) is the bottom third of the blog "Monkeys Running the Environmental Zoo".  The math has now been corroborated by USITC, by MIT, by World Bank, by the ASU Williams/Kahhat study, the Nigeria and Ghana E-Waste Assessment (studies of 279 actual containers, seized at ports in Lagos, based on reporter Cahal Milmo's and Greenpeace's "investigation" of naughty, naughty African television repairmen).

I will re-link all of those studies this week.   But as a reminder, Basel Action Network knew this in 2006, when they provided guidance to Kenyan researchers Kiaka and Kamande.

PRELIMINARY STUDY ON THE IMPORTED SECOND HAND COMPUTERS IN KENYA - THE CASE OF NAIROBI by Richard Kiaka and Rachel Kamande (2007) "with guidance from Puckett James, Basel Action Network"

The 2010 math has been completely borne out.  All you had to do was listen to the African, Latin American, and Taiwanese refurbishers, and take a pen and the back of an envelope.  It has always been obvious. Toxics are a problem, pollution is serious business... but Racial profiling doesn't look good dressed in green.   There are real victims of Environmental Malpractice, and the time has come to clean our "stewardship" programs of the vestiges of accidental racism and poverty porn.

Whose fingerprints are on the "e-waste" monitors at Agbogbloshie?   African cities.  The "80% export" figure was not just a mistake... it was mathematically impossible, and disproven by BAN's own 2007 study.  

From 2010 Blog:

Q:  How do bad monitors get overseas? 

Open Minded Electronics Importer Gets R2 Shaft: CEFAD

There are way too many trolls on the internet.  People who are either super sure of themselves, or who get off somehow by acting that way, appear to go out of their way to shock and provoke insult.

trolling e-waste downstream markets

There are also too many wishy-washy agreeable people, people who 'like' whatever is being said today by the people they are near, most comfortable with repeating second hand impressions as fact.

And then there are really principled people, who really think they are good and fair, who really mean to do well, but they are caught in a tide of group-think.

Some of us cannot even see how our perceptions of reality have been caught in a kind of cultural gravity that general impressions cannot escape.   Many of these people are even agents of conscience, trying to make the earth a better place, as best as they know how.

It was someone like the latter to whom I sent the email (bottom, in yellow) for someone's first R2 (Responsible Recycler) end market report two years ago.  I have changed names, hotlinks, and email addresses, otherwise this is exactly what we sent.  This is a real case of "collateral damage"... no one meant to do anything but good...

Someone I wrote about in September 2012 is now out of business.

Replacement: Powderfinger lyrics and Barn Burning

Last night I wrote something as I was feeling it.  This morning I took it down.

If you read it the Post (Revelation:  Vermont Won't Back Down Recycling Racism), what follows is an apology and a long explanation.   As I hit the "enter key" to post it, I was listening to this song, by Neil Young, called PowderFinger.


Cover me with the thought that pulled the trigger...

Hobsons Choice For the "E-Waste" Market

Take it or leave it.

When an E-Steward company, or a state or enterprise influenced by its negative campaign, is approached by an Egyptian, Indonesian, or Nigerian who wants to set up the fastest growing cities in on the planet with affordable internet, they have one choice.

They can either replace the bad capacitors themselves, replace the hard drives themselves, buy new laptop batteries themselves... etc. etc.   Or they can destroy them.

The fastest growing, highest use, internet market in the world, is in the cities of emerging markets.  Cairo, Jakarta, Lagos... and dozens of others with billions of people clamoring to learn, to be entertained, informed, and connected to their family, friends, and associates.  They are starving for things like affordable display devices.

When a Nigerian, Egyptian, or Indonesian electronics repairperson (a terrific job choice in emerging markets) wants to buy a Dell, HP, or Samsung computer from the USA, they have once choice:  buy from someone willing to sell to them, or go without.

The Watchdog, the Gatekeeper, the certifier wants to change that choice.  The E-Steward Program charges YOU money to not attack you for selling junk.  This changes the choice for suppliers / sellers in the USA.  I used to decide based on the demand - what people wanted to buy.  Now that's changed by the requirement that I pre-repair it, and the risk that if I do sell it, I may be attacked.    The effect has been to constrain the supply - the buyers choice of goods.

The Watchdogs say this is to protect the buyers from getting "junk".   The test of whether something is junk?  In the marketplace, it's called "the marketplace"... what people are interested in buying.  The buyers, the Geeks of Color, the Technicians, the "Good Enough Market".   The Watchdog, having convinced everyone that 80% of these decisions are bad ones, intervenes, and places themselves between the buyer and the seller.   A referee can be good - if the ref understands scoring and other rules of the game.

Under E-Stewards, the ref has raised the stakes on any missed calls, and so they design a rule to be something much easier to measure than willingness to buy (repeatedly).  They can't be bothered by the background checks on buyers and fair contract language that Fair Trade Recycling pursues.   Keep it simple e-Stupid.  "Fully Functional", "Tested Working", "Plug and Play"...  E-Stewards and PACE gave up when we sent them 20 page purchase orders with quantities, tests, sizes, buyer qualification rules and other parameters.   Too long to read.   To difficult.  So they created "tested working" as a standard.  Sounds good.  The effect was to remove sellers unable to test and buyers who preferred buying newer goods for repair (rather than old ones "working").

1:  Take the highest demand in the world
2:   Restrict what they can buy
3.  Profit!!

They get applause from the Anti-Gray Market Alliance members who make brand new product, who restrict the right to repair and use patent trolls and copyright extension to squeeze the largest demand in the world into the tiny space of brand new product.  Profit.

CRT Recycling Primer: Update

E-Waste Made Simple!

Taking a break on the "Term Paper" project which explains the "good enough" markets among the world's urban poor, I found some broken links on this 2010 post "CRT Recycling Primer".

I updated a broken link and added a few lines, and it occurred to me that this was kind of a gem in the light of recent buzz about CRT glass recycling stockpiles and glutted markets.

The ugly, the bad, and the Good Enough Market connect between bans on the West Coast, sellers markets on the East Coast, piles of CRT glass, and a surge in internet by young people in emerging markets, as profiled by EMarketer (covering research by Google and Booz)

O! What a tangled web we weive when first we practice to deceive!  It all started with a bogus, raunchy, cynical, made up statistic by Basel Action Network which said that 80-90% of CRTs exported were burned in primitive and polluting conditions.   Not only has BAN stopped distributing the stat, they have refused to ever say where it came up with it in the first place.  Combined with pictures of poster children, this stat sucked in CBS Scott Pelley, Terry Gross, Frontline, and entire "E-Steward" enterprises.

The outcome?  Shortages of monitors, dictator crackdowns on internet hardware, worse supply chains, high taxes, and a big stockpile of CRT glass cullet (and higher prices to recycle it).   Now California companies are asking for permission to landfill it, which means not only were California taxpayers asked to take the monitors taken from Egyptians, the CRT glass was not even recycled.

1.  California subsidizes companies to break CRT monitors.  This created a sellers market for working CRT exports on the East Coast, and created a simple "big shred" system of companies in California who live off the breaking subsidy (planned obsolescence in hindsight).

Environmental Malpractice: Conclusion Prelude (?)

We covered a lot of ground (somewhat laboriously) during the past 4 weeks, basically making the case for two serious "environmental malpractice" cases.  Do the poorest people in emerging markets have all the tools and safety protections they need to recycle bad CRTs?  No.  That is the point of Fair Trade Recycling.   Use the value of the proven 85% good material to pay for the proper recycling - not just of the 15% accidental breakage and elective upgrade, but also the electronics being thrown out today in those nations.   Fair Trade Recycling depends on the use of the reuse market to finance these improvements.  But we must overcome an effective boycott on trade with poor people.

In the past few posts on Environmental Justice, I've shown current news stories (within the past 6 months) about technicians framed, outed, and defamed for their reuse and repair work in ICT industries.  Here's a synopsis of the first two cases (already posted) and a teaser on Environmental Malpractice 7.  This is not OLD NEWS.  This defamation is in the headlines today.

- Egypt:  The false statements by BAN (cited in EM5) give an excuse to a regime to seize computers more than 5 years after date of manufacture - including CRTs that last 25 years - as "e-waste".  The timing of enforcement, 2007, meant there were virtually no CRTs with assembly line dates of 2003 to be found, and 100% of CRTs were seized by Egyptian customs during the next few years.  This led to a 2011 Report on "E-Waste Disposal Problems" in Egypt, which is cited (temporally wrong) as support for BAN's original claim. But the report dealt exclusively with the "problem" of the pile of working CRTs seized by customs - a completely Ban-made problem.  It culminates with three things:  an end to sales by reputable USA suppliers, an arrest of USA suppliers willing to tape fake dates on the monitors, and the Egypt market finally accepting cheap new units made in China, the end of a decade when names like "IBM" and "HP" and "Dell" meant a quality, affordable, internet experience in Cairo.  A November 2012 Headline on Egypt shows a massive pile of mixed TVs and monitor "ewaste" dumped on the ground.   Egyptian Geeks are out of business.  #Hamdy.

- Nigeria and Ghana:  The false statements by BAN (cited in EM6), especially the "80%-90% of African = primitive" statistic completely made up off the top of someone's head, leads to a ban on exports by European WEEE standards.  Africans try buying, as they did the previous decade, newish and tested CRTs.  Greenpeace and the UK Independent sneak a sabotaged TV into Joseph Benson's container with a GPS, and track it.  Benson is arrested and goods are seized.  But a 2 year research by UNEP finds that 85% of the imports are working, and that a similar percentage of material at the Agbogbloshie and other dumps were trade ins and discards from African cities (which had TV since the 1980s).  December 2012 Headline:  Joseph Benson found guilty of exporting, implied to be a vindication of the 80% primitive African propaganda, and no mention of the UNEP 2011 studies discrediting the original accusation.  West African Geeks are out of business. #Benson.

In the final section, Indonesia (Environmental Malpractice 7, currently editing), we have the absolutely worst example of Environmental Malpractice and Injustice.   In the two cases above, rich corporations protected their new sales from "secondary markets" by funding an NGO who targets up and coming threats in emerging markets (which were growing in internet use at 10X the rate of the USA and Europe).  This week's headline repeats the fake, false, discredited, unsupported, undocumented, predjudiced statistic - in Science Daily, a magazine likely to be cited as a source by future "e-waste" researchers.

BAN's silence is complicit in the high tech lynching of technicians in developing markets.  I will show that decisively with photos of Jim Puckett in Indonesia, falsely describing people who had hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods seized, in Environmental Malpractice #7.   #Chiu

Environmental Malpractice 5.1: Egypt and USA Crimes

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. 
- Winston Churchill

Aggravated against the profiling, arrest, and then defamation of 3 cases of Geeks of Color...   Just as I went to check on BAN.org's coverage of the Joseph Benson (Env Malpractice 7) case, I found this gem about similar USA arrest of "E-waste Criminals".  It's another digression from the Final Environmental Malpractice case study of the Indonesian reuse plant.

Here is the entire discussion between Mike Enberg of BAN and I, using their blog... assuming my comment below isn't "moderated" away.

Environmental Malpractice 5: Custody Case 1, Egypt

This is part 5 of a series on the impacts of "E-Stewardship" and "Watchdog" campaigns in support of a boycott of 6 billion people (the "non-OECD").

- Part 1:  Due Disclosures
- Part 2:  Accidental Racism
- Part 3:  "Collateral Damage"
- Part 4:  Poverty Porn

The hard work by the fixers, tinkerers, repairers and geeks in emerging markets, has been crushed underfoot by planned obsolescence, white guilt, and false data.  Three names should be "e-waste martyrs":

Hamdy of Medi-com (Egypt)
Joseph Benson of BJ Electronics (UK, Nigeria)
Gordon of Advanced Global (Indonesia, Taiwan, Peru)

ARE YOU ASHAMED OF TRADING WITH GEEKS OF COLOR?  I'm not.

Each of these companies suffered a massive trauma from seizures of used electronics they had purchased, tested for the specifications they gave the seller.   In each case, they accepted a narrow lot of material - TVs of a specific size with RCA plugs, working CRT monitors for direct reuse, or CRTs of a certain size and model which could be remanufactured by a factory which used to make them.  They paid and arranged shipping, and paid about 10 times the value the items would have as scrap.

In each case, they were tried and convicted in the western press based on the "primitive" associations made by Basel Action Network.   False assumptions abou exports from rich countries (the ones with nice stuff), and photos of the domestic generation of "e-waste" in their own nations, were enough for the western press to cover the story without interviewing any of these men about their own "crimes".  

The headline that the used electronics were "exported" made these men "e-waste criminals".  BANimplied that the junk on the ground was the same that these three men imported.  It was not. And Interpol believed BAN, and wrote that (because the sale was "organized") that this was evidence of "organized crime". And no American or European reporter has called ANY of these men to get their side of the "e-Waste" story.

Now universities, like University of Washington, are being asked to "sign up" and show pride in a boycott which would make Senator Joe McCarthy blush.  We need Bob Dylan to write another "Hurricane" song.

Defamation Case #1:  MediCom of Egypt

From Majella Magazine:   Here are the children of Egypt, photographed provocatively next to garbage.  Even the Egyptians are now in the act of "poverty porn" (this is not a BAN.org photo).  This is from an article, Egypt, E-Waste, and the Digital Divide, by Arwa Aburawa

Egyptian children stand in a doorway flanked by piles of waste. It is not uncommon for impoverished children in Egypt to mine waste for raw materials

"According to recent statistics, the number of Egyptians using the internet increased 39 percent to 13.5 million between 2008 and 2009, and the number of people who owned a mobile phone went from 30 million to 48 million in the same period. The repair industry has no doubt played an important role in making such technologies available to those Egyptians on the lowest wages."

Two paragraphs later, Jim Puckett of BAN warns the writer, that the repair business is fraught with problems:

Jim Puckett from BAN, however, argues that “a lot of nasty imports are justified by the repair pretext” which creates hazardous waste (all be it over the course of a few years) that cannot be dealt with safely or effectively in developing countries. Anyone stating that they want to help developing nations bridge the digital divide by sending them electronic cast-offs also need to be questioned, as “e-waste is a toxic waste that needs to be dealt with and not traded with—we need to stop exporting our problems to others to deal with.” 

Jim Puckett says "a lot".  In the past, he was more specific.   The BAN estimate peaked at "Eighty to ninety percent"...  Basel Action Network was circulating bad estimates to the press for a decade.  BAN knows next to nothing about Medi-Com or other importers in Egypt.

"Eighty percent of interracial marriages end in abuse and divorce".    Imagine that totally fictious, alarmist, made up statisic...  It would be an outrage.

In 2008, as the demand for used PCs and displays was at its peak, BAN got its way.  Hosni Mubarak's government passed a law that defined any PC less than 5 years old (from date of manufacturer - which itself is usually 9-12 months prior to distribution - was "#ewaste".   For display devices like monitors, which last 25 years, and may not be sold off the shelf in the USA for a year after manufacture, that is like banning cars which are two years old... and for Egyptians, who earn

Fair Trade Recycling Challenge to University of Washington

Nailing shut the case for fair trade recycling of used electronics ("e-Waste").

We finally got this translated, thanks to Middlebury College faculty and alumns.



I'm working on getting a better quality copy.  It's nice to finally see the subtitles of the interviews with 'Batman and Robin'.

"...This combination of white guilt, and white paternalism...  And that the more I got to know these "Geeks of Color", these technicians, the more I realized - these guys are not only 'not doing anything wrong' - but they are actually the very best hope that these countries have."

MIT, Memorial University, Arizona State, Middlebury College, UVM, Champlain College, University of Arizona, University of Peru PC, University of Amsterdam, Universite Paul Cezanne, Cornell, Boston College...   Everyone looking into this finds that we are telling the truth, and that Basel Action Network is the one "dumping" (false accusations and defamation) on the poor.

They are parasites of the poor, and cowards for not responding to any of this.  The universities will be calling and asking questions about the 80%.  We have opened our doors.  We have nothing to hide, we have made mistakes and we are going to show them.  We do not pretend to be what we are not, and do not pretend to do things we cannot do.  If we take the pictures of Africans, we give them a name and a say.  Primitive?  You disgust me for using that term to describe A+ technicians replacing faulty capacitors, or original design manufacturers who own the patent on your touchscreen device.

DISGUST.   Basel Action Network is taking down reputable environmental organizations like Greenpeace and NRDC in their black hole of niggardly defamation.  They have had more than three years to respond to the false arrests/accusations of PT Imtech and Joseph Benson.

For the opinion to the contrary, I urge you to contact the University of Washington, and ask why they have joined a boycott of the Geeks of Color, and why they did not get a peer review from universities on the East and West Coasts who have listened to both sides and chosen Fair Trade Recycling as a standard.

Alex Credgington
University of Washington, Communications Manager
206-616-3412
ecredgin@uw.edu

Alex, if you want to meet the Chicas and tour our plant in Mexico, give me a jingle. For more background on the case why exports should not be defamed, read this piece in Motherboard, "Why We Should Ship our Electronic "Waste" to China and Africa".

We would love to have University of Washington's best scholars join the team, look inside, and tell us why we are wrong.   I challenge you to take your surplus materials, divide them into two equal piles, and we will draw straws.  Send one half to Total Reclaim (a friend and E-Steward), and one half to our Fair Trade Recycling partners at InterConnection in Seattle, allowing product to go to Retroworks de Mexico.

I have nothing to hide.  And I trust Charles at Interconnection and Jeff and Craig at Total Reclaim.  Do a whole mass balance, and see where the monitors, TVs, PCs, and hard drives wind up.   Memorial University may have funding to film the entire process, film the two loads, and escort them.  Oh, and Retroworks de Mexico, while it's in the poorest area of Sonora, IS IN AN OECD COUNTRY.   So no, it will not violate "international law" and whoever told you that... well, like I said, let's have a little "PEER REVIEW".

In 2013 I will close the case.  E-Stewards will either change, change management, change message, or go down in history as a racist, xenophobic period of environmentalist history.

My mom in the Ozarks described the first interracial marriage I heard about this way.

"She's very brave."

She must love him very much to marry despite the southern recoil that surrounded interacial marriage in the 1960s.    I am only brave enough to trade.

I don't want to speak on behalf of any of the researchers from any of the universities.  I just want to change the presumption of guilt, and protesting innocence and opening doors seems like the best way to go about that.   If the University of Washington wants to bring a camera and ask BAN what they should be aiming the camera at, that's fine by us.   We dropped our bucket where it was, and will lift as we climb.

Recycling Human Beings After Ramadan

I'm in Montreal for the weekend, with my wife and our 12 year old son, speaking Franglais and restaurant hopping and seeing bugs at the Insectarium.

But the highlight of my trip was last evening, when we hosted a modest dinner reunion for friends at the original Basha's Restaurant (the first Lebanese Cuisine restaurant in North America, according to the website).  It was the "End of Ramadam" meal, and a busy long line of eaters at 8:30PM set the restaurant into a mass-feeding, no special orders mode.   We met with 9 friends, all with connections to WR3A and Fair Trade Recycling.



Jean Frederic Somda ("Mr. Fred" at our plant) and Hamdy of Egypt met, with friends Pascal et Isabelle, and  six children jabbering together in 3-4 languages (typical Montreal).

Learned English in Quebec

Mr. Fred is by all accounts the most prestigious WR3A Intern.  He was at his peak somewhere in the crooked line of ascension in the politics of Burkina Faso.   He was popular with the USA State Department, as a former seminary student with impeccable morals.  He was Attorney General or Prosecutor General, refused to prosecute "political enemies" and fell so far "out of favor" that he had to leave in the dead of night. He gained political refugee status after his 6 months stint at our E-waste company.  He will be passing the bar exam in Canada in December, and has made a focus of international law and the Basel Convention.  He was always a classy, upscale, impeccable dresser and it was a thrill to me when he came to meet us in his "Good Point Recycling" T-Shirt.

He met with Hamdy and Hamdy's wife and child.  Hamdy was one of my oldest trading parterns, one who I sold an interesting chunk of the 300,000 used computers I'd exported as of 2011, when he left Egypt with his wife and family.  He had the economic resources, unlike Fred, to get permanent resident status in Montreal based on economic grounds.   He described Egypt as a place of hope and change, but shared worries.  It was no longer safe to walk the streets at 2 in the morning, he said, describing the balance between Egyptians fear and dependence on the law and order of the military.

Defining E-Waste Racism: Part III Caste Irons

I'm on vacation and so I'm not interrupted, as I normally am.   That's good and bad.

Before posting the next part of my Marlow-inspired (I've just finished Joseph Conrad's 1902 work "Heart of Darkness") rant on the people who illogically criminalize contact between rich and poor, I thought I'd post this link to a morning story on Romeo and Juliet -in India.

As the USA celebrates the Loving v.Virginia interracial marriage, which was an imprisonable offense during my lifetime (and an annual theme of this blog), the growth of cities and expansion of information (parents and local society no longer control all the ideas of heaven, hell, and society) has led to inter-caste marriages in India.

BBC Reports on "A Hideaway for India's Rebel Couples", and interviews a woman who married a childhood friend - a barber from a lower caste - and the threats from her family to get a gun and shoot him dead.

I'm thinking there has to be some Stephen Pinker brain evolution behind the fear of intermingling.  But just as used computers sold Egypt made it stronger (democratically, by weakening the sick and weakened ruling class), diverse genetics make our species stronger.

Finding a case where marrying a lower caste turned out badly... that was the main enforcement in Virginia prior to the Loving marriage... threats of how badly in might turn out.   That's the tactic trying to keep companies like mine from negotiating terms for the sale of capacitor-plague boards, which can have the tiny caps replaced by a smart kid with a soldering iron.

Playing Nice With "eWaste" Geeks

I sort of get wound up sometimes.  I really believe in Fair Trade Recycling, and it's really sad that our biggest opponents are "environmentalists".  This post is dedicated as a reminder of some of the people I've been very, very proud to have met in developing nations.  See my friends pictures, below the "more" fold.

Photo Simon Lin, Wistron chairman

Photo credit: Digitimes file photo

What is a shame is that I have no slides of, or friends in, Chengdu, China.  It's just a little bit smaller than Cairo, with 14 million residents.  It's in Western China, which has lagged in development.

How is China trying to develop and advance this part of their country?  By partnering with Wistron, (the contract assembly company that owns ACER, number 2 in world PC sales).   The mainland Chinese government has turned once again to a Taiwanese billionaire with "tinkerer" roots.   Wistron began as a maker of plastic cases for computer monitors, and continues to supply SKD factories.  I'm sure there will be Western pessimism about Wistron and environmental stewardship, as there is with Foxconn and other Taiwanese-owned manufacturers.  But do they know that Wistron is also opening a major plastic recycling plant in Texas?  In fact, Wistron funds my company to collect computers from schools, free of charge, in New England.

I have met several people in the refurbishment business who bragged of knowing Simon Lin (one SKD factory owner was a nephew named after him).  Will I live to see one of my friends below, from Africa, Latin America, or South Asia, use the same refurbishing springboard?  No more far fetched than the idea of China's Shenzhen beehive would have been (to most) two decades ago.  And Taiwanese and Chinese investors are buzzing around Africa and South America like bees on daffodils.

What dreams can we have for the developing world?  I learned a new vocabulary word, ODM (original design manufacturer)...

These are great stories, about sustainable reuse, intelligent refurbishing, and geek and tinkerer economies, and recycling takeback, worldwide.  When I heard Allen Hershkowitz of NRDC, speaking on the Diane Rehm Show, say "I have been there, I have seen it" to describe "#ewaste exports" to 83% of the world, I shook my head.

I think I've been to a lot of different places.  Yet I could never imagine myself saying "I have been there" to describe the rest of the darn world.   I've never been to Chengdu, I've never even been to India or Pakistan.  But here are some places I have been to, and some people who have electronics knowledge have in common, with each other, with Wistron, and with FreeGeeks and Refurbishers here in the USA.