Better Solution to Eric Lundgren's Microsoft Operating System Reload: Spare Tire Licenses

Multiple pals on Facebook and Email sent me last weekend's article about Eric Lundgren, spectacled and lightly bearded electronics reuse guru.  Friend of Kyle at IFIXIT and other TechSoup sorts, Lundgren has made a colorful career doing press-catchy projects, like building electric cars out of e-waste, and other tinkerer tricks.

I have nothing against Eric and think it sucks he has been sentenced to jail for importing Microsoft Operating System licenses from China.  Whether he was going to give them away to poor people without computers, or sell them (as alleged by Microsoft and FBI informants), jail seems like overkill.  Here was Microsoft's side of the story, which sounds truthy as well.  And here is the view at IFIXIT.

Oh, and here is the petition circulated by PIRG... with a photo at the top looking very Agbogbloshie-like (reminding us that PIRG and Greenpeace still have not corrected their 80-90% primitive ewaste export hoax that put #FREEJOEBENSON in prison for much longer than Eric Lundgren is scheduled to serve).

Ok, I can fix this.  Have been trying for 20 years.  Had the solution in 1998. Tried to implement it in Massachusetts.

Spoiler in yellow.  I solved this over a decade ago.  Why can't I get traction?

THE SOLUTION IS FOR GOVERNMENT AND INSTITUTIONAL VOLUME PURCHASERS TO PROCURE ONE "SPARE TIRE" LICENSE ON EVERY PC THEY ORDER. 

THE "SPARE" LICENSE KEY WOULD BE GLUED ON THE BACK, AND USED FOR A CLEAN REINSTALL AFTER THE HARD DRIVE WAS WIPED.  

THIS WOULD ELIMINATE E-WASTE AND MAKE THE PCS AFFORDABLE.  

WHEN I PITCHED THE IDEA TO MICHAEL DELL IN AUSTIN TEXAS, HIS FOLKS ESTIMATED THEIR COST FOR SUCH A LICENSE WOULD BE ABOUT $1.   

I made a short career of this when another Operating System company, NewDeal Inc., hired me as a consultant to promote THEIR Operating System as the backup.  New Deal collapsed during the "dotcom" crash, and my Spare Tire licensing idea never got off the ground.

More about Lundgren's case and how OEM Operating licenses work below.  Wouldn't surprise me if that's Lundgren using Accra's slum as a backdrop.

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

Fifth Week of USA College Students Apprentice Program in Africa Tech Sector

Fair Trade Recycling Update:  How Four USA College Students Will Change The Way You See Africa's E-Waste.

Zacharia is amazing

Fair Trade Recycling has a positive message.  Like the message in Hans Rosling's seminal "chimpanzee test" video - that ignited Gapminder in Sweden - our programs teach more about emerging markets.  The 1960s "Third World" images are, themselves, a form of pollution.

This summer we have 4 USA college interns working across 2 continents - Africa and North America - to create a partnership in parts supply.  Two students (U of Florida and Middlebury College) have been working in an apprentice program for flat screen TV repair in Ghana.  They are not just learning about T-con boards and controllers, or how to spot and replace overheated capacitors.  They are seeing Africa's Tech Sector as equals.

"Karim Zacharia is amazing!!!"

I like getting that message.  These two Americans are not "saving Africans".  They are not introducing a new "less primitive" technique. They are being exposed to Africa's best and brightest, to people who may well have been on scholarship to an engineering program if they'd been born in different circumstances.

E-Waste Tragedy 7: Logical Fallacy ("Something Must Be Done")

Staying on subject.  What lessons can the Environmental Activist Community learn from the "E-Waste Tragedy?"  Does Joseph "Hurricane" Benson belong in prison?  If not, how the heck did he get there, and how do we keep from making the same kind of mistake again?

Turns out, the ancient Greeks had this nailed many centuries ago.

In Orlando, at the E-Scrap 2014 Conference, I actually had a chance to speak to several people on all sides of the "Guidelines" issue.   Most, including Jim Puckett, said of course Joe Benson does not belong in prison.

The person from StEP (Jaco) mostly defended the prison sentence for Benson.  Jaco acknowledged the probability that 91% of Benson's sold good were actually reused, and acknowledged that most of the stuff filmed at the dump was "Post-Reuse", and generated by Ghanaians.   Nevertheless Jaco made the case that "rules are rules".   If the Guidelines "suggest proof of full functionality", that Benson should have known the consequences of his export activity, even if those Guidelines were based on eroneous (BAN.org) claims.  Even if Benson knew they were being reused, and new he was bringing rejects back for free recycling in the UK, prison was warranted.

(Did you notice the term "Guidelines suggest proof is needed"? How about proving the suggestion is warranted?)

Throughout these conversations, we observe the "Appeal to Desperation".

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.  

X (GUIDELINE) IS SOMETHING. 

THEREFORE, X MUST BE DONE.

This logical "appeal to desperation" has also been labeled the Politician's Fallacy, and often results in prohibitions, war on drugs, 10 foot fences to foil 9 foot ladders, and many "industry self regulation" standards.  There is a lot of money in providing "Something".

Having studied this for a couple of decades, I'm basically hardening in my position.   Even Mr. Puckett actually offered to sign the petition, and said of course Benson should be released.

Earth Day 2014 - Searching for Africa's Bobby Fischer

Happy Earth Day.  If you have all day to read environmental blogs, I suggest a revisit to 2010s "Capacitor Heroes".  If you don't understand the last decade's capacitor plague and the good enough markets that replace bulging caps, you won't understand the economics of the export market.  IFIXIT gets it.  StEP and Interpol, I'm afraid, may not understand how supply and demand work, at least not well enough for a good cost-benefit analysis on exports.  

What drives demand in Guiyu?  Chip harvest and reuse.  You can "externalize pollution costs" much closer, in Haiti or west Texas.  Externalized pollution is real, and is a concern, but it's almost never the economic driver of the person paying for the product.

We need to listen to demand, and study it.  

Heroicizing and Exoticizing the Trade in Small Household Appliances

I was having a little Facebook chat with an old chum from Peace Corps (Cameroon 1984-86) early this morning, and she shared with me a Washington Post article about John Beale, who reported to Gina McCarthy (now head of EPA, and a former upstairs-dweller at EOEA when I worked at Massachusetts DEP's Recycling program in the 1990s).  I'm told that Beale's original development work was legit, but the slippery slope of junkets turned into a kind of riptide.  (If you don't have time for pontification, enjoy this amusing Vimeo parody "License to Chill")

It's about Fufu

Beale often went to Africa.  At the beginning he claimed it was for an international-EPA-outreach on "stoves" for more efficient cooking of fu-fu.   Within the EPA, the story goes, it became widely accepted that  he was actually working for the CIA, and his EPA post was "cover" for cloak and dagger work.

No.  According to his deposition, he was just playing hooky.   His cover story about "cook stoves" (which were nothing we hadn't seen in the 1980s, not much of a cover story for people who lived in Africa) was all he had come up with, and when the internal EPA gossip gave him "CIA" cover, it just made his travel appear more exotic.  We like to be exotic.

I had shared a link with Judi about a "fu-fu pounding machine" covered by an African blogger this week. It reminded me of how many hours of work teenage African girls and their mothers spend pounding nyams and gari into this delicious cookie-dough-like staple.  Fufu is dipped into all kinds of green, brown and orange colored spice gravies.   I wondered to Judi whether appliances like these might play something of the role washing machines and dishwashers are said to have played in the saga of American women's liberation.

Freedom from labor is freedom to read.  In the Mary Poppins movie, the mother is freed to promote "vote for women suffrage" by the housekeepers and hired help.  Democratic participation has always been for people with time on their hands.   Laundromats (which I've sung the praises of before) freed people - mostly women - to have more time after school to study, and to participate in other earning activity.

When Amartya Sen wrote of "100 Million Missing Women" it turned "environmental justice" on its side.  When women's hours are missing from the economy, land values stagnate, wars ensue, social development is stymied, and cultures tend to be, in a word, "more primitive".  With eventual acceptance of the washing machine, we release women to do more productive things.  Like write books, in the case of Rachel Carlson, author or Silent Spring.  (The tangential irony is that women were freed by technology, the downsides of which she aptly described.  Manufacturing of devices created waste and toxics, which tend to wind up in places where land values are lower... This isn't a rant, as I'm a fan of Carson, it's more of a yin yang thing.)

Here's film of the "fufu pounding machine" with traditional (women labor) pounding to the right.  In Africa, hand laundry is pounded in similar way, and as the video demonstrates, automated fufu pounding is a lot like a washer-dryer.  The first ones were probably made with spare WEEE parts (see bottom).

More professional videos (including consumer on the streets interviews) raise fears of change among African men, fear of the unnatural, association with disease, and other modern "modernization juju").  African Men demand  "certification" and call for the machines being "certified".   An opening for fufu Stewards?  What I can hear in the back of my mind is echos of similar "fear of tech", like the effects of train motion on womens uteruses, the hyperbole over direct current electricity, and "ghoulish" practices of computer monitor refurbishing (as described by Puckett and co.).

Bullyboys X: 城管 Authoratah!! Pope Francis to Joseph Benson

城管   [chéngguǎn / cheng2 guan3] noun. 

City management or administrators tasked with enforcing municipal laws, regulations, codes, etc. They have a very poor reputation amongst Chinese people as being corrupt and violent brutes, best known for often physically bullying illegal street vendors, hawkers, and peddlers. See examples.

This post is from the ChinaSmack Glossary, which is a collection of current idioms and expressions, like "memes" in China.  You've heard of the "green fence" and the crackdown on printer refurbishers in Foshan?  This may be the Chinese word for the people Joseph Benson called "bullyboys".

Good news.  The number of poor recyclers' defenders has just increased by One.

Pope Francis has made an amateur video praising the world's "cartoneros" — the poor people who pick through garbage to find recyclable and reusable goods. He says their work is dignified and good for the environment. [ABC News]

It is so bloody obvious that an activity, such as recycling, which is praised as good citizenship when performed by rich people, does not deserve less merit when performed by poor people.  How often do MIT and the Pope and modern artists in NYC agree?

We now have author Adam Minter, NYC Artist/Oscar Winner Vik Muniz, former Basel Convention Secretary Katharina Kummer Peiry, researchers from Memorial University, USC, PUCP, MIT, Africans and Chinese, all signing the praise of recycling in a fair manner.   Where with the backlash be felt?

By Authorities who hitched their wagons to Basel Action Network's campaign of poverty porn photos, false statistics, and halloween rhetoric.

Authority.  Bullyboys.  城管

[Pope] Francis, known for his simple habits, has denounced today's "throw-away culture" and said in the video that food that is tossed aside each day could feed all the world's hungry.

Francis has a long relationship with Argentina's "cartoneros" — literally "cardboard people." He would celebrate Mass for them as archbishop and invited them on stage during World Youth Day in July.

Middle managers, the tide has turned.  The Vermont E-Waste Massacree will be the Wounded Knee of the battle against good enough markets.  When Chinese bloggers are complaining about the same thing as the Pope, African TV repairmen (Joe Benson), and New York professional artists, the Temp Light is on your motorcycle.   Ignore it and ruin your vehicle.  E-Stewards has to execute Plan B, throw Eric Cartman out of the Executive Director chair.  Even Donald Summers, the former BAN.org consultant who (18 months ago) called my views on Fair Trade Recycling "a huge outlier", now works for ISRI.

"Recycling good." say Og, beating a reused mammoth bone against an elk antler.

Bullyboy 7: The Great Cabbage Farm vs. TV Repair Controversy

If you do an image search for "cabbage worker" on Bing or Google, you can find a lot of very interesting, very different photos, spanning a great deal of time.  Cabbage is eaten in almost every part of the world.

Well, it's interesting to me.  Let me explain why it's related to "E-Waste" exports in general, and Joseph Benson in particular.

You can search "African cabbage farm", or "Guatemala Cabbage", or "Chinese cabbage harvest", or "Russian cabbage".

Want to guess where the cabbage photo to the left was taken?  Florida.

There are some Australian aborigines cabbage worker photos from a century ago, and there is an ocean of cabbage photos on alibaba.com.  Dried cabbage, chopped cabbage.  

There are workers clinging to the sides of a moving cabbage truck in Guatemala.  There are workers dressed in white smocks and moon suits in the Czech Republic.

I was searching "cabbage" on alibaba, and searching images for cabbage, because I wanted to find something as boring and non-controversial as... television repairman.

Africans, Chinese, and Latino workers who head to the Bright Lights, Big City places like Lima, Cairo, and Joseph Benson's Lagos, are usually making a choice not to do something.  They don't necessarily know what jobs they'll find in Accra, Kinshasa, or Dakar.  But they don't expect to grow cabbage, or tubers, or sugarcane, or cotton.

"Ag Flight".   It's basically exactly the same reason the USA cabbage farms import migrant labor from other countries.  

I've got rural, subsistence farming roots.   Three out of four of my grandparents lived on subsistence Ozark farms, and remained in farming until the 1960s (fourth grew up in journalism, and as a child of someone in the Indian Service).  Agriculture's an honorable profession.

I was told the easiest thing to grow, if I chose to be a farmer, was probably cabbage. Cabbage is pretty virulent, cabbage crops can survive temperature disruptions.  You won't make a lot of money on cabbage, but barring an Oklahoma dustbowl storm, you are unlikely to utterly fail.  As I looked down at my grandpa Fisher's cabbage row, I thought it was the dullest, most boring thing in the universe.

Had Joseph Benson been a cabbage farmer, he would not have been the center of a sting by Greenpeace, Basel Action Network, Cahal Milmo (Independent), or BBC Panorama.  Unfortunately for Benson, he invested in a different job abandoned by white people - one exoticized to titillate environmentalists.

Television repair.

Four Elephant Fixers Films: IFIXIT.org, WR3A

THE TWEET:  "4 films on E-Waste Recycling: IFIXIT, WR3A, Fedele, PBS. See all and you begin to see the Elephant in Africa's room"

Kyle Wiens group, IFIXIT.org, and his professional blogger (I'm green with envy) Elizabeth Chamberlin presented on this Fixers film at Ismael's Electronics Recycling conference in Vegas.   The documentary is being produced with filmmakers at The Atlantic.

WR3A had wanted to do something like this in 2007, when we had the grant from CEA which resulted in the 3 minute "Fair Trade Recycling" film (original version presented at CES Conference).  We had dozens of interviews filmed in different countries with hand-held flip cameras and amateur and below-amateur camera people.   Bad sound, no translation, poor lighting, rambling unedited footage can be seen at WR3A group, viddler.com.

My next goal is to do a one-day event in California, have the day's take divided by geeks (perhaps from IFIXIT or Tech Soup) into two equal piles.  Then we'll RFID tag or geo-tag the items and send one batch to a California, no-intact unit E-Steward.  The other will go to Retroworks de Mexico, the womens coop which was profiled by PBS in 2010, and which is the stepping stone for the Memorial University / USC / WR3A / Peru grant ($469K) to do in depth interviews, secondary research, and film of the repair and reuse market.  The idea is to do an actual mass balance, and compare the environmental results when a group of struggling poor people, with the right tools and training, competes against a California shredding machine.

I'm grateful to Basel Action Network for one thing.   I've got an immense passion for the value added by repair and reuse, the way poor people find money in the pockets of discarded clothing, the way they resew buttons on jeans.  I love the story (from an engineer at Umicore) of the teenage kid in Ghana who jailbreaked his IPhone when every Belgian tech had said it was impossible.   Because BAN.org made this trade between rich and poor "controversial", because they made it look horrific and toxic and exaggerated the relative risk of recycling compared to mining (the only other source of metals), now my passion is considered controversial enough to get university funding.

What if I loved something that everyone agreed was a no-brainer?  Would we ever have gotten funding?

Most of the world thinks repair and recycling is a no-brainer.  Thank goodness for the Orwellian, Joseph Conrad-ish portrayal of computer monitor refurbishing by our friends who invented the term "e-waste" to describe the purchase of less-than-flat display devices by Africans, Asians and Latinos.  I'm looking forward to seeing this Fixers Film in its entirety and comparing it to David Fedele's well meaning (but in my view, tunnel-visioned... simultaneously peeping and myopic) e-Wasteland.  That one is a very, very truthful account of a rather small percentage of the export business.  If you see it after watching Fixers, you'll be ready to see the 2009 Fair Trade Recycling Mexico PBS and Fair Trade Recycling videos to grasp the solution to the questions it poses.

Then you'll understand my rage at Basel Action Network, which has devoted all their energy to banning this solution, via unsuccessful rejected interpretations of Annex IX of the Basel Convention (which they blatantly lied about having been accepted when they are rejected by Basel, in writing) and with the promotion of USA legislation to ban Fair Trade Recycling.

Take time to enjoy the Fixers film first.   I will forward a FairTradeRecycling.org Factsheet on Mining and Repair Statistics if Elizabeth or Kyle is interested in any collective thought.  It's a three dimensional world, and if people are actually excited to visit Africa based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it doesn't make sense to be angry at the stereotypes it churns... so long as they actually DO finally visit and see the whole picture... trunk, tusks, blanket, and the wall.

Join the unedited discussions and see more videos and articles at Facebook's Fair Trade Recycling group - join today, it's free.

Washington DC Testimony on E-Waste Rare Earths

I have to catch the 5A Bus to Dulles, and don't have many good pictures of the US Trade Commission hearings.  But I'll mention this:

The last panel of shredders and recyclers said that rare earth metals are not recoverable, and kind of waffled on the question whether hand disassembly provides better quality.

Here is an article by Bloomberg Reporter Adam Minter, who visited our Fair Trade Recycling partner in Malaysia.  They hand-disassemble hard drives there, and sell the rare earth magnets directly back to a company like Seagate in Singapore for direct reuse.  I'll show these magnets in a future post.

Here is an article recently posted by Fair Trade Recycling researcher Adelaide Rivereau, who is in Vermont from Marseilles, France, to study "e-waste" policy.  She has found definitive third party research showing that hand disassembly has greater value, creates more jobs, and has twice the environmental benefit when reuse components are recovered.

So how can someone testify under oath that rare earth magnets are not recoverable and hand disassembly is not preferable?

If you repeat the words "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste", "toxic e-waste" as many times as our shredder competitors said it, you can become entranced.  They made reference to an article from 2008 by National Geographic, talking about the dirty children burning waste computers from the city of Accra.

The photographer, Peter Selleck, ALSO visited the fair trade recycling company visited by Minter, and showed pictures of the reuse operation there.   But there were no children in those photos, so if I say "remember the really great operation in National Geographic?  That's the one where I learned to hand disassemble hard drives for magnets".   No one remembers the National Geographic in that context.

Toxic "ewaste" + Shredder = small pieces of toxic "ewaste" = $$$

Debate, Dialectic, Diablog: IPhone #ewaste Graphic Misleads

Diablogs and Wiki-Greeks

A couple of weeks ago, I was sent a new set of graphics, in the spirit of "Story of Stuff", by umm... students? activists? artists?... seeking to raise awareness about the IPhone.   A woman named J.Rhee sent me an advance copy and asked for my comments.   I sent her some, in the spirit of cooperation, but did not hear back.  

Elizabeth Chamberlin of IFIXIT (soon to take away the crown for the "Best Scrap Blogger in the World"*) has written about the Apple-criticism piece, and does a good job of examining the case against Apple without taking it hook, line and sinker.

The Anti-IPhone-graphic-activists display a lot of talent, sincere passion, and make some very valid points.  They asked my opinion rather nicely, and I'm always looking for mature, grown-up conversations with environmentalists.  But I'm disappointed not to have heard back from the authors of the piece.  Below is a snippet of the dialogue, followed by my response and comments.

Hi Robin,Thanks for getting back to me. The graphic I was referring to lives here: http://www.mbaonline.com/cost-of-iphone/  Let me know what you think. I’d love to get your thoughts, and feel free to use it as you’d like!Thanks again, Jen

Hi Jen,

I really like the lifecycle focus on mining, coltan, etc.   I lived in Africa and was in Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo for awhile.   The natural resources harvesting business has been a curse. The Worlds Most Polluted Places (TIME) are metal mines, not recycling yards.

With that said, I think your graphic is pretty unfair to Terry Gou and Foxconn (Han Hoi Precision)...  The Taiwanese "Geeks of Color" like Gou and Simon Lin (Wistron) and Rowell Yang (Proview) have been "racially profiled" by the left in the USA, I think.  All three of those guys began as a "tinkerer" importing and repairing used electronics, then became a contract manufacturer (like Foxconn is for ... um... everyone not just Apple).  They have done a pretty good job of learning 100 years of industrial revolution lessons in a decade.

Foxconn is owned by the Taiwanese, managed by Hong Kong, employs labor from Cantonese Guangdong, and is regulated by Mandarin Beijing.   It's pretty remarkable.  The suicide rate is below that of similar scale operations (yes including the USA), when you have 1.1 million employees living in campuses the size of cities, you see rapes, robberies, and suicides at the same rate as you'd see in Detroit. 

Finally, the piece about Guiyu is completely inaccurate.   There are no Iphones in Guiyu.  Guiyu is almost all scrap generated in China.  Shenzhen, Guanzhou and Hong Kong have basically grown into one metropolis which has the population of JAPAN, and Guiyu is the scrapyard.

If you want to know what happens to Iphones which wind up in China, check out this blog.  http://techtravels.wordpress.com/shenzhen-phone-recycling-1/  Visit all 4 pages on the cell phone recycling in China.

I'm a socially conscious environmentalist.  In my opinion, we don't do ourselves any favors with racist depictions of the Geeks of Color.  It is a major embarrassment to the environmental community to have launched this "green scare" campaign against geeks and techs overseas.  I urge you to imagine how you would feel if you were Mowgli... when sex worker, coltan mining, child soldiering is 30% of your job market, and you learn to fix a cell phone, creating affordable connections for people in your emerging market,  or putting CRTs into internet cafes that become the center of Revolution 2.0, when you are recycling rather than mining, and green Americans portray you as some kind of a primitive, polluting, sorry, toxic victim.

Again, bravo on the first half of your piece.  But if I post it on the blog as is, I'm going to make some of the points I made above.  If you are interested in really conveying the truth, I'll spend as much time with you as you want.

If you want to see the piece we are both commenting on, find it via Elizabeth's blog... I don't really want to raise its pagerank if they are sending it out "looking for comments" but don't respond to the comments.  An MBA is supposed to be a masters degree program, and work is supposed to be subject to peer review, response and debate...

Challenge: IFIXIT Recycles 2009 GreenPeace Vid

I like IFIXIT.  With that said... Their weekend's "ewaste" blog titled

MORE PROOF YOU SHOULDN’T BLINDLY TRUST YOUR E-WASTE RECYCLER

is correct in its emphasis on the word "blindly"... don't blindly do anything.  But Elizabeth Chamberlin also provides evidence that you shouldn't blindly trust EU Law, or Greenpeace and E-Stewards, either.

If you watch the Greenpeace slide show, you might think I'm saying you shouldn't trust your own eyes...   ( I covered this 2009 Greenpeace "science with photos" with the post "WRONG, WRONG, WRONG..." )

Chamberlin trusts her eyes and is doing what she should be doing - looking at all sides of the ewaste-to-Africa debate.   Now I'm gonna go Ozark Atticus Finch on her.  Where is Greenpeace's interview of the accused?  They have the African Tech there on camera, and say he told them it was not a working TV but they bought it anyway.  What exactly does their methodology prove, and why didn't they ask the African they spoke to what the percentage of reuse was, and what his losses were on the bad units?

Press Rains: India Pours OUT E-waste

First things first.  Let me welcome Elizabeth Chamberlin of IFIXIT.org, a new blogger using Kyle's photos to tell the other side of the story.  She came charging out of the gate last week.   Hope she puts me out of business.

Actual interview with actual recycler

Second, for a wider audience, ALJAZEERA is back on the job, and getting closer.    Reporter Sohail Rahman is NOT reporting a "feel-good story" on e-waste in Al-Jazeera, but it's fair.   He documents both good (recycling and reuse rates), bad (aqua regia and toxic recycling processes) and ugly (women doing hard recycling work without toxics, but without sophisticated tools either).

Obviously a "ban on exports" will do nothing for Mowgli's Sister Meena (interviewed in the film).  Almost as obviously, the recycling shown kicks the bejeezus out of Mining and Smelting and Disposal as an environmental process.  What bugs us are images of poverty.  Most Americans want to vote whatever takes the photos off the screen.  Banning trade with these people, however, is just turning our heads, it does nothing to help.  She says in the interview that the boss gets the money and decides what to pay her.  What we want to do is give the boss even nicer material, with more repair value, from richer neighborhoods - in return for sharing the proceeds fairly with Meena.  That, says BAN.org, makes me an "apologist" and makes Meena "a polluter".





This film shows a lot of what I saw nine and a half years ago when I visited Guangzhou.  Except its missing the also really cool and great stories of Techs of Color fixing and reusing and Tinkering, riffing like guitarists, whipping new uses out of old chips and display units, turning yesterday's CRT monitor into tomorrow's TV-Video-Monitor combo with all-bandwidth tuner technology.

Recycled Content Ju-ju Words

Recycling causes tuberculosis, and other nasty reporting...

The Independent, a reputable UK Newspaper, reports with fanfare how nations are a step closer to banning the trade of used electronics to "non-OECD" nations.  In the future, western nations will still be able to mine their coral islands and rain forests for the hard rock raw and rare earth materials rich nations need to manufacture electronics.  But the emerging markets will not be able repair, knock off, refurbish or remarket our used goods... the truth about what happens to exported cell phones, as reported by The Atlantic in an article with IFIXIT.

It's not about pollution.  We know that metal mining and refining, raw materials industries, produce 45% of all toxic pollution released by all industry.  We know that the coltan mining and gold mining bring the mercury and toxics, and creates the trafficked paths to bushmeat and rare species exploitation.  We know that recycling jobs are sustainable, lasting forever, but that veins of ores become dead ends and are abandoned to become the most toxic places on earth.

It's obvious that the free market prefers reuse and recycling.   If we are to maintain the marketing campaign of planned obsolescence, we need to convince these lesser developed nations that computer repair is bad.  We need to cover up the detailed data that shows 85% of the used electronics imported are reused and refurbished.  We need to convince them that they are hazardous waste.  The Independent Article takes a step in this direction, informing us that "tuberculosis" comes from "recycling".  I had always thought it was a contagious disease associated with poverty.  If poor people recycle, and poor people are more likely to have tuberculosis, that is "just enough information" to create an impression.

From the article, one would assume it's legal for Africans to stay barefoot and pregnant, mining coltan in rain forests for us to make brand new cell phones to sell them, but NOT to fix them for revolutions in Cairo.

How does our society, whose manufacturing system is sustained by exploiting rain forests, for metal for us to make into gadgets, market the word "Recycled"?  How do we let them manage the toxics from getting raw material, without letting them fix up our old product ("market cannabalization", another nasty term I learned for "reuse and repair", from the Obsolescence Class)?  We need a system to shred product prior to shipping it for recycling (shredded goods go to China), and to mine rare earths... something that doesn't get in the way of new product sales.   We find that dictators, afraid of the access to information the internet brings, and wealthy from sale of their nations raw material resources, are happy to classify used computers as "hazardous wastes", and bring the Basel Ban Amendment closer to passage.

Does it make any sense to define secondary material (reuse, repair, recycle) as a "waste"?  Waste is excrement... we have a natural revulsion...  good.  goooood.

IFIXIT, ISRI: Waste Recycling Sanity

Pelts:  Non toxic, recyclable, organic, and not "waste"

Two important efforts are underway to defend sustainable consumption, vis a vis the Solid Waste Hierarchy.

1. Reduce 
2. Reuse 
3. Recycle

Today's heroes are IFIXIT.com and ISRI.org.  The first is a reuse via repair organization, the second is a recycling association.  Both get it.  The worst recycling is better than the best mining.

This is environmentalism 101, going back to the first Earth Day (1970), and it is central to the definition of "waste".  Waste is defined as discarded by a consumer, ie post consumption.

Simply, the hierarchy is based on the central, undisputed fact, that mining-consumption-disposal is non-sustainable and carbon-belching.

However much a recycled paper mill might be improved, it is never worse for the environment than sending trucks up mountains to cut down trees and bleach them into pulp.   However cranky a scrap metal or junk dealer may seem, he never does as much harm to the environment or rain forest as the most polished metal mining company.   No matter how many photos you take of a barefoot child, repairing a cell phone beats the hell out of making a brand new one.

IFIXIT is picking up where WR3A left off.  I'm exhausted, happy to pass the ball.  We were trying to document reuse and refurbishment in developing nations via cheap cameras, with film uploaded to www.viddler.com (search term WR3A).   IFIXIT is going to do what we couldn't, which is to get professional filmmakers to study the reuse market overseas, and give voice to the parents of the shoeless children obnoxiously photographed, like harp seals, by watchdogs who give nary a penny to improve the kids lives.  Like a Greenpeace ship that burns harp seals as fuel, the watchdogs have done immeasurable harm to sustainability, democracy, environment, and law.  IFIXIT has heard the debate between us, and is sending journalists to see for themselves whether the Good picked the fight with the Perfect.  IFIXIT is the voice of sanity.

ISRI, meanwhile, is defending Recycling on the Waste Definition Front.   ISRI has the history and legal skill to counter-define the mission creep of EPA into raw material Commerce.  ISRI. Defending. Basic. Recycling. Good!   The war against the hierarchy is the definition of "waste".   If "hazardous waste" regulations apply to recycling, but do not apply to mining, then the perfect is the enemy of the good.  The mission creep is based on well-meaning "environmental justice" advocates, who respond to the momentum caused by real estate interest and property values.  I don't care if your recycling process saves baby seals, I don't want it in my neighborhood... AKA NIMBY, or "Not In My Backyard".  This was the conservative-anti-recycling barrier of the 1970s.  It led to a compromise of recycling going into less affluent real estate.  That seemed unfair to poor urban people.  The compromise - kill baby seals, who are in proximity to neither the wealthy nor the urban depressed sites.   The total pollution or hazard is divisible by property definitions.  Use waste law to kick the mining back into the rain forest.   ISRI is the voice of sanity.  From their recent call:

Regarding Proposed Definition of Solid Waste

Using its authority under federal hazardous waste laws, EPA has proposed to start regulating recyclers of scrap metal, shredded computer boards, and possibly other similar non hazardous materials. This proposal, if it becomes final, is likely to have very serious impacts on our industry, and on recycling generally. It will not only increase costs considerably, but it will also make people think that recycling scrap metal is the same as disposing of hazardous waste. ISRI needs your help to convince EPA that this is the wrong thing to do. Attachment A contains suggested questions and comments for you to send to EPA as a comment to this proposal by OCTOBER 20. Please do not simply copy these comments and send them in. To be most effective, please read them and, if you can, tailor them to your operations. You can fax, email or upload your comments directly to EPA at the following addresses:

• Upload: http://www.regulations.gov: Follow the on-line instructions for submitting comments
• Email: RCRA-docket@epa.gov, Attention Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–RCRA–2010–0742
• Fax: 202–566– 9744, Attention Docket ID No. EPA– HQ–RCRA–2010–0742.

The information in this message is intended to help you write a comment letter and talk about this issue with your suppliers and customers. Please encourage your suppliers and consumers to send similar comments to the EPA as your suppliers and consumers may be adversely affected if the materials you handle are suddenly deemed to be wastes or hazardous wastes.

I will try to spend more than the 30 minutes I spent on this blog and follow up on both the ISRI and the IFIXIT efforts.  The point is, it's not just me.   After 5 years of playing nice with the Watchdogs, esp. Basel Action Network, I believe they have become corrupted, much like a church, by a combination of their holiness and blindness to the interests of shredding and planned obsolescence.  They have in the end increased carbon emissions, lost working devices needed by democracy movements, and wasted rare earth metals, and their response is "we are a small non-profit and we mean well".  ISRI and I are branded "business", and many people in environmental justice, journalism, and jurisprudence are leaning towards stopping trade.  "Trade is bad" trumps free and fair trade and alter-globalization.

By taking my gloves off, I have not strenthened myself or my own organization.   But I believe we have empowered organizations like TechSoup, IFixit, and World Computer Exchange to go about their business. If Malcom X is not getting locked up, Martin is emboldened.